I don' t know anything about NATS or there internal strategies but studying economy and finances I can tell you that there are many reasons why a company would pay dividends rather than re-investing them in itself.. one reason could be that they are in crisis or they predict a decrease in the price of there shares so they pay out dividends to there shareholders to convince them to stay with them and to dissuade them from investing there money in other companies..as I said, this is just an hypothesis and every single case has to be considered separately..