RPM International Inc. at its annual stockholders meeting announced that its board of directors declared a regular quarterly cash dividend of $0.32 per share, payable on Oct. 31, 2017, to stockholders of record as of Oct. 16, 2017. This payment represents a 6.7 percent increase over the $0.30 quarterly cash dividend paid at this time last year. 
 
This action marks RPM’s 44th consecutive year of increased cash dividends paid to its stockholders, which places RPM in an elite category of less than half of 1 percent of all 19,000 publicly traded U.S. companies. Only 41 other companies, besides RPM, have consecutively paid an increasing annual dividend for this period of time or longer, according to the 2017 edition of the Mergent Handbook of Dividend Achievers. At a share price of $51.50, RPM's dividend yield would be 2.5 percent.
 
“The dividend increase today demonstrates our board of directors’ continued confidence in RPM’s performance and long-term prospects for growth,” said Frank C. Sullivan, chairman and CEO. “Annually increasing the dividend is a key element in rewarding our shareholders with a cumulative total return that has outpaced the S&P 500 by 70 percent and our peers by 28 percent over the ten-year period ended May 31, 2017.”
 
Four directors were elected to serve in Class III with three-year terms expiring at the annual meeting of stockholders in 2020: Julie A. Lagacy, VP of global information services and chief information officer of Caterpillar Inc.; Robert A. Livingston, president and CEO of Dover Corporation; Frederick R. Nance, global managing partner of Squire Patton Boggs (US) LLP; and William B. Summers, Jr., retired chairman and CEO of McDonald Investments Inc., which is part of KeyBanc Capital Markets.