Apple issues $1.04 billion in second round of Australian bonds
Apple reportedly sold A$1.425 billion ($1.04 billion U.S.) in Australian bonds on Friday, looking to raise more funding without tapping into its $233 billion U.S. in cash reserves.
The company issued three sets of bonds maturing in June 2020, January 2024, and June 2026, according to sources for Bloomberg. The 10-year bonds are particularly unusual in Australia, where many issuers outside of the financial industry don't exceed seven years.
Apple is said to have sold A$325 million in 10-year bonds, with a yield of 1.35 percentage points over the swap rate. The bulk, A$650, came in the form of the four-year bonds, up 0.82 percentage points over swap. The 2024 bonds accounted for the remaining A$450, with a yield of 1.25 percentage points.
The company's first foray into the Australian bond market came in August 2015, when it managed to raise A$2.25 billion (about $1.642 billion U.S.). That was the most ever achieved in Australia outside of financial firms.
The new money will presumably be put towards Apple's continuing program of dividends and share buybacks. The company is in fact expected to launch its first Taiwanese bonds in the near-future, selling between $800 million and $1.2 billion U.S. in 30-year securities.
The company issued three sets of bonds maturing in June 2020, January 2024, and June 2026, according to sources for Bloomberg. The 10-year bonds are particularly unusual in Australia, where many issuers outside of the financial industry don't exceed seven years.
Apple is said to have sold A$325 million in 10-year bonds, with a yield of 1.35 percentage points over the swap rate. The bulk, A$650, came in the form of the four-year bonds, up 0.82 percentage points over swap. The 2024 bonds accounted for the remaining A$450, with a yield of 1.25 percentage points.
The company's first foray into the Australian bond market came in August 2015, when it managed to raise A$2.25 billion (about $1.642 billion U.S.). That was the most ever achieved in Australia outside of financial firms.
The new money will presumably be put towards Apple's continuing program of dividends and share buybacks. The company is in fact expected to launch its first Taiwanese bonds in the near-future, selling between $800 million and $1.2 billion U.S. in 30-year securities.
Comments
Rich people save, spend and invest, which spurs economic growth in various ways. It's just that rick people do it far more wisely than governments.
So getting back to your comment what are those wise investments spurring job creation for the less-fortunate made by the 62 people who collectively have more wealth than 50% of the entire world, making them more worthy of doling out a little here and there for the rest of us? At some point the anger at the rapidly increasing inequality is going to boil over into actions IMHO. Simply working hard increasingly fails many families. It's a short-sighted policy to play favorites with the ones who already made or were given theirs.
Sorry for the off-topic diatribe, I won't comment on it further in this thread. Everyone as they were.
The issues are far more complex then the rich being rich, you should know that. Government waste is atrocious, so the value of taxation is far less beneficial than the value of private investment, commerce, or entrepreneurialism. We can't even get a pothole properly filled in the northeast, much less expect the government to solve the serious issues we have.
The problem is we are already taxed too much. There are many endeavors we are currently postponing because of ever increasing taxes, from home improvements to a new car to vacationing. Each would generate job opportunities and consumption based taxes that now are not being created or realized.
Trickle-down would work a lot better if the first hand collecting most of the run-off wasn't the government.
You can get 2.9% from a 60 month Commonwealth Bank Term Deposit.
I am getting 1.8% from a savings account.
People buy corporate bonds to diversify their portfolio. High quality bonds from a company like Apple are very low risk. That is unless you think interest rates are going to rise. In the US, at least, there are still a lot of financial problems in the slow recovery from the recession and employment numbers are not that great either, so an interest rate hike is not very likely, but no one knows. It changes quarter by quarter as to what the Fed might do. The strong dollar is another reason foreign investors might find bonds attractive, if the bonds are sold in US currency.
The issue I see is the government generally has little incentive to stop waste or to maximize return on dollars spent, unlike a majority of the private sector. So yes, a million dollar roadwork contract gets dispersed in all various ways back into the economy, but the value of the expenditure is generally very poor.
There's almost nothing governments do very well, efficiently, and with accountability.
"Stashed overseas" really isn't the right way of thinking about it. Stashed implies that Apple would want to send it home, or that it is being held offshore wrongfully. That money is generated by local sales. Apple have operations in these other countries, they have expenses such as local taxes, advertising/marketing, staff/benefits, research and product development in these other countries. There is no logical reason to send this money to the USA because Apple have plenty of cash there too, or as these bonds demonstrate, they have the ability to raise capital when desired.
It's only the US lawmakers who are pushing Apple to bring the cash into the USA - because it would flood their coffers with taxation dollars. Then how would Apple continue their world-wide expansion? By sending that money back to these other countries after needlessly paying tax on it twice? That's insane.
I can't see why an Australian investor would see these as attractive. While the rate might look attractive to European investors facing near zero or negative rates, anyone buying these with a foreign currency is essentially taking a large exchange rate gamble. I thought the primary attraction and raison d'être of bonds was that they aren't a gamble. If you were Swiss or in the EU, and looking at the historical long term exchange rate, it could look like a very good bet that the AU$ would have appreciated considerably by the time they mature, but it's still a gamble, and if you want to do that, why not just buy Australian government bonds and make a shed load more for arguably even less risk?
Think of it this way. If I was the government, and I want a pothole fixed, I'd simply hire one guy to go fill the pothole, and it costs maybe 100$. However because I don't employ "pothole fillers" full time, that means I can't just offer "anyone" $100 to fix it, I need everyone who is qualified as a "pothole filler" to bid on the project, and if they all collude into $10,000 per pothole, then the policy i have to pay $10,000 instead of just training one person to fill potholes and paying them $100.
A great example of waste is tunneling for transit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Base_Tunnel , 57KM tunnel, cost 12 billion dollars. Now state-side, the New York Subway costs 2.7Billion PER mile. Seattle wants to spend 50 Billion on Light Rail, many other US cities are setting money on fire chasing inefficient light rail projects. And they are doing so because the government doesn't care about building cost-effective transit, only "use it or lose it", so they build light rail because it's cheap on capital costs, but it typically starves the bus system of the same city to operate it, and in many cases an electric BRT would have been more cost effective and efficient, it just doesn't qualify for government capital subsidies, and seeing "tracks" gives people the impression that the route is permanent (hint it's not.)
If it costs 2 billion for a 5 mile at-grade line, or 2 billion for a 2 mile automated grade-separated line, the bean counters will go "we get more light rail at grade", even though the at-grade option costs 30% more to operate, serves less people, is slower, routinely kills people at grade crossings, and so forth.
And that is why government waste exists, from start to finish, a project that might cost a small amount of money, has to go through two or more consulting firms, a large project coordinator, who then sub-contracts the project out into hundreds or thousands of smaller jobs. Had the government simply kept all these people in-house, they'd cost ten times less until their union demands unreasonable wages, and then they'd outsourced again.
When business people run for office, they talk a big game about running the country/city like a business, but the end result of that is that the people on top get pay raises, and everyone beneath gets treated like disposable cogs in a machine. The amount of waste remains unchanged, it just changes who inside the government gets it because unspent tax money is money that loses value by next year.
At any rate, Apple, does not need to bring foreign-held capital back, ever. They can take on debt because the tax laws let them. If security regulators wanted to crack down on this activity as "Tax avoidance" they could do it, but it would likely send many US corporations to move their HQ to Europe.