The 10 most profitable dividend paying shares

Profitability measures such as return on capital employed (ROCE) are a useful way to gauge the “quality" of company. If a company can generate consistent returns on capital far above the cost of capital, that alone suggests some kind of durable competitive advantage or economic moat.If the company didn't have a competitive advantage then other companies would copy what it was doing in order to earn those same high rates of return. That in turn would increase competition and decrease profit margins and profitability.As a defensive value investor I'm interested in combining the defensive investor's love of relatively defensive, high quality companies, with the value investors preference for low prices.One way to find such companies is to look at very high quality companies, using measures such as profitability or return on capital employed, and then weed out the ones that appear to be too expensive.In an effort to do that, here are the current top 10 companies from my stock screen as measured by ROCE:Click to enlarge

ROCE in this context is in fact the 10-year median net ROCE, where net ROCE is ROCE calculated using...