The DivGro Weekly—02.06.23

133 Consecutive dividend increases

This week we received further real-time, tangible evidence of outstanding business progress when Lowe's increased its dividend by 4.8%, and when we collected our quarterly dividends from Zoetis, Pool Corp, MSCI and Visa, all significantly higher than this time last year.

Since DivGro's inception we have predicted and benefited from 133 consecutive dividend increases across our portfolio companies. The average rate of these dividend increases is 15.3%.

Visa, which traces its origins to the late 1950’s, benefits (together with Mastercard, another DivGro holding) from its incumbency and ubiquity as an effectively indispensable participant in the digital payments ecosystem. Less well appreciated but equally important in fortifying its competitive advantage is its immense trove of data, assembled over decades, which allows Visa (and Mastercard) to approve or deny transactions much more accurately and reliably than anyone else, and to do so in real time. Since Visa and Mastercard process the vast majority of digital transactions their data leadership continues to grow. This significant, and probably enduring, competitive privilege has contributed to Visa's outstanding dividend growth record, having raised its dividend at an annualized rate above 20% per year since its 2008 IPO, powering a corresponding 16x uplift in its share price.