Visa and Booking Holdings Lead Large-Scale Share Buybacks
Visa, Booking Holdings, and Williams-Sonoma are combining increased dividend payouts with aggressive share buybacks to return billions of dollars to shareholders.
Several major corporations have implemented capital return strategies that pair growing dividend payouts with large-scale share buybacks to increase per-share earnings and ownership stakes for long-term investors.
Visa Inc. returned a total of $25.6 billion to shareholders through buybacks and dividends in fiscal 2026, which included a 16% increase in its quarterly dividend to $0.78 in October. Booking Holdings Inc. repurchased $2.1 billion of stock in the third quarter alone and raised its dividend payout by 9% in 2026, following the initiation of its dividend program in 2024.
Williams-Sonoma also adopted this approach, raising its quarterly dividend by 15% to $0.76 per share in March and repurchasing $288 million of stock during the first half of the year. Across these companies, share buybacks have often been executed at a larger scale than dividend distributions.
