KO Analysis
The Coca-Cola Company — is the distribution income, or your own capital coming back?
Distributions plus NAV growth
Over the last 1Y, KO paid a 3.0% distribution yield and its NAV rose 27.2% — holders kept the distributions and the price appreciation.
This verdict is generated from fixed thresholds applied to live price and distribution data, not written per fund. Two funds with the same profile always get the same wording.
How KO generates dividends
Coca-Cola is the textbook dividend stock — Warren Buffett's favorite holding and a Dividend King with over 60 consecutive years of dividend increases. The dividends come from one of the most durable business models in capitalism: selling sugary beverages to billions of people worldwide.
KO's yield (typically 2.8-3.5%) isn't high by income-ETF standards, but that misses the point. The value is predictability and growth. Coca-Cola has raised its dividend every single year since 1962 — through recessions, oil crises, pandemics, and wars. The annual increase is typically 3-5%, which means an investor who bought KO 20 years ago has a yield-on-cost approaching 6-7% today.
The dividends are qualified (taxed at the lower capital gains rate) and come from real earnings. There's no return of capital, no financial engineering, no options. When you own KO, you own a piece of a company that generates $10+ billion in annual free cash flow and distributes a growing share of it to shareholders every quarter.
For DRIP investors, KO is a compounding machine: the dividends buy more shares, those shares pay more dividends, and the dividend itself grows each year. Use the calculator above to see how this compounds over 10-20 years.
- Income source
- Corporate earnings (global beverage sales)
- Dividend streak
- 60+ consecutive annual increases
- Status
- Dividend King
- Distribution
- Quarterly (qualified dividends)
- Largest shareholder
- Berkshire Hathaway (Warren Buffett)
KO price return since first distribution
The capital half of total return. Read it against the cumulative distributions below — the two together are what a holder actually earned.
Cumulative price return: +41.43%
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Cumulative distributions collected
Running total of per-share distributions since the first payment on record — 226 payments.
Total collected per share since inception: $85.80
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