Good morning, everyone. I'm Howard Brecher, the Chairman of the Board of Value Line, Inc., and I welcome you to the 2022 Annual Meeting Of The Shareholders. I'll call to order in just a moment. Because of the Zoom format, people are still joining in. I welcome our serving directors, Glenn Muenzer, Alfred Fiore, Stephen Davis, Mary Bernstein, Stephen Anastasio, and myself. As you'll hear, we are the candidates for election during the meeting as well. I'm just watching the screen for another moment on the group. I think everyone has been let in, as they say, so I'll call the meeting to order officially at 10:35 A.M. What we'll do today is first go through the official business of the meeting. That won't take too long.
Then I'll talk with you about developments during fiscal 2022 and somewhat up- to- date. At the end, we'll be taking questions. Again, because of the Zoom format, we did require, as stated in the notice, that questions come in advance, and we did have several. Some of them overlapped each other, and I'm going to address those at the end. Let's launch right in, and thanks for your attendance. The purpose of this meeting now called to order is set forth in the notice of meeting which you have all received in the mail. Stephen Anastasio, our Vice President, Treasurer, and Director, will also act as secretary of the meeting. Mr. Anastasio, as the first order of business, I ask you to present and file the proof of the due calling of the meeting.
Hi, I'm Mr. Anastasio. As Howard said, vice president and treasurer and also a director of Value Line. I present the following. A copy of the printed notice of meeting dated October 7, 2022, setting forth the time, place, and purpose of the meeting. Complete lists which are at the desk of the inspectors of election of the holders of common stock of the company as of the close of business on August 12, 2022, 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 9,474,814 shares of common stock were then outstanding, entitled to vote at this meeting.
An affidavit of Dominic Baca, an employee of American Stock Transfer & Trust Company, LLC, the company's transfer agent, showing that on August 18th, 2022, Dominic Baca caused to be mailed a Notice of Internet Availability of Proxy Materials, including the annual report, notice of meeting, proxy statement, form of proxy and proxy cards to each shareholder of record on the record date.
Thank you. As I said, a copy of the printed notice and the affidavit of mailing by Mr. Baca will be retained with the records of the company. Now, pursuant to the authority vested by the New York statute, I appoint Tamar Kajusty and Stephen Anastasio as our inspectors of election. The inspectors earlier this morning executed an oath of office which will be filed in the minute book of the company. Now I ask formally that the inspectors take a poll of the stock represented at the meeting in person or by proxy and present the report. Again, as announced under the Zoom format authorized by New York State, all voting is actually by proxy, and we've had an excellent turnout of well over 90%, and I thank everyone for participation.
However, we normally would ask who wishes to present a proxy, but the proxies have been turned in in advance. Accordingly, again, I received a written summary executed by the inspectors, and they've indicated there are present in person or by proxy at this meeting the holders of record of a majority of the outstanding shares of the stock as of the record date for voting on August 12, 2022. In fact, over 9 million shares voted and are participating. Because we have the holders of majority of the shares present, the meeting is valid. We have a quorum for voting, and the meeting proceeds to the transaction of business. The only official order of business is the election of directors.
As I said, after that, I'll speak about financial developments and address questions that have come in. Therefore, the meeting will proceed to the election of directors for the ensuing year. The nominees are set forth in our proxy statement, Howard Brecher, Stephen Anastasio, Mary Bernstein, Alfred Fiore, Stephen Davis, and Glenn Muenzer. Now nominations are closed because of the remote and the advanced voting format, so nominations are closed. Nevertheless, let me entertain a motion to close nominations.
Motion to close.
Thank you. Without objection, nominations are closed. Shareholders who have sent in their proxy forms have had their votes counted by American Stock Transfer. As I stated, the certificate of the inspectors of election has been submitted and executed and will be filed with the records of the meeting. It indicates that the following nominees, which I'll read, received votes representing majority of the outstanding shares. You should mute, not talk, 'cause otherwise.
Okay. Got you.
Thank you very much. The nominees who have been elected are the following, Howard Brecher, Steve Anastasio, Mary Bernstein, Alfred Fiore, Steven Davis and Glenn Muenzer. They are hereby elected by the meeting to serve as directors of Value Line, Inc. for the coming year. That actually concludes the transaction of the formal business specified in the notice of meeting. I will entertain a motion to adjourn the official business of the meeting prior to other discussion.
Motion to adjourn.
Thank you. Without objection, the meeting is adjourned. Now I would, as I said, like to discuss developments of both fiscal 2022 and a little bit more up to date as well. First, on earnings and the business of a corporation is earnings. We had an excellent year in fiscal 2022, which, of course, were the twelve months ending on April 30, 2022. The price of Value Line stock, in recognition of that rose during the year from $30.54 a share as of April 30, 2021 to $65.47 as of April 30, 2022. An increase of more than 114%.
Despite a summer of very unusual volatility for our stock and a decline in the overall market indexes, we have pretty much held that level as this week's trading has gone on. Dividends have continued to increase. Your board of directors enacted a 13.6% increase in the dividend rate this year, which was the eighth and the largest consecutive annual increase in the dividend rate. Company's net income was the highest of the past 10 years at $2.50 per share. That growth of income is built on a solid base. Income from operations of $10.8 million reached the highest level in more than a decade, up by 43% in fiscal 2022 over fiscal 2021. Publishing revenue exceeded $40 million.
In terms of our what we call our pure publishing business, it's been a tough environment, and we are continuing to stabilize circulation this year by promoting two-year subscription terms and various combination offers that are available to prospects and subscribers. Over time, we have also increased the average ticket or the dollar amount that we have obtained from our individual investor customers. Our circulation with professionals continues to grow strongly with a favorable mix of services and improved profit margins in the overall business.
All of our services, including the new ones like the Climate Change Investing Service and others, have achieved profitability during fiscal 2022. As was true last year, the company's overall digital services revenue now consistently exceeds our print revenue. We are still a citizen of the print generation and a thriving member of the digital age. The other parts of our business beyond what we call pure publishing have performed very well. First area I want to discuss is the somewhat similar businesses of mutual funds through the non-controlled company, EULAV Asset Management, and the ETFs business through completely independent partners.
In terms of contributing to our earnings, revenue payments and our share of profits. We get a revenue stream of income through EULAV Asset Management and also 50% of the profits. Collectively, those revenue payments and profits from EAM were up 4% to a record level. Most of our fiscal year, of course, fell before the market lows of this past summer.
No one could escape the impact of the market drop. The total from EAM of $18 million perhaps is unlikely to be matched in fiscal 2022, but EAM is rebuilding from an assets under management base which is around 40% below its peak moment. We don't attempt to predict how much of the ground will be recaptured in the year that ends in April of 2023. We are satisfied with the EAM strategies of emphasizing its line of Select funds and marketing effectively to the independent financial advisors, where such key gatekeepers of individual clients portfolios seems more and more every year.
As to exchange traded funds and all other data transactions that we enter into, copyright revenue grew more than 4% in fiscal 2022 versus 2021, and has thus far been fairly stable even during this volatile market, as reflected in our first quarterly report that came out in September. We are very actively working and speaking with long-time and newer partners about exciting expansions of the work we do together in the copyright field. Then the third portion of our income at Value Line is investment income.
This has become a more volatile element of income for our company and for others because in recent years, the accounting profession adopted a standard that makes our investment income reflect both what we call actual or realized gains and losses and income, but also unrealized gains and losses. Everything is now marked to market in our investment portfolio, so that income will vary each quarter with the stock and bond markets. Accordingly, the repricing or decline of the equities markets that we've seen this year means that our relatively flat 2022 investment income contrasts unfavorably with the excellent gains that we booked in fiscal 2021.
As we advise our subscribers, we are taking a moderate course with our company portfolio and emphasizing a good slice of dividend income in the mix. On some other financial factors, I am happy to report to you again that the company remains exceptionally strong, giving us the flexibility to continue and grow in good times and bad. Retained earnings grew during the fiscal year by more than $15.1 million to $87.6 million as of April 30, 2022. Liquid assets were up more than 28%. The sixteen million dollars in dividends have been paid to shareholders over the past two years.
As I said, it's grown eight years in a row thanks to the action and consideration of your board. Finally, shareholders who choose to sell and shareholders who want to see some liquidity in the market have benefited from the company's repurchases of shares. Company treasury has benefited as well as those shares have overall increased in value from the prices at which they were purchased. Let me talk about various current trends coming past the end of the last fiscal year. Investor sentiment out there is not too good at the moment, given the volatility of 2022.
That affects our publishing and other business. It's hard for people to get the courage to come in, to take our research, and to rejigger their individual portfolios. What we're doing now is continuing to build our business through first careful targeting of our advertising and social media. We spend when it's most fruitful, and we reallocate when some areas are less promising at the moment.
The second area is our successful pursuit of major existing and new relationships in publishing and in copyright, and particularly on the growing institutional side of our business. Third, we are pursuing new opportunities such as our Climate Change Investing Service. That has attracted investor interest, especially recently with a one-month run of a positive 26% in the model portfolio that we update each month in our Climate Change Investing Service. That was partly or largely a result of the climate spending initiatives in the congressional Inflation Reduction Act, but we're certainly in the right place and positioned correctly for our subscribers when that came along. The second area I wanna discuss is how we manage our resources, both financial and human resources.
I talked about our great financial numbers above in terms of liquidity, retained earnings, and the rest. In terms of operations, we have continued to selectively outsource certain data and information cloud operations. We believe this gives us more security at lower costs. The heart of our services, the core of our business, which is our expert analysis, is provided by our own analysts, statisticians, quantitative experts, and their editors. Overall, we were able to achieve a 9% reduction in operating expenses in fiscal 2022, although we're unlikely to repeat that this year given overall inflationary pressures.
Finally, I would just comment with an appreciation for our team and the other companies that we work with, that based on the example, the tenacity of our founder, Arnold Bernhard, and the loyalty of our entire current team. We have prospered through bull and bear markets, through pandemics, supply shortages, inflation periods, current and past, and we continue to do so. I'm very grateful for the support of our shareholders, employees, and partners. As you know, because of the remote meeting, we've had to encourage and invite questions before the meeting. We've had several and, to some extent, they fall into a couple of categories. I'm gonna discuss questions in two overall areas, revenues from asset management and revenues from research services.
We have one or two miscellaneous questions. In terms of the area of questions that ask about revenues derived from asset management and of course, how we and EULAV Asset Management are dealing with the kind of market that we've had in 2022. In our business, the two largest sources of asset-based income are, one, the mutual funds business of EULAV Asset Management, EAM. Two, our relationships with parties running money. That's thus far mostly been in exchange-traded funds. Those other parties run money in partnership with our Value Line quantitative systems and the Value Line ranks and brand names. EULAV had a great fiscal year in 2022, ending in April.
Naturally, they hit some bumps in late in fiscal 2022 and going into the summer. Their market of 2022 has been a relatively long one. EULAV as a growth-oriented fund family, the Value Line family of mutual funds, got hit harder than some other funds that were less growth-oriented and may not have done as well during the long bull market. However, we and EULAV Management remain confident in their underlying strategies, both as to stock selection, money management, and marketing. The big market success of EAM has derived from the advisor channel rather than independent broker-dealers or house accounts at some other kinds of firms. The advisor channel to independent advisors has been the biggest source. The numbers of advisors in their network have continued to grow.
Trouble is that some of the accounts have shrunk with the bear market. EAM also just after the end of fiscal 2022 experienced a loss of an annuity partner. It was actually the last of the large annuity firms to bring their money management in-house. That represented a lost account for EAM. I would add that this line of business, annuities, had profit margins only half as large as some other segments of the EULAV business. We think that they'll recover from that as they recover from the overall bear market. Our copyright or exchange-traded funds business held up much better actually because it is more focused on our safety ranks and conservative equities.
Also, we are exploring some exciting expansions of our current relationships using our ranks and with our independent partners. There's always something new under the sun in the money management field. We think, just as we did, with the exchange-traded fund and the unit investment trust vehicles, we got in on the ground floor and we're doing that again through the leadership of our sales and management team and the foresight of partners who know us well and new partners who are getting to know us. Second area of questions which I appreciate are about revenues derived from our research services. Our more traditional part of our business, but delivered both through print and through digital means even more so.
As I said before, we haven't abandoned our traditional individual investor, print-oriented, private investor customer, but we have found our growth and expansion elsewhere. Our digital revenue now far outpaces print, both in terms of growth and the base of it. Actually, in the inflationary environment, that's been quite welcome as paper's been expensive, sometimes hard to find. In prior years, I didn't spend any fraction of my time worrying about where we would get the paper for our services, but that was completely different after the pandemic and continuing into 2022. What we have done in that regard is management working with me have succeeded in diversifying our sourcing on all of our key supplies, including paper. Now, digital services.
Digital services, as in most of the economy, are marketed in what I call a more individualized, less mass-market way. When we used to advertise more in, newspapers and magazines and when our direct mail volume was at its peak, pretty much everybody got the same piece of direct mail for a given service. Once in a while, we did a test where we changed a few words, and we did a 50/50 test, but you have to send the same thing to everyone. Clearly in newspaper, magazine advertising, that was the same thing. Digital services, not so much. We and others are able to a degree, track the interest of people who visit our website. We know what pages they're looking at, and we're able to follow up. People may be interested in the energy companies.
In a different way, we follow up with other people who visit our website and are interested in the technology or cloud services or business services. To grow our business with younger individuals and individuals coming to us through the digital channels, we do extensive social media work and email communications. Now, for our institutional clientele, which is predominantly digital in how they receive our services, the key channel is good old personal selling, human to human. We have a staff of stars really, who use a vast database of prospects and to produce a series of record institutional sales marks. They seem to break the record a whole lot more often than the Roger Maris record that was broken the other day.
We have learned from the success of the institutional sales group, and more recently added a group of retail salespeople who back up our social media, direct mail, and other digital marketing programs. Each year, this retail team turns up new prospects, whether in international markets, as does the institutional team, and new prospects for data, drawing on our deep store of unique records and analysis. Here too, generally, the more digital the business, the better the profit margins. We continue to emphasize that. Final two questions I'll address really come down to what have we learned from the pandemic and how have Value Line's operations changed. The pandemic caused us to redouble what was an excellent business continuity plan before. They used to call it disaster recovery. It's that too.
Our level of automation is very satisfactory and very seamlessly really let people work remotely during the emergency. As we all remember, things locked down very quickly in the U.S. When they started to lock down, we sent our people home and functioned very effectively. Not to ignore our key on-premises personnel, including our distribution personnel who came in really throughout the pandemic with careful health precautions. The great majority of our team was able to work remotely thanks to automation and preparations. We now continue to have the majority of our team working remotely more than 50% of the time. Mr. Anastasio and I are among the holdouts along with others on our finance and executive team, but we're in the minority.
The geographic dispersion of our people and of our information technology systems should provide a sense of security. What I mean is that we have some of our employees and partners who are beyond commuting distance and who are at different places around the country, which I think is a help, and also has been a great flexibility in our recruiting. There have been some key positions that we could only fill with someone 100 or 500 miles away who would only meet with us occasionally. I've said at previous meetings that our information technology systems are also very carefully dispersed geographically.
Our two most key IT facilities are over 1,000 miles apart, and a third one is about 250 miles from facility number one, and none of them are in immediate proximity to our office facility. I think that's been a benefit growing out of necessity, right? I think that we'll always have a presence in the New York metropolitan region. Again, our next locations in the future will likely occupy a smaller footprint as the dispersion of our intellectual capital throughout the country, maybe the world someday, is more and more so each year. I think that addresses as a group the questions that we received, and I appreciate them.
At this time, I would thank you again for participating in our annual meeting, and I look forward to seeing you next year. Thank you very much.