Finding high-yield tech stocks that are great long-term investments isn't as easy as picking a few companies that pay the biggest dividends. You want a company that can not only pay a good dividend now, but is also generating enough cash to continue paying it, and raising it, for years to come.
To help you in your search, three Motley Fool contributors selected a few high-yield tech stocks that you should consider for your portfolio. Here's why Telkom Indonesia (TLK 1.90%), CME Group (CME 0.43%), and Iron Mountain (IRM 0.61%) made it on their list.
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A 3.9% yield on the far side of the globe
Anders Bylund (Telkom Indonesia): The largest telecommunications company in the world's fourth-largest country -- ranking behind only China, India, and the U.S. in terms of population -- is trading at rock-bottom prices nowadays. Low share prices also result in generous dividend yields, and that's currently the case for Telkom's shares. The stock offers a 3.9% dividend yield right now, the highest level seen in four years apart from a short spell of deep-discount share prices and excellent dividend yields in the summer of 2018.
As it happens, Indonesia's population isn't just large. It is also skewing young with nearly half of the island nation's inhabitants aged below 30, and they are far behind the rest of the world in internet usage. Telkom would like to change that last bit, and the company enjoys booming interest in its smartphones and data plans right now. Telkom is also improving the user experience by upgrading the aging wireless systems to 4G technologies (with an eye toward joining the 5G boom over the next few years) and boosting Indonesia's access to the global internet backbone. That effort includes communications satellite launches and new submarine network cables that connect Indonesia's young, data-hungry citizens to the global online community at speeds never before seen.
Indonesia's rapidly evolving telecom industry led to price wars in recent years, and it isn't cheap to install and maintain a cellphone network that can keep up with exploding data usage among Telkom's customers. In the recently reported first quarter of fiscal year 2019, Telkom's data revenues rose 30% year over year while the Telkomsel network's data traffic increased by 57%.
In short, Telkom Indonesia's robust dividends are powered by generous cash flows and a promising core business. Put all of that together and you get a high-quality dividend married to a stock that looks easy to own even without its income-generating powers.
A haven for volatile markets
Steve Symington (CME Group): As the operator of the world's largest and most diverse options and futures exchange, CME Group is a delightful dividend-paying stock to own when stocks are most volatile. As it showed when the markets plunged at the end of last year, more trading means higher daily contract volumes for CME. The company's platforms let investors place bets on future changes to everything from interest rates to the prices of gold, corn, energy, and even bitcoin. And it's working hard to build its global presence -- something its recent acquisition of U.K.-based NEX could help accelerate -- as international business represented just over a quarter of total daily volumes in Q1.
While it may not exactly be a "high-yield" stock with a dividend yielding a healthy 1.6% annually as of this writing, patient shareholders should know CME has increased that dividend for each of the past 16 years since instituting its payout in early 2003. For investors who want to rest easy when the markets go crazy, I think CME is as solid a bet as they come.
A mountainous opportunity
Chris Neiger (Iron Mountain): Iron Mountain is a document storage company that's rapidly grown its business over the past few years and now boasts a clientele of 95% of Fortune 1000 companies. Those customers look to Iron Mountain for both their document storage and shredding needs, and as the company has grown, it's also begun to branch out into new sources of revenue.
While document storage is still the company's bread and butter -- it earns 63% of its revenue from its storage rental business -- Iron Mountain has also moved into the data storage business as well and says that five of the top 10 cloud companies use its data storage services. And the company's "growth opportunities" segment, which includes data storage, now accounts for one-quarter of its total revenue.
Investors will be pleased to know that Iron Mountain pays a hefty 7.5% dividend yield and that the company's business is set up as a real estate investment trust (REIT), which means that it has to pay out 90% of its earnings as dividends. With the company's successful expansion into data storage, strong market position in document storage, and 7.5% yield, investors looking for a high-yield tech stock can safely store their investment money with Iron Mountain.
