In June 1930, a Chicago businessman parked his Studebaker at the entrance to the pier in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

Inside the car, with some of its parts squeezed under the floor, was a radio. Loudspeakers carried the music out to the crowd walking by.

He had no booth at the convention down the pier. He had no appointments and no money for advertising. So he stood by the car with his wife and waited for someone to stop and listen.

Most investors couldn't tell you that story. But plenty of them know the company he built. The dividend stopped once, after a year of heavy losses. Since it came back, the company has raised it 14 years in a row. Through 2020... through the inflation of 2022... every year, a raise.

Today, we'll show you how a $750 auction purchase became a company with $11.7 billion of sales last year. We'll show you why its dividend once stopped, and what it has done since. And we'll tell you whether it made our list of 25 holdings this quarter.

Let's start at the beginning...

Paul Galvin had already watched two battery companies go under.

The second one left him one product worth saving. It was called a battery eliminator, a box that let a home radio run on the current from a wall outlet instead of batteries.

At the bankruptcy auction, Galvin bought back that product line for $750. On September 25, 1928, he and his brother Joseph incorporated a new company in Chicago to make it.

The first sale came more than a week before the paperwork. On September 17, 1928, Sears, Roebuck bought ten eliminators to sell through its mail order catalogs.

It didn't last. The stock market crashed in 1929, and the eliminator was becoming obsolete. The brothers needed a new product, fast.

Radios for cars already existed. Custom models built into the car cost about $250 each, far more than most drivers would pay.

Galvin wanted one most drivers could afford. His team had to beat the electrical noise of the engine, find room for the parts and build something that could survive rough roads.

In May 1930, he announced he would drive to the Radio Manufacturers Association convention in Atlantic City, about 850 miles away, and demonstrate the radio there. That left his team one month to make it work. They got a clear signal with the motor running just days before he left.

His company wasn't even registered for the show. So he parked at the pier, turned up the volume, and when traffic was slow, he went inside and talked people into coming out to listen.

He came home with enough orders to keep the company alive. His $110 car radio sold well enough that year to come close to breaking even.

Keep that Studebaker in mind. We'll come back to it.

Police departments of the day had a problem. Officers on patrol checked in from call boxes on the street, and news of a crime reached them late.

A radio in the patrol car could fix that. On November 14, 1930, the Village of River Forest, Illinois, paid $57.50 for one of Galvin's car radios. It was the company's first sale to a government agency.

"There was a need," Galvin said, "and I could see it was a market that nobody owned."

In 1936, the company brought out a radio built for police cruisers. In 1940, the police department in Bowling Green, Kentucky, became the first customer for its complete two way radio system, with radios in the cars that could both send and receive.

Then came the war. The company built a five pound radio that one soldier could carry and use with one hand. The Army saw it was light enough for paratroopers. Once the United States entered the war, it became standard equipment for infantry too.

The decades that followed made the company famous. The company says its equipment relayed the first words from the moon in 1969. In 1973, it showed off a working handheld cellular phone in New York City.

By 1998, cell phones brought in two thirds of its revenue. In the late 2000s, that phone business lost money.

From 2007 to 2009, the company lost $4.3 billion, most of it in 2008. The last dividend was paid in early 2009. Then the board stopped declaring one.

On January 4, 2011, the company split itself in two. The phone business was spun off as a separate company, along with its cable television equipment business. The company kept the radio business and its customers in government and business.

The dividend came back that same year at 22 cents a share each quarter. It has been raised every year since.

In 2025, sales rose 8% to a record $11.7 billion. The company ended the year with a record backlog of orders still to be delivered, $15.7 billion, more than a full year of sales.

About 62% of sales came from products and systems: radios, radio networks and video equipment. The other 38% came from software and services, and that part grew faster, up 13%.

And remember that Studebaker?

The car radio Galvin squeezed into that Studebaker grew into a business that still equips the patrol car. Today, the company sells the radios mounted in police vehicles, the cameras inside the car and on the officer's body, and software that supports a 911 center's work, from the moment a call comes in until the case is closed. It sells to defense agencies and businesses too.

The growth has carried into this year. Sales rose 13% in the second quarter of 2026, and the company raised its outlook for the full year to about $12.975 billion.

Here's what the last ten years looked like.

As of November 10, this stock yielded 0.9%.

A lot of income investors would see that yield and move on. The table above is the reason not to stop there.

The dividend grew from $1.43 a share in 2015 to $4.48 in 2025, about 12% a year. Over the same ten years, earnings per share rose more than fourfold, from $3.02 to $12.75.

The yield is small because the share price climbed even faster than the dividend. Ten years ago, the shares traded at about $79. On November 10, they closed at $527.38.

The dividend is one part of it. The rest came from a growing business, and from investors paying more for each dollar of its earnings.

The dividend also has room. In 2025, dividends used about 28 cents of every dollar of free cash flow. The current dividend of $4.84 a year comes to about 38% of last year's reported earnings per share.

Many of its customers are governments. The U.S. government alone was about 8% of sales in 2025. Police departments, cities and states spend from budgets and grants, and those can shrink or change.

The company has also been buying its growth. In 2025, it closed four acquisitions for $4.9 billion, the largest for $4.4 billion. Its debt rose from $6.0 billion to $9.2 billion over the year. By August 2026, it had agreed to buy another company for $1.5 billion.

Some of what it sells is drawing new rules. Governments are writing laws on facial recognition, license plate readers and police reports written with AI, and the company says those rules could affect some of its products.

And the share price already reflects a lot of good news. At the end of 2015, investors paid about 23 times that year's earnings for the stock. Today they pay about 41 times last year's reported earnings. That price assumes the growth of the past ten years keeps going.

Those risks sit beside a 98 year record. It began with $750 and a product that was going obsolete. It found its first government customer in a village in Illinois. It lost billions chasing consumers, and its dividend stopped. And the business that grew out of a radio squeezed into a Studebaker has raised that dividend every year since it came back.

Think you know? Hit reply and tell us your guess. We read every reply.

Subscribers to The Dividend Record Portfolio can see the answer right below. They'll also see whether it's one of our 25 holdings this quarter, and the numbers behind the story: where a decade of returns actually came from, how well the dividend is covered, what today's price assumes, and how the stock has held up when the market fell apart.