The board of the £345m trust declared a 4.8p interim dividend per share for the year ending 30 September 2013, up from 4.6p per share last year.
Anthony Townsend, chairman of FGT, said: “We decided to increase the interim dividend because a number of the companies in the portfolio have raised their dividends. In the current low rate environment dividends are increasingly important to the trust’s shareholders.”
Diageo, the fund’s largest holding – representing 10% of net asset value – increased its interim dividend by 9% recently, while second-largest holding Unilever (9.6% of Nav) upped its quarterly payout by 8.5%.
Third in line, Heineken (8.8% of Nav), bumped its final dividend up by 5.7% and finally, Train’s fourth-largest conviction position in Pearson (6.5% of Nav) posted a 7.1% increase in dividend.
At the company AGM at the end of January, Nick Train said dividend prospects had been “satisfactory” because companies the trust invests in had been increasing them.
But compared with the 23.6% growth in the trust’s Nav during the 2012 calendar year, the dividend increase has been quite tame. He added that over the past few years it has been 7% to 8% per annum, which is competitive compared with the UK stock market (1% to 1.5% above it).
