Massiveattack87

mpantone said:

melgross said:

I’m still ticked at Apple’s indifference to direct shareholder benefits. Seriously, a 4% increase in dividend payments when they declare another massive $100 billion in buybacks? It should have been at least a 10% increase and they could have taken a few billion off the buybacks and nobody would have noticed. I’d also rather see them begin to pay off the $132 billion in debt instead of constantly increasing it in order to pay for buybacks. This is not good, folks.

Apple doesn't think that dividends provide the best ROI for shareholders. The only reason they issue a dividend is to qualify for pension plans, mutual funds, and ETFs that require component companies to issue dividends. I'm not convinced that an extra dime per share is really going to change any investor's life.

It's pretty clear they just increase the dividend to match inflation, that's it.

Apple thinks that they can invest the money better themselves through acquisitions, stock buybacks or strategic expenditures (like prepaying TSMC *cash* for access to cutting edge nodes and wafers). And you know for 99.9% of retail AAPL shareholders Apple is probably right. 

Part of the reason why they sell bonds is because of the tax implications of repatriating cash from overseas operations. They still seem to be waiting for an opportune moment. At this point, they probably think it's still cheaper to use someone else's cash instead of their own.

If you really want to stick your money somewhere else, sell off some of your AAPL and diversify. That's a good idea anyhow. Warren Buffett does it and he doesn't throw temper tantrums about paltry AAPL dividends. And your due diligence should have uncovered that AAPL doesn't pay out handsome dividends before you invested. It takes like 3-4 seconds to figure out Forward Dividend & Yield at Yahoo Finance for any company publicly traded on American stock exchanges.

If you want a stock that pays out big dividends, go invest in a company like AT&T (NYSE:T) which has zero vision and innovates poorly.

Anyhow, feel free to bring up your concerns at next year's annual shareholder meeting.