These tech giants offer you rising dividends

Article Excerpt

MICROSOFT CORP. $125 (Nasdaq symbol MSFT; High-Growth Dividend Payer Portfolio, Manufacturing & Industry sector; Shares outstanding: 7.7 billion; Market cap: $962.5 billion; Dividend yield: 1.5%; Dividend Sustainability Rating: Highest; www.microsoft.com) is the world’s largest computer software company. Its Windows operating system powers about 80% of the world’s personal computers. Microsoft’s other main product is its Office suite of business programs: word processor (Word), spreadsheets (Excel) and slide presentations (PowerPoint). With the December 2018 payment, the company increased its quarterly dividend by 9.5%, to $0.46 a share from $0.42. The new annual rate of $1.84 yields 1.5%. Microsoft continues to benefit from its 2014 decision to focus on cloud-computing services. In its fiscal 2019 third quarter, ended March 31, 2019, overall revenue rose 14.0%, to $30.6 billion from $26.8 billion a year earlier. The company earned $8.8 billion, up 18.7% from $7.4 billion. Due to fewer shares outstanding, per-share earnings jumped 20.0%, to $1.14 from $0.95. In the quarter, commercial cloud revenue rose 41% to $9.6 billion. The…