The DivGro Weekly—08.12.23

145 Consecutive dividend increases

This week we received further real-time, tangible evidence of outstanding business progress when Mastercard and Stryker increased their dividends, by 15.8% and 6.7% respectively. We also collected our quarterly dividends from Visa and Zoetis (covered in this recent interview) and became entitled to our quarterly dividend from Nike, all much higher than this time last year.

Since DivGro's inception we have predicted and benefited from 145 consecutive dividend increases across our portfolio companies. The average rate of these dividend increases is 15.1%.

This week Mastercard announced another significant dividend increase, this time by 15.8%, having now increased its dividend by 73x since its 2006 IPO. Together with Visa (another DivGro holding since inception), Mastercard benefits from significant incumbency advantages including global recognition, ubiquity across merchants and cardholders, and unparalleled infrastructure and transaction data. Mastercard and Visa are both making substantial progress leveraging these advantages towards dominating the enormous but still comparatively archaic realm of business-to-business payments, and together with the ongoing shift from cash to digital payments providing a runway to keep growing their consumer payments businesses, the prospects for their future dividend growth trajectories look outstanding.