Welcome once more to the 2023 Annual Meeting of Value Line, Inc. I'm Howard Brecher, the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. Our directors are all present for the meeting. One or two of them may not be visible because they're out of town and joining the Zoom as all of you are. I'm here with Stephen Anastasio, our Vice President, and our directors, Mary Bernstein, Alfred Fiori, Glenn Munzer, and Steven Davis, are present on the Zoom.
I appreciate your attendance, and it's a pleasure to have you on our annual meeting Zoom. The purpose of this meeting is set forth in the notice of meeting, which you have all received. Stephen Anastasio, Vice President, will act as secretary of the meeting. Mr. Anastasio, will you present the proof of the due calling of the meeting and all of the documents you mentioned will be recorded in the records of the corporation? Go ahead.
Sure. I present the following copy of the printed notice of meeting, dated August 18, 2023, setting forth the time, place, and purpose of the meeting. Secondly, complete lists, which are at the desk of the Inspectors of Election of the holders of the common stock of the company as of the close of business on August 11, 2023. The record date fixed by the board of directors for shareholders entitled to notice of and to vote at this meeting, which list shows that 9,430,116 shares of common stock were then outstanding and entitled to vote at this meeting.
An affidavit of Domenick Vacca, employee of American Stock Transfer & Trust Company, LLC, the company's transfer agent, showing that on August twenty-fifth, two thousand twenty-three, Domenic Vacca caused to be mailed a notice of internet availability of proxy materials, including the annual report, notice of the meeting, proxy statement, form of proxy, and proxy cards to each shareholder of record on the record date.
Thank you. As I stated, the printed notice and a copy of the affidavit of mailing that you mentioned, Steven, will be retained with the records of the company. Now, pursuant to statutory authority, I confirm the appointment of Tamara Cajuste and Stephen R. Anastasio as Inspectors of Election. The inspectors earlier this morning executed an oath of office, which also will be filed with the records of the company. Now, although votes have been accepted by your proxies, the inspectors perform a step called taking a poll of the stock represented at the meeting, in person or by proxy, and will file their report. Stephen?
Is there anyone present who wishes to present a proxy?
Thank you. The inspectors have noted to me in writing that there are present in person or by proxy at this meeting, holders of record as of the close of business August 11, 2023, of a majority of the outstanding shares of the common stock of the company. Because we have a majority present and voting, a quorum is present, and the business of the meeting can go on. The business, rather, the meeting will now proceed to the transaction of the business for which we convened. First order of business is the election of directors for the ensuing year.
The following persons, as you know, are the nominees for director, as set forth in the proxy statement. Myself, Howard A. Brecher, Stephen R. Anastasio, Mary Bernstein, Alfred R. Fiori, Steven P. Davis, and Glenn J. Munzer. I will now entertain a motion that nominations be closed. Do I hear such a motion?
Motion to be closed.
Thank you. Without objection, the motion is carried. Shareholders who have sent in their proxy forms will have their votes cast by the proxies, as in the past. The inspectors will please accept the ballots, act as tellers of the vote, and make their report on the vote. That will be done in writing. All votes have been received prior to the proxy cutoff of midnight last night, and the polls are closed. We're going to file with the records of the meeting the certificate of the Inspectors of Election, which indicates that the following nominees have already received votes representing a majority of the outstanding shares of the company and therefore representing the required plurality for election.
I therefore declare that the nominees I mentioned, Howard Brecher, Stephen Anastasio, Mary Bernstein, Alfred Fiori, Steven Davis, and Glenn Munzer, are hereby elected to serve as directors of Value Line Inc. for the year ahead. This concludes the transaction of the voting business of the meeting, as specified in the notice of meeting. You also cast votes, which we appreciate on the advisory vote on executive compensation and the advisory vote on the frequency of future advisory votes on compensation at the so-called say-on-pay. We will report those votes in the immediate future in our filing about the voting of this meeting.
Therefore, what I'll do is speak to you about key developments over the fiscal year 2023, and some developments in our business that will technically follow the formal business of the meeting. So for that reason, at this point in the meeting, I will ask for a motion to adjourn and then go on to speaking with you and also addressing a number of questions that were received ahead of the meeting from you, and we appreciate the shareholder interest. So now I'll entertain a motion to adjourn.
A motion to adjourn. All in favor?
Thank you. The meeting is formally adjourned, and I'll go on to talking about business items and addressing the questions that I received in earlier days. The company, I'm happy to report, had an excellent year in fiscal 2023, which were the 12 months ending on April 30, 2023. Even though we faced the headwind of a steadily falling stock market during much of calendar 2022, and then just the beginning of a some recovery in the first months of calendar 2023. I'm very pleased that your board of directors reelected today, increased dividends again. Our quarterly dividends during the year rose by 12% or $0.03 per share quarterly to a rate of $1.12 per year. This was the ninth consecutive annual increase in the dividend, and as a company, we're proud of that.
Meanwhile, the company earned net income of $18,069,000 or $1.91 per share for fiscal 2023. Notably, income from operations of $11,470,000 was up 6.2% from last year and reached the highest level in more than a decade. Retained earnings, the earnings of the company that we have kept for the needs of the business beyond the dividends paid, rose again. They were up by more than $8.3 million or 9.5% compared to a year earlier. Retained earnings reached $95,979,000 as of April 30, 2023, and in recent months are on their way to crossing the $100 million mark. Operating expenses declined by $1,500,000, or 5%.
That was despite the spike in inflation that all of us experienced in 2022, so our expenses are quite well controlled. Turning to operations and first to publishing. We've had a tough stock market environment, as I mentioned, and we are seeking to maintain revenue by promoting two-year and longer subscription terms and various combination offers on our publications. Over time, we have also increased the average dollar amount of the orders that we have obtained from our individual investor customers, and we also have a general upward trend in the amounts realized from our various institutional customers, which I'll mention shortly. In fact, our business with professionals using our research continues to grow, and it has exhibited a favorable mix of the services they buy and better profit margins than in the past.
The company's overall digital services revenue now consistently exceeds our print revenue, and it improves our profits by eliminating the cost of paper, printing and postage for those customers, and actually serving the customers better by earlier, more dependable delivery than post office and other delivery. Turning to other aspects of our business, I mentioned I'd speak to you about the institutional business that we do, what we generally call institutional business, and that's a large part of our publishing activity. That's accounted for by sales to money managers, financial advisors, brokers, and academic, municipal, and corporate and other libraries. During the fiscal year. Thank you.
During the fiscal year, our outstanding team of national sales executives set a new sales record, partly through expansion into some new market segments, including financial technology or high-tech financial competitors known as fintech, and previously underrepresented foreign countries. As COVID conditions have normalized, trade shows and gatherings of potential professional and library customers have resumed, as has participation by our company through the institutional sales team. Let me speak about some marketing initiatives and particularly about the individual investor part of our publishing business, which is where we started and always important to us. We pulled back a little bit on advertising during the fiscal year, as we observed that the stock market was going down and creating hesitation among our customers about investing and taking new positions.
Therefore, our advertising was less effective than it normally was projected to be, and we trimmed it a bit. The beauty of direct mail and email marketing, which we use, is that it gives us real, not always immediate, but gives us direct feedback on what our market is thinking and what their sentiment or attitude is toward equities. We anticipate that in the current year, more individual investors will return to the stock market, resulting in many subscribing to one or more of our Value Line research publications. As confidence returns, even though it may be uneven, we should see more assets under management at EULAV Asset Management, the mutual fund manager for the Value Line Funds.
And that the investment approach of the EULAV Asset Management team for the Value Line Funds generally favors growth stocks. Continuing interest in both the Value Line Mutual Funds, as well as exchange- traded funds that we work with, and new annuities featuring Value Line-produced indexes, should give us very good exposure to all segments of the market. In these various ways, ETFs, the Value Line Mutual Funds, annuities, we should be able to participate in the growth of both major classes of equity investments, value stocks and growth stocks. Turning to financial matters, the company remains exceptionally strong in terms of balance sheet numbers, cash flow, and all aspects of financial strength. That gives us the flexibility to continue to grow in good times and bad in the market and the economy.
I mentioned that retained earnings grew during the year by 9.5% to nearly $96 million. Liquid assets were $62 million+ , which was a more than 7% increase. We're pleased to have been able to pay over $16 million in dividends to shareholders over the past two years. Let me speak about some current market and operating trends as well. While we can't predict the short-term direction of the stock market, investor sentiment has improved. With some indexes still up in calendar 2023, certainly some leading stocks well up in 2023, we're finding a better market. That's also indicated by the fact that lately, some major initial public offerings of stocks by newly public companies are finding success.
That's usually a sort of a leading indicator, a sign of optimism and confidence among investors. Therefore, we are increasing our advertising to the individual investor channel or market, and offering various new packages, new types of offers to attract customers. Second, we are reaching out to institutional markets by expanding our web publishing and improving aspects of it. The company is also actively working with long time and some newer partners in other parts of the financial industry about expanding the work we do together and therefore expanding revenue of our company, as well as exposure of our company's name and offerings through additional channels of communication.
I want you to know that we maintain up-to-date and resilient data systems, and there were some questions from shareholders, which I'll address in a moment. But we constantly update our data and information technology systems. The company hosts or stations our information technology equipment at multiple secured data centers. I've been to a couple of them, and they're very impressive. Meanwhile, the heart of our services, which is our stock analysis, that's done from home. That is provided by our own analysts, statisticians, and editors, rather than by so-called outsourcing, which we do for some of our information technology work that I just mentioned.
Bottom line, or one of the bottom lines, is that we're able to achieve a 5% reduction in operating expenses in fiscal 2023 versus the year before. Not easy, but we did it effectively. So my conclusion, my prepared remarks, is that a fine management and employee team has brought us to continuing success as the market and economy hit bumps in the road, and we'll do even better as those conditions improve. I'm very grateful for the support of our shareholders, employees, and partners, which has enabled us to have another successful year and increase our dividends. Now, I'll take a few more minutes of your time to address some questions that were submitted earlier by our shareholders.
The questions received, as I looked them over, were able to be grouped into just a couple of major areas. The first area is. The questions asking to gain a better understanding of our copyright business. What is the type of copyright business that Value Line engages in? Here's the story. Because of ongoing investor interest in safer investments that can also grow in value over the long term, we partner with distributors of investment products, including exchange-traded funds, that rely on Value Line indexes. The core of these products and these indexes is the Value Line Safety ranks, which have a long record of recommending stocks that hold up better than average during market downturns, yet also participate significantly in the upward trends in the equity markets.
As you know, the stock market goes up more often than it goes down, and net goes up over the years. And so the safety, the well-ranked stocks and the Value Line Safety ranking system go up with the market overall and yet have less volatility, less of a fear factor in bad times, and they've been very successful. Second area of questions is a concern, I'd say, among both readers and shareholders who have asked, "Is the company moving on from print to digital?" And I want to say first, that we have in no way abandoned our classic print-oriented private investor customer. In fact, in the past year or two, we have first moved to an improved, easier-to-read paper stock. Had a lot of compliments on that. Secondly, standardized our binders that subscribers like to use.
They, they're free with a paid subscription, and we organized that better, gives us better supply factors, and the readers have been happy with them. Third, for example, we introduced an improved service covering small- and mid-cap stocks. That service is accompanied with no extra charge by an expanded small- and mid-cap companion digital service, which folks can use or not, but available to all of them. That service now covers over 1,800 stocks, which are rarely covered elsewhere, and that's the highest level that we have covered in the small- and mid-cap service in many years. The majority of our business is now served digitally. That costs us less, and it delivers our research sooner and reliably. That proportion of digital versus print is continuing to increase.
Another thing we've done in terms of transitioning to new means of communication is that to grow our business with new customers and younger individuals, we do extensive social media promotion by Facebook, Twitter, under their old name and new, and email. For our institutional clientele, which buys predominantly our digital services, the key channel for marketing and selling, buyer sales staff, and they now specialize either in sales to our library customer market, or on the other hand, to professional managers, and advisors, money managers and financial advisors. For our shareholders, generally, the more digital the business, the better the margin, so it's been a favorable trend that helps us to control costs.
And one final question came in last is: "What can you tell us about the security of the company's information, given the increasing frequency of hacking incidents that everyone reads about?" I'm the first to say I cannot give you a guarantee in this game of hacker versus security. It's a constant cat and mouse contest, and there are companies that sometimes lose a battle. We all hope that we can win the war. The majority of our workforce actually works remotely from their homes in several different states. This gives us a degree of diversification and makes us less dependent on a electrical or internet problem at our headquarters location. And additionally, our computing power is now located not at headquarters, but in multiple, well-separated and secure locations.
So that's an information protection. And also a limited portion of our technology team is based overseas. Not most of it, but a portion. And we have found that that provides us really a wider pool of talent that we can hire or engage for our professional IT workforce. All of our computer servers and systems are protected by state-of-the-art firewall and related systems as well as strong physical security. I think that covers all of the questions that we grouped together, which we appreciate. And I thank you very much for participating in our annual meeting. I look forward to seeing you all next year. Thank you for your confidence.
On behalf of the board of directors, we appreciate your votes and your participation, as well as your shareholdings in the company. We will sign off now, and thank you very much. Have a good day.
Thank you, Howard.