Kwikiwi

I am not a big fan of stock buy backs for Apple. The main issue I have is that Apple has to take out debt to buy the stock back and it has gone from being debt free to having over $100 Billion of long term debt that now costs over 4% to service. Yes they generate lots of cash and are able to service the debt but things can change rapidly in the tech industry and that could be a problem in the future. If they did a better dividend scheme, say 50% of all net profit paid out as a dividend the return would be very healthy and by it's nature always serviceable and they could reduce their long term debt substantially. I know dividends create issues when so much of the profit (greater than 54%) is generated overseas and that a lot of people will go on about lazy balance sheets, and I understand their thinking, but I would rather they had bigger cash reserves, less debt and did some better acquisitions than so much in buy backs. Having said all of that I am very fortunate to have done well from my shareholding in Apple over a 20 year period and extremely grateful for that - I just don't like the massive buy backs.