The DivGro Weekly—15.05.26

218 Consecutive dividend increases

Weekly Dividend Progress

This week we received further real-time, tangible evidence of outstanding business progress when we collected our dividends from Lowe’s, American Express and Mastercard and became entitled to our dividend from Visa, all meaningfully higher than this time last year.

How We Are Tracking

Since DivGro's inception we have predicted and benefited from 218 consecutive dividend increases across our portfolio companies, with no decreases. The average rate of these dividend increases is 14%.

Mastercard

Mastercard, our payment processing titan, recently raised its dividend again — this time by another 14%, marking its 15th consecutive year of annual dividend increases. Since its 2006 IPO, Mastercard has multiplied its dividend 100-fold. While widely considered a ‘credit card’ processor, Mastercard’s more recent ‘debit and prepaid’ business has already eclipsed its traditional credit card business, in terms of both cards issued and dollar volume processed. Meanwhile, its more nascent ‘value-added services’ businesses - which monetise the insights gleaned from its irreplicable data trove — are growing even faster. As a critical and highly scaled gatekeeper of global commerce, Mastercard’s profitability is very high (akin to sister DivGro holding Visa), especially on the incremental transaction processed through its network. By reinvesting the bulk of its profits in innovations to adapt to an ever-evolving ecosystem and maintain its leadership, Mastercard appears primed to continue escalating its profits and enhancing its impressive dividend growth record into the future.