226 Consecutive dividend increases
Weekly Dividend Progress
This week we received further real-time, tangible evidence of outstanding business progress when Interactive Brokers increased its dividend by 71.4%. We also collected our quarterly dividend from Salesforce and became entitled to our quarterly dividends from Accenture, American Express, Intuit and Mastercard, all meaningfully higher than this time last year.
How We Are Tracking
Since DivGro's inception we have predicted and benefited from 226 consecutive dividend increases across our portfolio companies, with no decreases. The average rate of these dividend increases is 14.1%.
Mastercard
Mastercard, which shares an effective duopoly in payments processing with DivGro sister holding Visa, is the archetypal example of the veracity of our dividend growth model. Established in 1958 and having gone public in 2006, Mastercard has grown its dividend nearly 100-fold since its IPO, including consistent and significant annual increases for the last 15 years. While its yield has always appeared initially low and stayed within a tight range, there has been a close correlation between Mastercard’s dividend increases and the growth of its stock price, which has seen a parallel stunning rise of about 100x post-IPO. Bolstered by its shared leadership in payments, as well as a persistent tailwind towards digital payments and rapid growth in its payment-adjacent services, Mastercard is able to reinvest the overwhelming majority of its profits into innovation and the extension of its franchise — at returns exceeding a whopping 50% on those investments. Looking forward, and notwithstanding its almost 100x increase of its dividend already, Mastercard appears extremely favourably positioned to continue to enhance its impressive dividend growth performance long into the future.