Updating Your High-Growth Payers: Microsoft Corp.

Article Excerpt

MICROSOFT CORP. $374 is a buy. The software giant (Nasdaq symbol MSFT; High-Growth Dividend Payer Portfolio; Manufacturing sector; Shares outstanding: 7.4 billion; Market cap: $2.8 trillion; Dividend yield: 0.9%; Dividend Sustainability Rating: Highest; www.microsoft.com) began paying regular dividends in 2004 and has raised that rate each year since 2010. Microsoft last increased your quarterly dividend by 10.7% with the December 2024 payment, to $0.83 a share from $0.75. The new annual rate of $3.32 yields 0.9%. The company plans to spend $80 billion on AI datacentres in its 2025 fiscal year ending June 30, 2025. The 2025 spending is also 60% more than its fiscal 2024 outlays of $50 billion. These new facilities will support Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI. That’s the firm behind the ChatGPT chatbot/search engine, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) software to interact with users in a conversational way and produce human-like written responses. These datacentres will also support Microsoft’s Azure cloud-computing business. In its latest fiscal quarter, Azure’s revenue jumped 31% from a year…