Good morning officially. I'm Howard Brecher. I'm the Chairman and Chief Executive of Value Line, welcome to the 2021 Annual Meeting of the Shareholders. This meeting is called to order at this time. It's October 8th, 2021. My pleasure to welcome you to our annual meeting. As in the past, what we do is go through the official business first, then I'll give a brief update on developments at the company for the annual meeting, and we'll be happy to take the questions at that time. We accepted questions in advance by email, as you may know, and we should also be able to accept them both verbally or by the chat. The purpose of this meeting is set forth in the notice, which you have all received. Later on, Stephen Anastasio and I, who were appointed by the board to serve as proxies, will serve.
With us are Mary Bernstein and Stephen Anastasio, our officers, directors, and several of our shareholders. Thank you for attending. The purpose of the meeting is set forth in the formal notice of meeting, which you have received. Stephen Anastasio, our Vice President and Treasurer, will act as secretary of this meeting. If the audio is working correctly, Mr. Anastasio will present the proof of the due calling of the meeting, please, and incidentally also present from American Stock Transfer is Tamara Cajuste and appreciate her attendance and assistance of AST during the process. Stephen?
I present the following copy of the notice of meeting dated August 17th, 2021, setting forth the time, place, and purpose of the meeting. Complete lists, which are at the desk of the inspector of elections of holders of common stock of the company as of the close of business on August 12th, 2021, the record date set by the board of directors for shareholders entitled to notice of and to vote at this meeting, which list shows that 9,557,761 shares of common stock have been outstanding and entitled to vote at this meeting.
An affidavit of Dominic Vactor, employee of American Stock Transfer & Trust Company, LLC, the company's transfer agent, showing that on August 18th, 2021, Dominic Vactor 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, Mr. Anastasio. A copy of the printed notice and affidavit of mailing will be retained with the records of the company. At this time, pursuant to the authority vested by statute, I appoint Tamara Cajuste and Stephen Anastasio as inspectors of election. The inspectors have executed an oath of office, which will also be filed in the records of the company. I ask that the inspectors take a call of the stock represented at the meeting, by proxy or in person, and present their report. Mr. Anastasio, is there anyone present who wishes to present a proxy or intends to vote personally and indicate to shareholders that proxies are not necessary because of the virtual meeting, but has anyone sought their proxy intends to vote in person?
Not to my knowledge at this point.
The items have indicated to me that they're present personally by proxy at this meeting. The holders of record as of the record date, close of business August 12th, 2021, that are present, majority of outstanding shares of the common stock of the company. Quorum and holders are present. Holders of the common stock. If any of the outstanding shares of common stock of the company are present in person or by proxy. Quorum is present and has the right to speak to the transactions business for which it has been convened. The first business is the election of directors for the ensuing year. All seven , as you know, was renominated as a director as set forth in our proxy statement. Howard Brecher, Stephen Anastasio, Mary Bernstein, Alfred Fiore, Stephen Davis, and Glenn Muenzer. I'm going to entertain a motion that nominations be closed. Is there such a motion?
I make the motion to close nomination.
Thank you.
I'll second it. Al Fiore.
Thanks, Mr. Fiore. The shareholders who have sent in their proxy forms will have their votes cast by the proxies in their behalf. In-person votes today. I'm asking the inspectors, Cajuste and Anastasio, to count the ballots act as t ellers, and make their report on the vote. Holders who desire to vote have done so already. Voting was concluded yesterday. Starting according to the vote closed. The certificate of inspection of election, which shall be filed with the records of this meeting, indicates the following nominees received votes all representing the majority of the outstanding shares of the company and were therefore elected. David Henle, Howard Brecher, Stephen Anastasio, Mary Bernstein, Alfred Fiore, Stephen Davis, and Glenn Muenzer are hereby elected by the meeting to serve as directors of Value Line including chairman. This concludes the formal business specified in the notice of the meeting.
I will entertain a motion to adjourn the meeting.
In favor of adjourning the meeting.
Is there a second?
Yes. Steve Davis.
Thank you, Steve. The meeting is therefore adjourned. As I said, next I will speak about some of the highlights and developments of the year, and a couple of our plans, and then I'll be happy to entertain questions.
Thank you.
If I can give a little color and commentary to the annual report and the prospect statement and 10 that's available to everyone, that's what I'd like to do. Regarding the fiscal 2021 year that ended last April, it was an excellent year. Our dividend yield to the shareholders far exceeded the stock market average. Part of that was that your board of directors enacted the seventh consecutive annual increase in the dividend rate. Seventh consecutive annual increase is, I think, the shareholders couldn't ask about that. The company's net income was the highest for the past 10 years, coming in at $2.43 per share. On the circulation front for our publishing operations, we're pleased that overall circulation, current and digital, has increased year-over-year. As of year-end, the overall total was up 5.9% against fiscal 2020.
We have worked hard and succeeded in increasing the average dollar amount that we have obtained from our individual investor customers by promoting two years of subscription plans and also various combination offers such as print and digital services. Could you turn off the microphone?
Sure.
Going on, the company's overall digital service revenue, as you may know, now consistently exceeds our print revenue. This is an opportunity for our shareholders, for our subscribers rather, to receive information more promptly and conveniently, and also helps us manage our costs of delivery. In addition, other parts of our business continued to perform well, too. In terms of asset management, our mutual fund manager and our copyright business, which involves our Value Line indexes being used in other financial products. The biggest uptrend actually in fiscal 2021 was in revenue payments and our share of profits from EULAV Asset Management. We sometimes call it EAM. It's a company we separated out in 2010 to take on the role of advisor and distributor of the Value Line family of mutual funds.
The total that Value Line, Inc. had received from the EAM operations was $17.3 million, up by nearly $5 million from the year before. After the significant bump in the road of the coronavirus in our market, which principally occurred towards the beginning of the pandemic and then was followed by a market recovery, despite the continuing effects on the economy of the virus situation. EULAV Asset Management continued both to attract new investment monies, new investments to the key Value Line equity funds that it operates, and had grown the assets also by appropriate stock selection, keeping up with or exceeding the strong recovery that the stock market generally experienced. Copyright revenue was stable this year. Investment income that we realized increased as dividend income trended up, and we enjoyed realized investment income totaling about $2 million this year, consisting mostly of capital gains.
On the financial side, the company remains strong, giving us the flexibility to continue and to expand in good times and less good times. For example, on the financial side, retained earnings grew during the year by more than $15.1 million. Current assets were up more than 25% as our liquidity is solid. Very importantly, some $16 million in dividends have been paid to our shareholders over the past two years. In addition, shareholders have also benefited from repurchases of shares by the company as those shares have increased in value from the prices at which they were purchased. We purchase shares under the supervision of your board of directors. We believe they're a good investment, and then we expect their going up in price has been protecting the investment value of your shares. Let's talk about a few things we've been doing and will do in general terms.
We constantly add important stocks of interest for coverage. We keep track of both the hottest stocks and also stocks that may get less attention but are also important to our readers. We're constantly adding stocks to the list of those that we cover. We believe that we cover in depth a much bigger share of the stocks on the stock exchange than almost any of the brokerage houses or other research houses. For examples, we've added hot initial public offerings like Beyond Meat, the meat alternative company, and Uber, the ride-sharing taxi service. Also, we keep track of split-ups and combinations among some of the old industrial stalwarts. We had the old Dow Chemical, we had new Dow Chemical.
When one of the large conglomerates split up, we began to cover Carrier Global Corporation, Otis Worldwide Corporation, and Raytheon Technologies, the three parts of the company that were created. We try to be there at all times for our readers on these important developments. The second area that we're very pleased with is that our new M&A, that's Mergers and Acquisitions publication, has been one of our fastest-growing product introductions ever. That's some, I think, on the strength of an immediate, strong record of recommending winning stocks. Next, many investors and subscribers may appreciate our climate change investing service. We emphasize the investing part because our climate change, our global warming publication is oriented to our readers understanding the issues and making money.
Our Climate Change Investing Service focuses on businesses that provide solutions to global warming or that are likely to thrive in the circumstances of our changing climate. We cover alternative energy and solar energy companies that are part of the solution. We also, from time to time, have covered companies that make generators, which are necessary in these terrible hurricanes that we sometimes have. We'll cover companies that help to secure and strengthen ports and provide areas for resilience so that both categories and areas of business that cover the investing service requirements. Finally, looking inward, we have modernized and continue to modernize our security and cybersecurity provisions for our digital services and for our own operation. We're also chasing both the genius speed abilities and user-friendliness of both our internal computer systems and our customer-facing computer systems.
This is always a gradual process, but I think our digital users have appreciated the difference. Really, we do something new every month. We made a usability improvement last night, and we stay on top of this constantly. Those are the comments that I wanted to make. You can read more in the annual report linked in the reports, and I know many of you follow with interest. If the technology permits, we'll be very happy now to take questions, whether it's by chat or just go ahead and speak up. I'll be quiet for one moment. Sometimes we have a number of questions, and other times not so many. Hearing none so far, I take it we have set it up, and we appreciate your interest, attendance, your votes, and your support, which we strive very hard to earn.
Thanks for coming to the Value Line, Inc. 2021 meeting. Technically, it's been adjourned already, and now we will shut down.