“Apple is preparing the groundwork for another blockbuster debt sale in the region of $17bn that could rank as the second-largest corporate bond sale of all time,” Michael Mackenzie and Vivianne Rodrigues report for The Financial Times. “The world’s most valuable company said last week that it planned to increase its share buyback from $60bn to $90bn, funded by domestic and international bond sales.”
“Apple plans to use proceeds from the debt sale to fund the buyback rather than tap its $150bn cash pile. About $130bn of that cash is held overseas, 88 percent of the total, and returning it to the US would lead to a tax charge of up to 35 percent,” Mackenzie and Rodrigues report. “A foreign debt sale would probably target the eurozone, where interest rates are lower than in the US, and diversify Apple’s debt investor base.”
During Apple’s quarterly results call last week, Luca Maestri, Apple’s incoming finance chief, warned that repatriating offshore cash would incur ‘significant’ tax consequences,” Mackenzie and Rodrigues report. “Apple was likely to raise ‘an amount of term debt financing similar to what we issued in 2013,’ he said, adding that preparations had also been made to tap the commercial paper market for short-term liquidity.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: U.S. corporate taxes are obviously too high.
Under the current U.S. corporate tax system, it would be very expensive to repatriate that cash. Unfortunately, the tax code has not kept up with the digital age. The tax system handicaps American corporations in relation to our foreign competitors who don’t have such constraints on the free flow of capital… Apple has always believed in the simple, not the complex. You can see it in our products and the way we conduct ourselves. It is in this spirit that we recommend a dramatic simplification of the corporate tax code. This reform should be revenue neutral, eliminate all corporate tax expenditures, lower corporate income tax rates and implement a reasonable tax on foreign earnings that allows the free flow of capital back to the U.S. We make this recommendation with our eyes wide open, realizing this would likely increase Apple’s U.S. taxes. But we strongly believe such comprehensive reform would be fair to all taxpayers, would keep America globally competitive and would promote U.S. economic growth. – Apple CEO Tim Cook, May 21, 2013
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