International Business Machines (IBM 0.90%) yesterday hiked its quarterly dividend 16%, from $0.95 to $1.10 a share. Shareholders of record on May 9 will be paid on June 10.
For IBM, this marks the 98th year of paying dividends with 19 consecutive years of increases and 11 straight years of double-digit increases. All told, Big Blue has increased its dividend by over 800% since the beginning of 2000 and doubled the dividend in the past five years.
"Today's announcement reinforces our commitment to delivering value to shareholders," IBM Chairman, President and CEO Ginni Rometty said in a press release. "We will continue to invest aggressively in our strategic growth areas including cloud, big data analytics, social, mobile and security to position the company to drive growth and higher value for our clients."
Interestingly, despite the size of its dividend hike and almost a century of continuous payouts, IBM doesn't rank among S&P's coveted list of Dividend Aristocrats. Only businesses that have increased dividends for at least 25 consecutive years qualify. In 2013, 54 made the cut.
