Apple to host conference call Monday to discuss its $100B cash balance - Page 3

Hahaha... as much as I'd like a dividend, the comedy value of that would be worth not getting one.

They're buying three states in northern Mexico, annexing them to the US, and setting up solar-powered, fully-robotic factories so that Apple products can be made locally.

Ten cents per share dividend. That should shut up the whiners about not getting any dividend. I hope Apple decides to wait until the cash reserve grows to $150 billion and the share price reaches $700 before issuing a dividend and that's what the conference is all about.

Well.. Not very likely, but seems in the realm of possible(ok not Detroit but a US factory).
They did take a(if you believe the tear down websites) hit on new iPad margins. If true, interesting. Will that continue? Inevitable?

IMO, they should seed tech entrepreneurs... And use funds for innovative tech acquistion etc. Research lab partnerships at universities etc. Again in my humble opine... Apple is great at consumerization of tech, driving tech forward, but not the basic tech development itself.

Or

Buy ABC?
Buy yahoo?

Or???

In addition, we'll be immediately replacing Tim Cook with our brand new Apple-brand artificial intelligence CEO, which we lovingly refer to as "iBrain". Thank you for your years of service, Tim... Security!

I would love to see Apple buy a major interest in a cable or satellite company. Maybe it's not viable and it is outside their core competencies. However, it could hold Verizon and ATT&T in check; Google's busy laying fiber optic lines; and DirecTV seems to be sniffing around for a buyer.

APPLE should start building factories to create their products in America as well as jobs. Seems farfetched but this would benefit Apple in the long run.
As for declaring a dividend & stock buyback.....Very likely as this would rocket Apples stock and create a buying frenzy.

No buyback please! I'd like to see some evidence that it has ever helped a company's stock

We read about increasing equity. Bah! That's nothing. Look to Microsoft's stock, or HP, or any number of companies over the years. Stocks tend to go up slightly, then drop back again.

If they do anything, I'd rather a one time disbursement, or a dividend, or some combo. Otherwise, there's no guarantee that shareholders will actually see value from it.

Short and long term marketable securities. That's an important difference.

I surely hope not.

Wow

Read all the posts.

Seems majority believe in a dividend and or a split over a buy back.

I support that but...am in Hollywood...work in the entertainment industry and for my money two acquisitions (not that they'd announce it tomorrow) make a whole lotta sense to some of us here.

1) Netflix - Why? Content deals. Apple needs to secure it's position in this arena IF it's gonna go balls out in the TV Content world. Strange that suddenly you can now pay for your sub's in itunes. Just sayin.

2) Sprint - Why? Wireless is the future. Again if you were Apple and going full on into the TV arena and your not getting cooperation from content providers who (some) happen to also control the content pipes into our homes then you'd make a run for a pipe provider giving you access into homes wirelessly. As we heard, Apple is at first base and getting ready to roll out a major boost to WIFI delivery...The only way I see Apple gaining cooperation with content providers and developers like my employer is by having direct access. Thoughts?

Totally disagree! My daughter started using my Mac when she was 2 1/2 years old. By the time she was three, she was reading books. She was one of a very few who was reading well by kindergarten.

We bought her books such as Grandma and Me, plus D&K dictionary, and a number of other programs. She loved them! I think that kids should get on computers as soon as they can manipulate them. They are amazingly strong learners.

But you have to buy the right programs. Junk isn't the way to go.

Generally, a dividend causes a rise in price, though that may not last. With the stock rising so rapidly, it would be difficult to seperate out a rise caused from a dividend, and where it would be going anyway.

But if they do announce a dividend, and the stock goes up 20 points, that's likely due to the dividend, though it did go up more than $16 one day last week.

STeVEN: Superior Tim-expunging Virtual Executive Nomographer

STeVEN: The products we're about to release need more 'Boom'.

Human exec: I think they have a fair bit of pizazz; they have a real Jobs-like quality to them already.

STeVEN: No, no. We need real 'Boom'. Rig the batteries to short after three full charge cycles. And add one more thing. What it is doesn't matter, just add one.

I claim .001%.

Paying an additional 35% would be ridiculous. They have already paid taxes on this money.

Perhaps the government has agreed to split those taxes with the tech companies who are trying to get a break here. Even if these companies paid no taxes on the repatriated cash, it would benefit the economy. It's estimated that tech companies alone have almost $500 billion overseas. If that went into banks and investments here, it would make a big difference, while causing problems abroad.

I definitely don't think acquisition. Any deal so large as to have meaningful impact on their cash would have seen rumors for days or weeks.

Unless they were buying Foxconn, or parts of it, but that's not very likely.

I'd like Apple to set up a wholly-owned manufacturing subsidiary in China. It would handle a percentage (say 10%) of the volume, but the main intent would be to serve as a labor and environmental benchmark, to focus on new products and thus keep them from eyes of third parties more effectively, to grab the best Chinese manufacturing engineering and logistics talent (keeping it out of reach from competitors), and for marketing purposes to Chinese consumers. I don't expect this to happen either.

I see no point in a buyback while the stock is flying, and neither Cook nor Oppenheimer look like guys who like to pay top dollar for anything.

So I think the one-time large dividend ($20?) theory is the most plausible, with or without a split to go along with it. If all they were going to announce was an intent to ramp up acquisitions, they would not choose this kind of time or date.

What do you mean by distributed? They're given quarter by quarter, so if, for example, Apple were to be very generous and give $20 a share per year, we'd get $5 a quarter. I don't know if that answers your question, or if it has nothing to do with it.

5:1 would be sweet ...

Ha!! Tim announces that Apple is buying a well known Japanese TV manufacture.

A stock buyback would be satisfying Wall Street. That would be their preference. I think it's a terrible idea, and always has been.

I was think of buying FoxConn and putting him in charge.

Transferring this post from another thread;


I agree on the buyback -- just shuffling deck chairs...

A substantial split would open the stock to the smaller investor -- advantages and disadvantages...

We discussed before an OTPC (One [iPad] Tablet Per Child) offering -- they could set up and administer a matching fund... supplying iPads at cost (or below) and setting up infrastructure in underdeveloped countries. There could be some substantial tax benefits to this if structured correctly. And, as we discussed I really like the long term potential for Apple and for humanity.

They could open up the iTunes store to "hard goods" -- Amazon done right!... Nah!

They could become a massive MVNO (possible), investing in a cableco (not likely), buy content or broadcast rights -- I like this the more I think about it.

Or, LOL, they could (to paraphrase Michael Dell) "payoff the shareholders and take Apple private".

Except that AMD sucks. Really badly. And they no longer have their own chip production. That's putting them at an even worse disadvantage.

Apple needs to make decisions that benefit the board and the shareholders. While some options may provide an immediate kick to the shareholders (dividend or one time disbursement), it may adversely affect the company over the long term. I'm in favor of Apple making long-term decisions, not just quarter-to-quarter decisions.

Netflix is way overpriced, and has a number of problems. Sprint isn't a good idea because it's always bad to go into competition with your customers . And, yes, the carriers are their customers too, as are we.

I just can't resist...

Apple is going to pay down the cost of Algore's carbon footprint

Can't be Sony. They don't make Tv's anymore.

Surely they fact is MS won't go up based on crap products not because of stock splits?

Only one I think they would buy (if it ever made any sense) would be Sharp.

On Apple's site, they do say that this is about the cash, so I don't think it would be about anything else, unless they did have some numbers to give us.

Maybe Tim just wants to ring the bell

Is your example the dollar value you think dividends would be distributed?

It's been pointed out in a number of articles that Apple will generate at least $40 billion in cash during 2012, and possibly 50% more$60 billion. They could easily give a $20 a share dividend, and still accumulate a lot of cash. In 2013, unless something unusually adverse occurs, they will generate a good deal more cash than that, and so on.

I've been against dividends and cash disbursements for years concerning Apple. But when they reached $50 billion I began to think differently. Now, they've got to do something. There is no need for that amount of cash. Apple has NO long term debt to pay off, or medium term debt to pay off where cash would be a good backup in case of some severe economic turndown like the last one. But they don't need it for that.

So, what DO they need it for? Does it matter if they now have $105 billion (by the end of the quarter), or $85 billion? By the end of next quarter, they will have added another $10 billion anyway. The quarter after that, they will be back where they will be in a few weeks, maybe even more.

Seriously, cash is not a problem for them.

Totally agree.

It's tough to buy Asian and European companies. The governments there aren't happy about that. It's even difficult to learn what these companies are comprised of in Asia. They are part of groups that are very opaque. Their accounting is different from ours, and the laws in most Asian countries allow companies to hide a lot of cash, and debt.

One example. A lot of Japanese and Korean companies own banks. Those banks then make loans to the companies that own them, as well as to companies involved in the groups in which they are part of. But, they also make loans to banks owned by other groups, and receive loans from them. They are all interconnected. It's difficult to pry them apart.

Samsung, as an example, has numerous divisions, and sister companies, all of which issue their own stock. Very confusing as they use different accounting rules.

If they do give a dividend, I think it could be anywhere from a low of $5 per share, to $25. That's per year. Of course, no one knows what their thinking on this is.

Not me. A dividend does not historically increase the share price of a growth stock. For example, look at the big Microsoft one-time dividend a year ago. The share price dropped by almost exactly the amount of the dividend.

And Microsoft's share price growth has been far lower than Apple's - and MS offers a dividend and Apple does not. There's no evidence that a dividend increases the share price of growth stocks - and people like Warren Buffet are staunchly opposed.


Both terrible examples. In both cases, Apple's success depends on having access to all content and carriers. Choosing only one puts them in competition with key partners.


That's not at all true. A large one-time dividend causes a drop in share price roughly equal to the value of the dividend. If it's an ongoing dividend, there's no evidence that dividends are correlated with share price. Some of the fastest growing stocks (Berkshire Hathaway and AAPL, for example) do NOT pay dividends.

But feel free to provide evidence to support the claim that a dividend generally increases share price.


Not quite true.

They pay taxes in local currency on money earned in other countries. If they repatriate the money, they pay taxes based on US tax rates - BUT they get to deduct the amount paid on foreign countries. So, in effect, if they want the money back in the U.S., the total tax rate they pay will be US tax rates, so there's no double taxation.


Actually, you have it backwards.

A split is shuffling deck chairs. It has absolutely no impact on the ratios or the split-adjusted share price. Evidence is pretty clear that while a split might have a very short term benefit, that goes away quickly.

OTOH, a buy-back has a very real effect. There are 930 M shares in circulation right now. The per-share earnings are $X divided by 930 M. If Apple buys back 30 M shares, then the per-share earnings are $X divided by only 900 M, so earnings per share are increased - permanently.

Whatever multiple the investor uses will be based on the new share price, so the price would increase proportionally. That is, if they buy back 5% of the shares, the share price will increase approximately 5%.