Linde PLC (LIN), formerly Praxair Inc. (PX), will raise its quarterly dividend by 10.1 percent to $0.963 per share in the first quarter of 2020. Last year the newly formed company hiked its dividend from 82.5 cents to 87.5 cents per share.

The next dividend is payable on March 20, 2020 to shareholders of record on March 6, 2020. The new dividend yield for  is 1.9% at a stock price of $203.41 and today marks the 27th consecutive year of dividend increases if we continue the Praxair dividend history.

"Linde is committed to increasing its dividends annually and, as such, we are pleased to raise the quarterly dividend again, this year by ten percent," said Chief Executive Officer Steve Angel in the company's press release announcing this dividend hike today.

This latest dividend hike is the biggest in the last five years and the first double digit dividend increase since 2015 by the former Praxair. Because of this new double digit dividend hike and the record of 27 consecutive years of increases Linde is a dividend hike star in 2020. The company will now pay an estimated $2 billion of dividends to its shareholders annually.

Linde plc, formerly Praxair, Inc., is an industrial gases and engineering company. The company serves a variety of end markets including aerospace, chemicals, food and beverage, electronics, energy, healthcare, manufacturing and primary metals. Linde's industrial gases are used in countless applications, from life-saving oxygen for hospitals to high-purity & specialty gases for electronics manufacturing, hydrogen for clean fuels and much more. Linde also delivers state-of-the-art gas processing solutions to support customer expansion, efficiency improvements and emissions reductions. In 2018 Germany's Linde merged with Praxair, forming the new Linde plc.