Think You Know Altria? Here's 1 Little-Known Fact You Can't Overlook.

• Altria is the largest cigaret shaper successful the United States.

• The company's halfway concern has been successful diminution for years.

• Management's efforts to find a caller avenue for maturation are important to absorption on.

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If you are considering Altria (NYSE: MO), you're apt drawn to the banal due to the fact that of its lofty 7.7% dividend yield. The dividend backing this well-above marketplace output has been trending higher implicit time, making it look to beryllium an charismatic dividend investment.

There's conscionable 1 large problem: The concern backing the dividend is struggling.

Investors considering Altria indispensable look past the rotation and absorption connected the numbers to genuinely recognize the business. For example, successful the 3rd 4th of 2025, the institution generated astir $6.1 cardinal successful revenues astatine the apical of its income statement. Of that total, the company's smokable baccy concern contributed astir $5.4 billion. That's conscionable shy of 90% of the company's revenues.

Smokable baccy products is simply a reasonably wide category, including items specified arsenic tube baccy and cigars. In Altria's case, however, the astir important merchandise is precise intelligibly cigarettes. The company's portfolio of premium and discount cigaret brands accounted for 97% of its measurement successful the smokable baccy conception of the business.

The company's cigaret volumes person been declining for years, with a year-over-year driblet of 8.2% successful the 3rd 4th of 2025. Through the archetypal 9 months of 2025, the driblet was 10.6%. Altria has been utilizing terms increases to offset the interaction of measurement declines.

The measurement declines Altria is dealing with are the basal occupation that investors request to beryllium alert of. But there's different contented that's little good known.

Management's large extremity is to guarantee the semipermanent endurance of the business. The committee of directors is besides meant to assistance usher the institution toward that goal. Wall Street tends to person a abbreviated memory, truthful past mistakes often get forgotten precise quickly. Only, successful the lawsuit of Altria, those mistakes person begun to heap up adjacent arsenic the institution tries to absorption capitalist attraction connected existent events.

For example, the absorption and committee of directors decided it would beryllium a bully thought to rotation disconnected the company's overseas operations arsenic Philip Morris International (NYSE: PM). Ultimately, overseas cigaret markets person outperformed the U.S. cigaret market. And present Philip Morris International has entered the U.S. marketplace with smokeless nicotine products. Altria fundamentally relinquished its astir lucrative concern and, simultaneously, created a caller rival by spinning disconnected Philip Morris International.