Apple today announced that its Board of Directors has authorized a significant increase to the Company’s program to return capital to shareholders. The Company expects to utilize a total of $100 billion of cash under the expanded program by the end of calendar 2015. This represents a $55 billion increase to the program announced last year and translates to an average rate of $30 billion per year from the time of the first dividend payment in August 2012 through December 2015.
As part of this program, the Board has increased its share repurchase authorization to $60 billion from the $10 billion level announced last year. This is the largest single share repurchase authorization in history and is expected to be executed by the end of calendar 2015. Apple also expects to utilize about $1 billion annually to net-share-settle vesting restricted stock units.
Additionally, the Board has approved a 15% increase in the Company’s quarterly dividend and today has declared a dividend of $3.05 per common share, payable on May 16, 2013 to shareholders of record as of the close of business on May 13, 2013. Apple is among the largest dividend payers in the world, with annual payments of about $11 billion.
Apple more than doubles Capital Return Program
Shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders
I am glad to see that Apple is investing in AAPL at the current share price.
Smacks of a pretty desperate move to me.
Not really.
They just have too much money right now and nothing they could do with it.
If they sit on that money, shareholders will find a way to lose trust in Apple, the stock will crash and some idiot will demand for Tim Cook to step down – With him being replaced by…Steve Ballmer or whoever – the death of Apple^^
With a dividend and stock buyback, the stock price will stay higher and Apple can keep Tim Cook.
Sounds ridiculous, but i bet that some parts of this are kinda true^^
And just think of the amount of money they have – 144 billion dollars.
There’s absolutely nothing in the world that requires such an amount of money.
Even with half of that money, Apple will be able to fund their R&D around the world and everything that happens in Cupertino for a decade – and there’s more and more money coming in.
Acquiring other companies?
Sure – but the interesting companies are cheap, even with “only” a billion dollars you could buy startups that invented awesome new tech for “One more thing”s for ten years.
The really expensive companies are the ones that Apple isn’t interested in acquiring or that they can’t acquire.
Why would Apple want to buy HP, Dell or even AMD (dirt-cheap!) None of those companies has something to offer to Apple, maybe except for AMD.
And Microsoft, Google or Samsung?
Still too expensive, legal hassles, Samsung wouldn’t sell and nothing to offer that would help Apple.
Even creating an Tesla S-like iCar would be cheap in the context of Apple’s funds.
Hey, they could give out 300-500 Million iPhones for free to burn their cash, ultimate marketshare.
But Wall Street would kill them, so they give some of the money back to the shareholders with the plan to become more independent of them via stock buybacks over time instead.