Topic: How To Invest

The Successful Investor Hotline – Friday, October 19, 2018

Article Excerpt

FORTIS INC., $42.61, Toronto symbol FTS, owns electrical utilities across Canada, the U.S. and the Caribbean. It also distributes natural gas in British Columbia. The company announced this week that it will raise its quarterly dividend with the December 2018 payment by 6.25%, to $0.45 a share from $0.425. The new annual rate of $1.80 yields a high 4.2%. Fortis has now increased its dividend each year for the past 45 years. The company plans to raise that annual payment by about 6% each year through 2023. Fortis also announced that it will invest $17.3 billion in its operations between 2019 and 2023. That’s up $2.8 billion from its earlier plan. To put those amounts in context, the company’s market cap (the total value of all outstanding shares) is $18.2 billion. Most of that spending will go toward improving the reliability of its regulated utilities. As a result, regulators will let Fortis pass along most of the costs of those upgrades to its…