The DivGro Weekly—01.09.23

135 Consecutive dividend increases

This week we received further real-time, tangible evidence of outstanding business progress when we collected our quarterly dividends from Visa, MSCI and Zoetis, and became entitled to our quarterly dividends from S&P Global and Home Depot, all significantly higher than this time last year.

Since DivGro's inception we have predicted and benefited from 135 consecutive dividend increases across our portfolio companies. The average rate of these dividend increases is 15.4%.

Home Depot captures about 20 cents of every dollar spent in the home repair, maintenance and improvement industry in North America. This scale superiority translates into Home Depot enjoying a seemingly unassailable cost advantage over competitors. Indeed, with the exception of Lowe's (another DivGro holding), it is understood that Home Depot can profitably sell its merchandise at a price below what its competitors pay for the same merchandise, making it near impossible to compete against. This cost advantage underscores Home Depot's mantra that it is able to gain market share under all conditions. With a backdrop of 140 million homes in the United States, whose average age now exceeds 40 years (an inflection point for increased repair and maintenance expenditure), this ability to gain market share at will provides Home Depot a tremendous platform to extend its enviable dividend growth record, having already grown its dividend by more than 4700x since 1987.