ANZ Group Holdings Ltd (ASX: ANZ) is one of the largest and most widely held shares on the S&P/ASX 200 Index (ASX: XJO). Thanks to its status as one of the big four ASX 200 banks, ANZ shares have long been popular with dividend income investors.
But how lucrative, if at all, has holding ANZ shares over the past decade been for investors exactly? That's the question we'll be looking at answering today.
Let's start at the beginning. Ten years ago to the day, ANZ was asking $29.60 a share (as of market close on 5 September 2013). If a hypothetical investor put $5,000 into ANZ shares a decade ago at that share price, they would have been able to buy themselves 168.92 ANZ shares (we'll round up to 169).
Today, those same shares are going for $25.12 each at the time of writing, down 0.26% for the day so far. This means that, far from delivering even modest share price capital gains over the past decade, the ANZ share price has cost investors approximately 15.14% of their capital. So our investor's 169 shares would be worth $4,245.38 right now.
Ouch.
How have the dividends from ANZ shares boosted returns?
But of course, we have to take into account ANZ's dividends. Dividends form the lion's share of the total shareholder returns for most ASX banks. So it would be remiss not to factor those in for ANZ's ten-year performance.
So over the past decade, ANZ has paid out two dividends every single year, which have almost always come fully franked. These payouts are summarised below:
| Year | ANZ annual dividends per share |
| 2013 | $1.64 |
| 2014 | $1.78 |
| 2015 | $1.81 |
| 2016 | $1.60 |
| 2017 | $1.60 |
| 2018 | $1.60 |
| 2019 | $1.60 |
| 2020 | $0.35 |
| 2021 | $1.42 |
| 2022 | $1.46 |
We also have the 2023 interim ANZ dividend to consider as well. Earlier this year, ANZ forked out an interim dividend of 81 cents per share. That was the highest interim dividend ANZ paid out since May 2015.
For the purposes of working out an accurate shareholder return over the past decade, we'll use this payment for our calculations in place of 2013's July interim dividend of 73 cents per share.
Thus, we get a ten-year total of $14.94 in dividends per share from ANZ that were paid between September 2013 and today.
Multiplying that by our investor's 169 shares, and we get a total of $2,524.86 in dividend income. Adding this income to our capital base grows our investor's total wealth from $4,245.38 to $6,770.24. That's a return worth a total of 35.34% over the past ten years, or roughly 3.07% per annum.
Well, at least we have a positive figure now.
But still, a 3.07% return per annum is a pretty poor result by ASX standards. Our investor would probably have been better off keeping their cash in an ANZ term deposit over those ten years than in ANZ shares. And they certainly would have done far better putting their money in an ASX 200 index fund.
No doubt ANZ's investors will be hoping the next ten years prove more lucrative than the past ten. Right now, the ANZ share price offers a fully franked dividend yield of 6.17%.
