저자: 미상 · 외국인
요약 보기
워런 버핏의 버크셔 해서웨이가 배당으로 연 약 43억 달러를 받으며, 코카콜라 취득단가(주당 약 3.25센트 수준 표기) 대비 배당수익률(yield on cost)이 매우 높다는 점을 강조. 장기 배당성장주 보유 시 원금 대비 배당수익률이 시간에 따라 크게 확대된다는 예시(가상 8% 배당성장 가정)를 제시하며, 배당 삭감·개별주 리스크도 언급함.
다듬은 글
Right now, without lifting a finger, Warren Buffett's company is collecting roughly $138 every single second. Berkshire Hathaway has quietly amassed about 4.37 billion dollars in annual dividend income, which works out to roughly 138.63 s every second without selling a single share. Buffett is famous for value investing, for reading annual reports, for holding businesses for decades, but almost nobody talks about the actual engine underneath most of his fortune, dividends.
And once you see the specific number behind his most famous holding, it changes how you think about investing entirely. Let's start with the one stock that explains almost everything about how Buffett thinks, Coca-Cola. Berkshire started buying Coca-Cola shares back in 1988, right after the 1987 market crash, eventually building a stake of about 400 million shares for a total cost near 1.3 billion dollars.
Do the math on that, and Buffett's average cost was somewhere around 3.25 cents a share. Yahoo Finance, here's the part that should stop you. Coca-Cola currently pays $2 per share annually, backed by a streak of increases now past six decades. So, take that $2 for and divide it by what Buffett actually paid, 3.25 s a share back in the late '80s and early '90s.
That's not a 3% yield. That's not even 20%. That's a yield of well over 60% on his original money, every single year forever, just from dividends. Yahoo Finance, that single position now sends Berkshire about $816 million a year in dividend income, not from selling shares, not from trading, just from owning the same stock quarter after quarter for over three decades.
And Coca-Cola isn't even the whole picture. Household names like Coca-Cola, Apple, Bank of America, and Chevron together generate more than half of Berkshire's total dividend income. Buffett built an entire cash-generating machine, and dividends are quietly doing most of the work. So, here's the real question this video answers.
What is Buffett actually seeing in these businesses that most investors miss? And more importantly, can an ordinary investor with an ordinary amount of money use the exact same idea. Let's talk about what Buffett is actually looking for because it's simpler than most finance content makes it sound. He favors businesses that are simple to understand with products people need regardless of what the economy is doing, run by management focused on profitability and steady dividend increases.
Coca-Cola fit that description in 1988. It still fits it today. But here's where most people misunderstand what actually made this trade brilliant. It wasn't that Coca-Cola had a huge dividend yield when Buffett bought it. It didn't. It's that the yield he's earning now is measured against what he paid then, not what the stock costs today.
There's a term for this, yield on cost. It's simply your current annual dividend divided by your original purchase price, not the current share price. Most investors only ever look at the yield on today's price. Buffett's actual advantage was patience applied to a growing dividend measured against a price he locked in decades ago.
This is where it gets interesting for someone who isn't sitting on billions because yield on cost isn't a Buffett-only trick. It's available to literally anyone who buys a quality, dividend-growing business and simply doesn't sell it. Let's build a much smaller version of the same idea using Ethan as the example.
Say Ethan puts $10,000 into a basket of well-run, dividend-growing companies, the kind of businesses with long streaks of consecutive dividend increases, not high-yield gimmicks. We'll assume a modest starting dividend yield of 3% so Ethan's first year of dividend income is $300. Nothing special yet.
But here's the part that takes time to notice. Assume those companies grow their dividend payouts by a hypothetical 8% a year, which is roughly in line with how many long-term dividend growers have historically behaved, though obviously not guaranteed for any individual stock. Ethan isn't adding another dollar.
He's not buying more shares. He's just holding what he already owns while the dividend itself keeps climbing. After 10 years, that $300 starting dividend, compounding at 8% annually, is now paying out around $648 a year on the exact same $10,000 he originally put in. His yield on cost has gone from 3% to roughly 6.5% and he hasn't invested another dollar.
Fast forward to year 20, that dividend has grown to approximately $1,398 a year. Measured against his original $10,000, that's a yield on cost of nearly 14%, almost five times what he started with. From the same shares, the same original investment. Just time and dividend growth doing the work. Now, here's the mid-video shift, because we've only been talking about the dividend so far, not the share price, which is where Buffett's version of this really explodes.
Quality businesses that consistently grow their dividends also tend to grow in value over time, because a rising dividend usually reflects a business that's actually becoming more profitable. So, while Ethan's income is climbing from $348 to $1,398, the underlying $10,000 is very likely growing in market value, too.
This is the part where the account balance and the income stream compound at the same time, not separately. By year 30, using that same 8% dividend growth assumption, Ethan's annual dividend income has grown to roughly $3,020 a year, a yield on cost above 30% on an original investment of just $10,000.
That's not Buffett's 60% plus yield on Coca-Cola, but it's the exact same mechanism running on an ordinary person's timeline and an ordinary person's money. And that's really what separates Buffett's approach from how most people invest. Most investors watch the current yield, get bored when it looks small, and sell to chase something with a bigger number today.
Buffett does the opposite. He finds a business capable of growing its dividend for decades, buys it, and then does almost nothing. The waiting is the strategy. Now, before this sounds like a formula that always works, let's be honest about the parts that don't show up in a highlight reel. Not every dividend-paying company keeps raising its payout.
Some freeze it. Some cut it during a recession. And picking the wrong individual stock can leave you holding a shrinking dividend instead of a growing one. An 8% annual dividend growth rate is a reasonable long-term assumption for a basket of historically strong dividend growers, not a guarantee for any single company.
Buffett's own result depended on Coca-Cola specifically continuing to execute for over three decades. Plenty of one great dividend payers have not managed that. And concentrating $10,000 or $1.3 billion into a small number of stocks, the way Buffett does, carries real risk that a diversified index fund doesn't.
Here's what actually stands out when you step back from the whole thing. The first 10 years of yield on cost look almost unremarkable, barely double the starting point. The next 10 years pick up speed as the dividend growth starts compounding on itself. And the final stretch is where the number stops looking like a small dividend check and starts looking like meaningful income, all without Ethan ever touching his original $10,000.
That's the actual secret behind Buffett and Coca-Cola. It was never about picking a stock with a huge yield. It was about buying a business capable of growing its dividend for decades at a price that made the eventual yield on cost enormous and then simply refusing to sell. If you want to see what this same yield on cost math looks like when Ethan adds new money every single month instead of investing once and waiting, that's the next calculation worth running.
Comments 0