Tuesday, March 19, 2019, T+76, Part 2

SRE: declares dividend of 96.75 cents/share -- link here --

• Sempra Energy declares $0.9675/share quarterly dividend, 8.1% increase from prior dividend of $0.895
• forward yield 3.29% 
• payable April 15; for shareholders of record March 22; ex-div March 21

  
Disclaimer: this is not an investment site. Do not make any financial or investment decisions based on what you read here or think you may have read here.

AAPL: prediction -- AAPL increases its current dividend from 73 cents/share to 85 cents/share (payable May, 2019). This is a prediction only. I've not see anyone else predict AAPL's next dividend increase, but, then again, I have not looked very hard. Motley Fool suggests a 10% increase "near" the middle of the CY19. That would take the dividend to 80 cents/share.

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The Book Page

From A History of China, John Keay, c. 2009. Author lives in Argyll, Scotland.

When [Beiping] was finally overrun by Ming in 1381/82, among those captured was an intelligent eleven-year-old Muslim called Ma He. Castrated, dispatched to Beiping and taken on to the household staff of one of the first Ming emperor's sons, Ma He would become the most trusted confidant of the prince; the prince eventually became emperor; and thus would a Yannanese Muslim eunuch find himself entrusted with the command of China's greatest maritime enterprise. -- pp. 372 - 372.

Nanjing never entirely recovered.... the emperor would spend little time there. He preferred Beiping, which he immediately renames Beijing ("Northern Capital"), and which in 1424 he would adopt as the supreme Ming capital. Nanjing meanwhile acquired a different distinction. In 1403 the new emperor announced his intention of dispatching a fleet to the "the countries of the Western Ocean." The largest vessels in this fleet, indeed in the world at that time, were constructed on the Qinhuai River where meets the Yangzi at Nanking. Others would follow, making Nanjing, for the next three decades, the shipbuilding capital of the world's greatest maritime power. For with the 1405 departure of Admiral Zheng He in command of China's first world armada, the Ming were poised not just to emulate Khubilia Khan's overseas adventures but sensationally to upstage them. -- p. 375

But according to the Standard Histories, there was no great example of wanton extravagance than the series of voyages that the Yongle emperor ordered Zheng He, his trusty Yunnanese Muslim eunuch, to conduct into "the Western [or Indian] Ocean."

There were seven such voyages, six of them ordered by the Yongle emperor himself between 1405 and 1421, plus one [voyage] of 1431 that was an afterthought by an admiring successor. All were commanded by Zheng He; each included between 100 and 300 ships carrying in total up to 27,000 men; and of these ships, around fifty were usually "treasure ships," colossal constructions about five times the size of any wooden vessel built elsewhere in the world at the time and ten times the capacity. -- pp. 379 - 380, and then much more through page 387.