By Rick Aristotle Munarriz June 22, 2009 | Comments (1)
Stock Advisor
Not every company is slashing its dividend these days. Some of the market's better performers are easing up on their purse strings and sending more money out to their shareholders.
Readers of the Income Investor newsletter service can appreciate that kind of thinking. So let's take a closer look at four of the companies that inched their payouts higher over the past few days.
Let's start with Del Monte Foods (NYSE: DLM). The food giant is feeding its investors cash by bumping up its quarterly dividend by 25% to $0.05 a share. Faith in its cash-flow trends and the recent divestiture of its StarKist brand are giving Del Monte the confidence to come through with the upgrade.
Medtronic (Nasdaq: MDT) is also looking healthy. The medical-products company is improving its quarterly distributions by 9% to $0.205 a share. Medtronic shareholders are probably used to this by now. The company has delivered chunkier disbursements through 23 consecutive years of yield increases.
Then we have Casey's General Stores (Nasdaq: CASY). The retailer is holding up well, as shoppers turn to bargain havens, and the welcome trend is giving Casey's the leeway to boost its payouts by 13% to $0.085 a share.
Finally, we have John Wiley & Sons (NYSE: JW-A) printing fatter dividend checks. The "knowledge for generations" publisher is delivering an 8% increase. Investors will now be getting $0.14 a share every three months. John Wiley & Sons has now increased its rate in each of the past 16 years.
Some of these moves may not seem like much, but consider the less savory moves that took place in recent days:
* First Defiance Financial (Nasdaq: FDEF) and S&T Bancorp (Nasdaq: STBA) are the latest banking specialists to slash their yields. The two companies roughly halved their dividends. * Biotech-leaning REIT BioMed Realty's (NYSE: BMR) new quarterly rate of $0.11 a share is just a third of its earlier disbursements.
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