Stock Of A Great Dividend King Jumps 24%
While tech giants burn cash chasing AI dominance, one old-school tobacco company is quietly outpacing some of the biggest names in the market, and income investors are starting to take notice.
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The “dividend kings”: are companies that have raised dividends for 50 years in a row. They are supposed to be lazy stocks like Colgate-Palmolive (NYSE: CL | CL Price Prediction) and Coca-Cola (NYSE: KO). One is up more than a performance leader of the Magnificent Seven. Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG) is up 13%, just above the market. Altria (NYSE: MO), the huge tobacco company, has posted a 24% surge this year.
In a world in which tech companies were the stock market leaders for over two years, many investors want to dodge the risk of AI, which is causing America’s mega tech companies to drain their balance sheets of cash and forcing them to use debt to raise money. The economy overall has been less than stable, with inflation at moderately high levels, employment gains mediocre, and a war in the Middle East. In the meantime, smokers continue to smoke, and Altria has started to move into tobacco products beyond cigarettes.
Altria’s top brand, which accounts for over 90% of its sales, is Marlboro. It used to be listed among the world’s most valuable brands and was sometimes in the top 10. It has been dropped completely from those lists, likely because it is tobacco, which, because of its health effects, is shied away from
Altia’s dividend yield is over 5.5%. It has raised its dividend 60 times in the last 56 years.
Regardless of these benefits, the company remains a difficult investment for many because of its products. The plain fact is that the CDC reports that 480,000 Americans die from smoking every year. Worldwide, the figure is above 8 million. It is the largest preventable cause of death globally. Altria is a “sin stock,” a term usually applied to all tobacco and alcohol companies.
In the first quarter of this year, revenue rose 3.2% to $5.43 billion. Reported diluted EPS more than doubled to $1.30. More than the earnings, investors cheered the guidance. “We reaffirm our expectation to deliver 2026 full-year adjusted diluted EPS in a range of $5.56 to $5.72, representing a growth rate of 2.5% to 5.5% from a base of $5.42 in 2025,” the company said
For those who worry about a market sell-off, Altria is an excellent safe harbor, if you can stand what the company does to make money.
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Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.
