Apple's Q3 2025 cash dividend is up in spite of growing tariff concerns
Apple is paying a cash dividend of $0.26 per share after the Q3 results reflected strong results with iPhone sales exceeding expectations.
Apple's Q3 2025 beat expectations
Even though Apple's fiscal Q3 tends to be one of the quiet ones, it was one to watch in 2025 thanks to ongoing tariff worries. Apple has managed to evade some of the pricing concerns by moving imports to India from China, and the complex supply chain has also helped reduce costs.
These strategies have resulted in a strong quarter, lifted mostly by $44.6 billion in iPhone revenue, which is way up from $39.3 billion in the year-ago quarter. Apple's results have allowed a cash dividend of $0.26 per share of the company's common stock.
Those that hold Apple's stock before the close of business on August 11 will be paid on August 14. The dividend for the year-ago quarter was $0.25 per share for comparison.
An increase in the cash dividend wasn't guaranteed after Apple warned against potential revenue hits due to tariffs. It expected a $900 million hit to its bottom line when it revealed the Q2 results.
More color will be provided during the earnings call, which takes place at 5 p.m. Eastern. Apple CEO Tim Cook and CFO Kevan Parekh will share details on the results and answer questions.
Read on AppleInsider
Comments
Perhaps if they expended more on R&D we would not have to have a bunch of lies covering up their failures to get the job done they promised. Leadership sucks so bad that four top AI guys were recruited away as they were obviously disgusted with the Apple work place. Lack of Leadership is not usually rewarded with anything other than a termination notice. Tim Cook has a huge Apple provided financial cushion and his life style would not be negatively impacted if he had to do work elsewhere.
Well, those were the A.I. guys who were responsible for the failure. Good riddance.
but they could buy Perplexity as they were said to be thinking of doing. They would certainly have the money if they didn’t throw it away. Also the talk about gaming has been goi g on for how long? Microsoft understands what has to be done, and they spent $67 billion for Activision. Apple could have done that.
but they would rather tear up their cash than do something with it. I guarantee if they bought Activision, their stock would be at least $15 higher. If they bought Perplexity, it would rise another $15. But buying stocks back has never shown any appreciable gain. People have been so brainwashed about this since it became legal in 1985 that they think it’s a real benefit. I’ve read a number of economics papers on this and there has never been any proof it it’s effectiveness. Some economists agree that it’s not a good thing.
Apple's primary reason for even having a quarterly dividend is to qualify the stock for mutual funds, pension plans, and other retirement vehicles that require constituent companies to pay out dividends.
Apple themselves rightfully don't think that Joe Investor is capable of reinvesting their dividend payouts into something that has a better ROI. If you really want to diversify, just sell some AAPL shares like Warren Buffett. He doesn't complain about AAPL dividends.
A company has many options in what to do with the money. They can hire more employees, spend more on capital investments, buy other companies, etc. Hell, Apple has first dibs on TSMC cutting edge output because THEY PREPAY. They have been doing this for 10+ years. Buy up all the cutting edge node wafers and use it as a competitive advantage.
If you want a stock with high dividend payouts, invest in something else like T (AT&T), a company that basically has zero innovation, literally a dumb pipe.
See you in three months because I'm sure we're going to see the same inane blathering ONCE AGAIN.
For example, the the taxable income plus qualify dividends threshold for a joint return for tax year 2024 was $94,050. If a couple have $80,050 of taxable income (this after deductions) and $20,000 of qualify dividends, then $14,000 worth of dividends is taxed at 0% to meet the $94,050 threshold and the other $6,000 is taxed at 15%. But if the same couple only have $10,000 worth of qualify dividends, then one can easily see why that couple would rather have more dividend. As $4,000 more would be taxed at 0%. Even if this couple had $200,000 in qualify dividends, $14,000 of it would still be taxed at 0% and the rest at 15%. And of course the taxable income portion (not including the dividends) is taxed using the standard tax table. And this for Fed returns.only. For your State return, milage will vary depend on the State you file in.
https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/taxes/dividend-tax-rate
BTW- One must not forget that the money Apple uses for dividends payout and buybacks are from after tax profits. Which means that Apple already paid a 21% corporate tax rate on that money. But who is Apple? Apple are the shareholders. This is why qualify dividends are taxed at a lower rate. Shareholders already paid the corporate tax rate on the money they're getting as qualify dividends. Many thinks that only the wealthy owns stocks and thus the lower qualify dividend tax rate amounts to a tax break for the rich.
I believe AAPL $.26 / per share dividend has already been pre-funded during Apple 2nd Q earnings report, for 4 quarters. This is when Apple usually declare how much of their free cash flow will be spent on buybacks and dividend payouts. So far Apple has never changed their dividend payout based on results of quarterly earnings. The amount of dividend declared during 2nd Q earnings remains the same until next year 2nd Q earnings report. When they declare a new higher dividend. (At least it has always been higher ever since they started paying a dividend.) and how many billions of dollars they will allot to buybacks. I see it more as a $1.04 / per share annual dividend payout, split into 4 quarterly $.26 / per share payments.
Now I think they are allow to change the quarterly dividend payout with each quarterly earning report but for sure, they are not allowed to cancel or reduce the amount of their buybacks. The SEC would not allow it. Many AAPL investors made investment moves based on the announcement of the buybacks and it would be a form of stock manipulation if Apple did not go through with it.
My preference is that the proportions are adjusted towards a higher dividend of 1.5% vs. The effective 0.5% currently. Since currently Apple is effectively trading sideways short term and down (YTD) then investors can have a risk free better return in cash savings.
Many of the other big 7 companies reinvest a lot of their huge earnings into capex for AI or infrastructure. Apple has currently a capex light AI strategy under the cover of privacy where inference is done on end user devices and thus limited need to stand up large inference farms. However scaling laws for both training, inference and reasoning suggest that capex light is no longer viable and as such it is an interesting correlation that Apple is lagging behind in AI while deploying most capital towards financial engineering rather than AI engineering.
XAi came out of nowhere and spent a tonne of cash on compute and is now parity or ahead of the pack in AI in 2 years. Apple potentially could do the same.
The car fiasco squandered billions and those creatives associated went elsewhere.
The $3,500 goggles blew billions and it has been a flop as the R&D costs have yet to be recovered.
So the best they can do is change the processor on the mother board and add a different color to the reused case design and they expect sales to soar. That applies to the entire product line.
If the billions wasted had been spent on improving the operating system to a bug free status, that would have driven sales. There are significant problems that are closing in on ten years since they were discovered and documented and yet Apple does not address them.
Tim's great ideas of moving production have been negated by Trump so Apple will be paying lots of tariff money. Can the buyers reimburse Apple or will they say this stuff is just too expensive now and sales tank?
Again (split adjusted) outstanding share count was 26.34 billion in October of 2012. After this earnings report there are currently 14.84 billion outstanding shares.
Apple split their stock years ago so their customers could afford to own a few shares....
This has been Apple plan since 2018
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/02/apple-vows-to-cut-its-163-billion-in-net-cash-to-zero.html
Right now Apple have about $98B in debt and $96B in free cash flow. And this after Apple had already purchased back $70B with of their stocks this year. But guess what keeps happening? Every 3 months, Apple makes another $20B-$25B in fucking free cash flow. If Apple don't take on any more debt and don't spend any of their profits, for the rest of the year, Apple would still have $98B in debt but $140B in free cash flow. Which is why $30B is still earmarked for buybacks. That would put them back to "cash neutral" at the end of the year.
Apple take on debt by issuing bonds. Apple 10 year and under bonds, the most popular, pays about 4-4.5% interest. Over ten years bonds pays about 5-7% interest. Apple free cash flow earns about 3.5-4% interest. Every share of AAPL bought pack save Apple about .5% (of purchase price) every year by no longer having to pay the dividend on them. So if you can do math, it cost Apple almost nothing to take on some debt for buybacks. With the uncertainty of the tariff issues still playing out, I'm sure Apple would rather have a little extra free cash flow on hand, so taking on some debt, that cost almost nothing, is a wise move to ensure there's more cash on hand if needed. Plus they might need more cash on hand for requisitions to help with their AI problems.
https://www.financecharts.com/stocks/AAPL/growth/free-cash-flow
https://finbox.com/NASDAQGS:AAPL/explorer/fcf_yield_ltm/
https://www.shacknews.com/article/145342/apple-aapl-70-5-billion-share-buyback-9-months
Apple been operating like this for the past 8 years. And guess what? They are still here and still one of the most profitable company in the World. So your Apple doom and gloom scenario is only causing Apple nay sayers to have to change their diapers.
Investing in Blue Chip stocks pay off over time, if I had stayed in the stock market after Black Friday, my net worth would be astounding relatively speaking. It does pay off to stay in long-term and ignore the noise. It really does but you have to be willing to invest over time. Anyone starting at the age of 18 should be starting their portfolio/brokerage account as soon as possible.
The rumored amount Apple spent on the Apple car research was only $10 billion dollars spread out over 10 years big deal. Microsoft in contrast spent 75.5 billion dollars on buying a content Blizzard a game company and Microsoft will never recover what they spent on it, also note Apple’s largest acquisition to date was only $3 billion dollars also note Wall Street is now campaigning that Apple should buy Perplexity a AI company for $40 billion dollars which would be a complete waste.