Singapore is a small market.
A handful of licences, a limited population, and a few regulatory decisions are often all it takes for one company to end up as the only player in its industry.
In that sense, a monopoly here is not particularly hard to come by.
Plenty of companies hold one simply because nobody else was allowed in, or because the market was never big enough to support a second competitor in the first place.
A monopoly is just one kind of moat
Investors have a name for this kind of protection: an economic moat, a structural advantage that keeps competitors out for years.
A monopoly is the most extreme form of a regulatory moat, where a licence or rule determines who is even allowed to compete.
But moats take other forms too.
A strong brand can let a company charge more simply because customers trust the name.
Infrastructure can be so capital-intensive that a challenger would need years and billions of dollars just to catch up.
High switching costs can keep customers locked in even when a cheaper alternative exists, because leaving is more disruptive than staying.
Whatever form it takes, a moat is what separates a business built to compound shareholder returns for decades from one that looks good only until a competitor shows up.
Surprisingly, having a moat is the easy part.
Having a moat and using one well are different skills
A company can sit on a moat and still run it badly.
It can grow lazy, under-invest, or let service quality slide because customers have nowhere else to go.
Squeezing genuine, growing value out of that position, year after year, is a different matter entirely.
It takes disciplined capital allocation, pricing decisions that do not alienate customers or invite regulatory scrutiny, and a willingness to keep reinvesting instead of coasting.
Most companies with a monopoly never bother.
A small number of them treat it as the foundation for decades of compounding shareholder returns instead.
One SGX-listed company sits firmly in that second group.
It holds an outright monopoly in its line of business in Singapore.
No rival is able to walk in tomorrow and take a slice of its customers, no matter how much capital it raises or how aggressively it prices.
And it has made the most of that position for longer than most investors have been paying attention.
16 straight years of raising dividends
This company has raised or maintained its dividend for 16 years running, a streak that began in the aftermath of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis.
That stretch has since carried it through the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020 and the sharpest rate-hiking cycle in a generation, which began in 2022, without a single year of decline.
A moat is not a blank cheque
A moat tells you a business is protected from competitors. It does not tell you that the stock is cheap or that the fundamentals justify today’s price.
A great business can still be a poor investment if you pay too much for it.
But a durable moat like this one tells you something a stock screener never will: whether the business behind the dividend is built to last. What you pay for it is a separate question, and still one worth asking.
Get Smart: Look for the businesses nobody can copy
The next time you look at a dividend stock, ask yourself a different question from the usual: “What is the yield?”
Ask instead: what protects this business from a competitor simply taking its customers?
A licence, a brand, an asset nobody else can replicate, or something else entirely?
For this company, the answer is a monopoly.
That is precisely why it has been able to raise its dividend for 16 straight years, through three separate crises, while others were still figuring out how to survive.
We cover this company, and five others built on different kinds of moats, in our free report, Dividend Dynasty.
Download now to see which business this is, and how each of the six built a moat nobody else can cross.
Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Telegram and YouTube for the latest investing news and analyses!
