本文來自《終極股息投資攻略》第4章，在原文基礎上有些調整，以便適合朗讀學習。
The appeal of a 6 or 7 percent current yield is obvious to someone who is looking for income. But what can we say about a stock with a yield of 1 or 2 percent? Is its dividend useless? As it turns out, a pattern of steady dividend growth, even when yields are low, can be an equally profitable driver of total return.
Ask anyone who's owned Johnson & Johnson (J&J, stock symbol JNJ) for a while. J&J hasn't appeared to be the kind of stock an income investor would grasp at; on average, it provided a current yield of just 2 percent between 1977 and 2007, and even at the stock's lowest price it never offered much more than 4 percent. (See Figure 4.1.) It would be only too easy for a dividend seeker to pass on such a paltry yield, that is, until one checks out what subsequently happened to the dividend.
In May 1977, an investor could have bought 100 shares of Johnson &Johnson for $65 apiece, a total investment of $6500. Back then, J&J paid dividends at the rate of $1.40 per year for a yield of 2.2 percent. That wasn't the kind of yield that appealed to income seekers then any more than it does now.
But in the succeeding 30 years, J&J managed to increase its per-share dividend rate an average of 14.4 percent annually. Compounded over three decades the annual income from that original 100 share investment rose more than 50-fold, from $140 to $7,968. The dividends paid by those 100 shares over 30 years totaled $56,784, nearly nine times the value of the original investment.
No less majestic is what happened to J&J's share price. Between 1977 and 2007, J&J split its shares five times, turning an original 100-share stake into 4,800 shares. At the end of May 2007, J&J closed at $63.52, making those shares worth $304,896, a compound annual rate of appreciation of 13.7 percent. As the dividend rate rose, the shares couldn't help but keep pace.
Dividend reinvestment provides the icing on the cake. I estimate that an investor who used her dividends to buy more J&J shares along the way ended up not with 4,800 shares, but slightly more than 8,900, a stake worth about $563,000 at the end of May 2007. This made for a compound average annual return of 16 percent. (See Figure 4.2.)
Had one predicted how fast J&J's dividend would grow, this spectacular compound return would not have been a surprise. Johnson & Johnson's initial dividend yield of 2.2 percent plus subsequent growth of 14 percent annually would have suggested an annual return of 16.2 percent; at a realized 16.0 percent including reinvested dividends, J&J is only barely off this projection.
Durable success on the scale of Johnson & Johnson's is rare, but the basic mechanics are not. Relatively few investors hold a stock for even three years, let alone three decades. Nevertheless, those original 100 shares in May 1977 provided these returns to whoever happened to own them, for whatever reason. Dividend yield plus dividend growth equals long-term total return; what more can I say?
