The DivGro Weekly—17.02.23

122 Consecutive dividend increases

This week we received further real-time, tangible evidence of outstanding business progress when we received our quarterly dividends from Abbott, Mastercard and Texas Instruments.

Having marked our calendars, we look forward to shortly receiving our quarterly dividends from Visa, Microsoft and Cintas.

Since DivGro's inception we have predicted and benefited from 122 consecutive dividend increases across our portfolio companies. The average rate of these dividend increases is 15%.

Cintas, our leader in uniforms, fire safety and first aid services, traces its origins to the Great Depression when unemployed couple Doc and Amelia Farmer began collecting discarded rags to launder and resell. Over the decades this resourceful enterprise evolved into a full-service rental and laundry system. While unglamorous, as Cintas developed scale and efficiency, it could execute this vital role more reliably, more cheaply and more quickly than a customer could perform in-house, making Cintas a compelling choice. Dominating this space, Cintas today has more than 1m customers and benefits from two ongoing tailwinds: enjoying the most favourable cost structure, Cintas stands to acquire customers at will, while standards of sanitation, fire safety and first aid only escalate, enabling the provision of progressively sophisticated and profitable services. Combined, these factors underwrite an extensive runway to extend its almost peerless dividend growth record which has seen its dividend rise at an annualized rate of almost 20% per year since its 1983 IPO.