Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the T. Rowe Price Group 2022 Annual Meeting of Stockholders. I'm Bill Stromberg, Non-Executive Chair of the Board, and I'll preside over today's meeting. In an effort to support the health and well-being of our stakeholders and based on the success of our prior virtual annual meetings, we determined to hold this meeting in a virtual format again. I'd like to call the meeting to order. The agenda and rules of conduct are available on the virtual meeting site. The rules of conduct will govern how we run the meeting. As stated in the rules of conduct, please limit your remarks to the proposals set forth in the proxy statement. Please note we've allotted an hour for the meeting.
At the start of this meeting, I'd like to take a moment to recognize the service of Senator Olympia Snowe, who's retiring from our board after nearly nine years of service on behalf of the company stockholders, including six years as chair of the nominating and corporate governance committee. During that time, she's provided the company with wise counsel, governance acumen, and exceptional leadership in addition to bringing unique insights to our boardroom. Thank you, Olympia, and very best wishes for continued success and happiness in the future. Moving to the business of the meeting, there are 13 directors who've been nominated for election, all of whom are attending this meeting. The nominees are Glenn August, Mark Bartlett, Mary Bush, Dina Dublon, Freeman Hrabowski, Rob MacLennan, Eileen Rominger, Rob Sharps, Bob Stevens, Bill Stromberg, Rich Verma, Sandra Wijnberg, Alan Wilson. Thank you.
David Oestreicher will act as secretary of the meeting. Representatives of Broadridge Financial Solutions have acted as the tabulator for this annual meeting. Jim Raitt of American Election Services will act as the independent inspector of elections, and he has taken his oath as the inspector of elections, which will be filed with the company's records. Christopher Samulski of KPMG, our public accounting firm, is also with us and will be available to answer any questions you might have related to their engagement. The record date for voting at this meeting was the close of business on March first, two thousand twenty-two. The secretary has delivered an affidavit of mailing to show that the notice of this meeting was given, and a copy of both the notice and the affidavit will be incorporated into the minutes of this meeting. This morning, we're asking stockholders to do three things.
1, elect 13 directors to our board. 2, approve by non-binding advisory vote the compensation paid to our named executive officers. 3, ratify the appointment of KPMG to serve as our public accounting firm for 2022. After we complete our official business, Rob Sharps, our CEO and President, will provide more detail on our 2021 results and this year's first quarter results, after which there will be a question and answer session. In order to begin, our bylaws require that a majority of all votes entitled to be cast at the meeting be represented in person or by proxy for us to have a quorum. The stockholders list shows that holders of 227,809,949 shares of common stock of the company are entitled to vote at this meeting, with each share having one vote.
We are informed by the inspector of election that they are represented in person or by proxy 189,113,877 shares of common stock or approximately 83.01% of all shares entitled to vote at the meeting. Based upon the percentage of the total shares of the company held by holders of record now present at the meeting, either in person or by proxy, a quorum is present. The report of a quorum and all proxies received at this meeting will be filed in the company's records. This meeting is now duly convened, and we'll now consider today's proposals. Please note that we'll give stockholders an opportunity to comment on the proposals themselves after all three proposals have been presented.
If any stockholder would like to ask a question or comment on any of the proposals, please submit your questions through the web portal beginning at this time. The first proposal is the election of 13 directors to hold office until 2023's Annual Meeting of Stockholders. The nominees have been introduced and are listed in your proxy materials. The board of directors recommends a vote for all director nominees presented for election in the proxy statement and at the meeting. The second proposal is commonly known as say on pay, is a non-binding advisory vote to approve the compensation paid to our named executive officers as disclosed in the proxy statement. The board of directors recommends approval of the compensation of the named executive officers.
The third proposal before us today is the ratification of the appointment of KPMG as our accounting firm for 2022. The board recommends the ratification of the appointment of KPMG. We'll now address any questions. Questions and comments can be made through the web portal at this time.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The first question we have is from stockholder named Mr. Ed Durkin. The question is, Mr. Chairman, the Carpenters' Funds are long-term shareholders and support the executive compensation plan. The executive compensation committee can exercise its discretion in determining the level of executive compensation awards. The investor market generally disfavors discretionary decision-making as regards setting executive compensation. Could you or the committee chair discuss the committee's use of negative and positive discretion and its benefits in implementing an effective executive compensation plan? Thank you.
This is Bill. The compensation for our NEOs is not dependent on or determined by any one factor. Rather, our compensation program is designed to recognize and reward performance as measured by a number of different short-term and long-term factors, including the financial performance and the financial stability of the company, investment performance of our investment products, and the performance of our NEOs against corporate and individual goals. We've always believed in having a reasonable amount of discretion, and we think we've used that, discretion, appropriately over the course of time.
Mr. Chairman, at this time, there are no other questions for this portion of the meeting.
Because no further business is on the agenda to come before this meeting, we'll move on to the voting. The polls are now open for each matter to be voted on today. Any stockholders who have not yet voted or wish to change their vote may do so by clicking on the voting button on the web portal and following the instructions there. Stockholders who have sent in their proxies or voted via telephone or internet and do not want to change their vote do not need to take any further action. We'll allow some time to complete and submit the ballots. Okay, I now declare the polls closed and ask that the inspector of elections collect and tabulate the ballots. I've gotten a signal that the ballots have been counted, and we can proceed.
We've been informed by the inspector of election that the preliminary vote report shows that the nominees for election to the board have been duly elected, and the compensation of the named executive officers has been approved by advisory vote, and the appointment of KPMG has been ratified. We will be reporting the final vote results in a Form 8-K to be filed with the SEC within four business days. If there is no further official business to come before this meeting, the 2022 annual meeting of stockholders of T. Rowe Price Group is now adjourned, and we'll now proceed with the informal portion of the meeting. At this time, I'd like to introduce Rob Sharps, our CEO and President, who will provide a review of 2021 and first quarter 2022 results.
Please note, also note the web portal is now available for any questions to be submitted, which will be answered after Rob's presentation. Rob.
Thank you, Bill. Before I share an update on the company, I'm required to remind you that this presentation may contain forward-looking statements, which include future estimates or opinions about our potential business results. Actual results could be different from the forward-looking statements. We ask all investors to carefully consider the risks described in our 10-K before investing. With that, we'll transition to the company update. T. Rowe Price is celebrating 85 years of being a trusted advisor to our clients in a firm that's intensely focused on delivering value, excellent investment results, and client service. Our independence, financial strength, and deep global research capabilities have allowed us to persevere through many market cycles. We rely on a strong collaborative culture that values trust, mutual respect, and long-term thinking. Several trends are driving disruption in our business and across the asset management industry.
Passive investing continues to grow, raising the bar on performance and pressuring fees. This, combined with greater demand for ESG-focused products and alternative investments, is leading us to broaden our investment capabilities. Additionally, many clients are seeking a broader range of vehicles offering greater flexibility and more customization. We're continuously reviewing new forms of product delivery to capture this opportunity. While these challenges are real, we address them from a position of strength with the scale and resources to continuously invest in our business. To proactively address industry challenges and evolving client needs, T. Rowe Price has identified and is executing several strategic initiatives. At the end of last year, we had completed the acquisition of Oak Hill Advisors. We're working with Oak Hill to build out the firm's alternative investment platform. We seek to bring Oak Hill's capabilities to a broader set of clients.
Our fixed income and multi-asset businesses are performing well in diversifying our base of AUM. Both investment divisions are developing and offering new strategies, including three new active fixed income ETFs launched last year. We've also continued to refine our target date products to meet evolving client need. In May, we announced fee reductions across our suite of retirement date funds and trusts to make them even more competitive in the cost-sensitive defined contribution market. As I mentioned on the previous slide, our acquisition of OHA allows us to offer private credit and distressed debt strategies, adding new capabilities in an area of tremendous client interest and growth. The potential to broaden the reach of OHA to our clients around the globe, and specifically to our individual investor and wealth management client segments, is significant. Importantly, the OHA team is a strong cultural fit with T. Rowe Price.
They are excellent investors and care deeply about their clients. I'd now like to shift the focus to our long-term financial results. Since our initial public offering in 1986, we've delivered strong and consistent financial performance. The line chart on the left shows the growth of earnings and dividends on a per share basis since the IPO. In the table on the right, you can see the compound annual growth rates for revenue, GAAP earnings per share, and dividends per share, as well as total shareholder return over 5-, 10-, 20-, and 30-year periods ended December 31, 2021. Overall, T. Rowe Price's total return to shareholders has been robust, outperforming our peers and the broad market. Investment performance has been the foundation of our success as a firm. Outperformance relative to both market benchmarks and to our peers.
As you can see on the left, 79% of our US mutual funds outperformed their Morningstar peers over the 10 years ended March 31. Nearly half were in the top Morningstar quartile for their fund category for that period, a measure that considers performance for a broad range of account types. Results for our investment composites, shown on the right, are probably the best representation of our overall performance versus benchmarks. Again, longer-term relative performance has been strong, with nearly 75% of our composites beating their benchmark over 10 years and 66% outperforming over 5 years. Recent relative performance has shown some weakness compared with our long-term track record, especially in specific growth equity strategies. Despite this, we are optimistic about our ability to deliver superior performance over time. Our assets under management have grown at a 12% annualized rate over the last 10 years.
While we've recently encountered net client outflows, primarily in our equity portfolios, three of our four asset classes, fixed income, multi-asset, and alternatives, saw net client inflows in the first quarter. We remain a leader in the industry and have the scale to continue investing in our business. Our 2021 annual revenue growth was 24%, which translated into earnings per share growth of 33% as our assets under management were boosted by market appreciation, especially in U.S. equities. In the first quarter of 2022, revenue grew 2% versus the prior year quarter as we included OHA in our operating results for the first time. Earnings per share, adjusted to back out non-GAAP items like the acquisition-related intangibles, were down 13% versus the prior year quarter.
The decline was primarily driven by non-operating losses in the mark-to-market of our corporate cash investment strategy and continued investment in the business in the quarter as revenue growth softened, reflecting weaker markets. We raised our dividend 11% in February. We've increased the dividend each year since our IPO in 1986, demonstrating consistency of results and confidence in our long-term prospects. Our balance sheet remains solid. As of March 31, 2022, we had about $2.6 billion in cash and discretionary investments and $9 billion in stockholders' equity. This financial strength gives us the flexibility to continue to invest in our strategic priorities, even in the face of short-term market turbulence. While we have been reinvesting in our business, we've also been returning excess capital to shareholders.
On the right, we show that over the last 10 years, we've returned over 100% of our earnings to stockholders through regular dividends, three special dividends, and share repurchases. We bought back $1.1 billion worth of T. Rowe Price shares during 2021. Shifting to our strategic priorities for 2022, we're focused on delivering compelling investment outcomes through expanded global reach, strong operations, and developing exceptional talent. Most importantly, we remain committed to achieving exceptional investment results for our clients. The launch of T. Rowe Price Investment Management allows us to drive durable investment capabilities at scale by deploying greater capacity in our strongest investment convictions. We're also steadfast in our commitment to delivering world-class client service. An example of that is our strategic partnership with Charles Schwab.
I'm incredibly proud that we were selected as Charles Schwab's active asset manager of choice to provide RIAs and retail investors with access to T. Rowe Price active mutual funds with no transaction fees. Additionally, the investments we are making in expanding our global reach have allowed us to grow new areas of the business, including a stronger presence in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and Asia Pacific. Global reach will continue to be a core growth opportunity for T. Rowe Price. Finally, we're committed to being a great place to work. The world's changed meaningfully in the last few years, but the value of collaboration and connectivity among our associates remains paramount to our success. We recently reopened our offices and are offering greater workplace flexibility to not only support our current associates, but also attract top-tier talent from around the world.
I'd like to thank our associates for their resilience and determination. I'd now like to turn our attention to our focus on promoting diversity and community engagement. Diversity, equity, and inclusion are critical to our culture and important to our long-term business success. We strongly believe that more diverse perspectives ultimately lead to improved outcomes. Our leadership team is committed to DE&I and is executing a plan to improve the representation of women and underrepresented minorities throughout the company. To achieve this, we've aligned our DE&I goals, strengthened our DE&I leadership team, and are proactively engaging our associates. I'm proud of the commitment our global teams have made to integrate our DE&I goals into their work, particularly with regard to attracting a more diverse group of associates during a difficult hiring market. Though we have further to go on our diversity journey, I'm encouraged by the progress we're making.
Shifting our focus to where we work, our move to a new global headquarters in Baltimore and relocating to Warwick Court in London demonstrates our commitment to creating a world-class work environment for our associates. These new spaces will bring greater opportunities for collaboration while also improving our environmental impact through advanced sustainability measures built within these spaces. The opportunity to better connect our associates by investing in these new offices will return greater benefits for our clients and communities. T. Rowe Price believes strongly in giving back to the communities where we work. T. Rowe Price has funded our foundation with $192 million cumulatively since its founding in 1981. The foundation team has granted over $157 million since inception and over $14 million in 2021 alone, including $6.9 million from associate matching gifts.
Our associates volunteered more than 25,000 hours last year, and 365 of our associates serve on charitable boards. We also continue to advance our work on environmental sustainability, including the goal of our new global headquarters in Baltimore becoming a LEED certified building. Connecting and giving back to our communities is important to us and will continue to work no matter what the market environment. I would like to thank our investors for the confidence you place in us and for joining us today. I'll now open the line for questions. Okay, this concludes the management presentation. I'll now open the floor to questions. As stated in the rules of conduct, we'll impose a limit of one question per stockholder, which must be no more than 3 minutes in length.
After all stockholders wishing to ask questions have had the opportunity to do so, additional questions, up to a total of three, will be allowed if time permits. Please note we'll attempt to answer as many questions as time allows.
Thank you. The first question comes from a shareholder named Mark Zashen. He asks, "Will the company need to increase marketing costs due to the competitive nature of the industry? And how long does it take to recover these costs as well as return?" I would turn this over to our CFO, Jen Dardis.
Thanks, Mark. Yes, we have a broad range of clients around the world, and we invest significant amounts in being able to attract and retain those clients over time. Those show up in the cost of sales, client service, and marketing, including advertising and promotion. Those are long-term investments for us, and we think about those for how we can invest to retain those clients over time. All of those expenses are included in the expense guidance that we give externally. Those are all included in that expense guidance.
Mr. Zashen had a second question which is, where is the company seeing the largest flow of funds?
Yes. As I believe, as Rob mentioned during the presentation, we saw the most significant inflows in the past quarter into our multi-asset franchise and into our fixed income franchise. In the multi-asset franchise, including our targeted suite of products. Our most significant outflows were in our equities franchise, and those were more concentrated in large cap and global portfolios.
Thank you. Our next question, which two shareholders have asked, this one comes from Mr. Steve Williams, asks, "How does T. Rowe plan to deploy or use the $4 billion in cash from the balance sheet?
Yeah. The first thing I would point out is that some of that $4 billion is used as a hedge against our deferred compensation plan, and some is used to seed new investment strategies and new investment vehicles. It's not all available for deployment. Our priorities for cash remain the same, and the first priority is to invest in the success of our business both organically and potentially through acquisition. To the extent that we don't require all of our cash flow and capital to invest in the business, as I mentioned in the presentation, we have a track record of consistently returning capital to shareholders, either through increases in the regular dividend, share repurchases, or special dividends.
Thank you. The next question, shareholder named Robert Toy. He asks, are there plans for investors to add the purchase of all varieties of Bitcoin as investment choices?
We have evaluated whether we believe it's right for us to offer digital assets and cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, either as part of dedicated strategies or integrated into our multi-asset offerings. At this point, while we believe it's very important to understand the digital asset market in cryptocurrencies, we have decided not to incorporate it into our investment strategies.
Excellent. Our next question comes from Wade Marquardt. The question is: A recession in 2023 appears to be a possibility. How will the business focus need to evolve to meet a recessionary challenge?
Thanks for the question. Yes. I mean, we are always making sure that we are investing for the long term in the business, and certainly there are always potential for recessions to come and go within our business. We try to focus on the long term, making sure that we're investing in those long-term priorities that Rob outlined and being thoughtful about where we're hiring and investing for the future.
Yeah. I think we always try and balance managing our expenses in a difficult market environment with continuing to invest for the long term. To the extent that we do in fact face a recession, you know, we already have had a meaningful correction in the market, in a bear market, in parts of the market and, you know, are balancing those considerations currently.
Mr. Chairman, there are no additional questions.
Are there any more questions? Doesn't look like there are any. With no further matters to come before the meeting, the meeting is adjourned. Thank you all for joining us today.