Altria

Altria is the US tobacco group behind Marlboro, the country's best-selling cigarette brand, along with smokeless products and stakes in beer and other ventures. Its core market is in slow structural decline as smoking rates fall, so the company relies on steady price increases and a push into reduced-risk products to sustain profits, a strategy that has met mixed success. For income investors Altria is a high-yield mainstay, with one of the richest and longest dividend records in the market, raised year after year for decades. That generous, well-covered payout is the whole point of owning the stock. The trade-off is a shrinking cigarette business and the regulatory and health pressures that hang over tobacco, which cap growth and keep the profile a yield story rather than a growth one.