“Apple makes more money than any company has ever made,” Matt Phillips writes for Quartz.
“As a result, Apple is left with a large and growing pile of cash: more than $200 billion,” Phillips writes. “Who owns this money? In one sense, Apple does. But in another sense, it doesn’t. Since shareholders own Apple, it’s shareholders that really own the money. Apple is just managing it on their behalf.”
“Historically speaking, companies have tended to pay this money out to shareholders in the form of dividends,” Phillips writes. “Apple is one of those companies, having resumed paying dividends in 2012. It’s now one of the largest dividend payers in the world.”
“But there are other ways companies give shareholders their money back. In recent years, the most popular way has been through the repurchase of shares, also known as buybacks,” Phillips writes. “Apple is also the source of the world’s largest ever buyback operations, with three of the top five biggest quarterly buybacks among S&P 500 companies, emanating from Cupertino.”
Much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: And to think, this is really only the beginning!