Screen Finds Better Dividend Stocks Than Microsoft

After a $900 million write-off for its Surface tablet in July, the late August announcement-under-pressure of CEO Scott Ballmer’s retirement, and the less than enthusiastic response to the early September news it will spend $7 billion for Nokia’s cell phone business, Microsoft’s (MSFT) just-announced 22% dividend hike smacks of “if you can’t please ‘em, at least pay ‘em more.” After being teased with a stronger than expected first quarter report that sent the stock up 25% from mid April to early July, Microsoft has fallen back during its the past two months.

Using YCharts Stock Screener tool turns up a list of 67 stocks in the S&P 500 tech sector. Moving the dividend yield slider past zero, eliminates the non-dividend payers from the screen, leaving 45 dividend payers. Adding one-year dividend growth and payout ratio as two filters, creates a good start point for further investment research. Science Applications International Corp (SAIC) had the largest dividend jump over the past year. Qualcomm (QCOM) jumps out as a tech company that has managed to keep key financial metrics sloping upward of late, a bit of a rarity in the tech sector these days.

Source: yCharts

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