A dividend king is a company that has managed to increase dividends to shareholders for at least 50 years in a row.
There are only 45 such companies in the US, and perhaps a couple more in the rest of the world. It is not a small achievement to have been able to reward long-term shareholders with a dividend raise for over half a century.
Q4 2022 hedge fund letters, conferences and more
Over the past 50 years, some calamities experienced include:
– Seven Recessions since 1967
– The Vietnam War
– The oil crisis in the 1970s
– Stagflationary 1970s
– Double digit interest rates in the 1980s
– Fall of the Soviet Union in 1991
– 9/11 in 2001
– The Dot-com bubble bursting in 2000
– The housing bubble bursting in 2007 – 2008
– ZIRP and NIRP since 2009
– The Covid-19 Pandemic
Throughout this calamity each of those businesses managed to grow earnings, and raise the dividend to their long-term shareholders. If you are looking for a long-term shareholder base, the best way to build it is by paying those owners more every single year. This is a simple, but novel idea for corporations to embrace.
We had seven new additions to the list in 2022. There were no companies that left the list. These actions brought the number of companies to 46, from 38 at the end of 2021. This is a record since we started tracking the list of dividend kings in 2010.
When I first came up with the idea for the list of dividend kings in 2010, there were only eleven companies on it. Our 2023 list includes 45 companies.
Since 2010, there have been only two companies that have left the list. One, Vectren (VVC) was acquired. The second, Diebold (DBD), kept dividends unchanged, but ultimately ended up cutting them.
The companies in the 2022 dividend kings list include: