Apple Buying Up Billions of Dollars Worth of Apple Shares

[Maura]

[FONT=&amp]

According to Apple expert Philip Elmer-DeWitt, writing today on Fortune’s Apple 2.0 blog, Apple has recently been spending billions of dollars buying up Apple shares. In fact, Elmer-DeWitt says that by his calculation, Apple spent a whopping $16 billion last quarter ($4 billion cash, $12 billion via the accelerated share repurchase program) on buying 36 million Apple shares for, on average, $444. To put into perspective what a massive investment this is, Elmer-DeWitt notes that you could buy Nokia or BlackBerry three times over with this sort of money. As Phone Arena states in its report on the same story, the purchase of 36 million of Apple's own shares by Apple is much more than the 10 million shares it was originally expected to repurchase, and is therefore an extremely significant move.[/FONT]

[FONT=&amp]“One way to think of it,” said Asymco’s Horace Dediu in his Apple Q3 RY13 Review, “is this is Apple’s greatest acquisition ever.”[/FONT]

[FONT=&amp]Elmer-DeWitt says that 22 million of the shares were retired in fiscal Q3, so Apple now has 908 million shares outstanding. The remaining shares will be retired in Q4.[/FONT]

[FONT=&amp]Source:[/FONT] Apple is snapping up shares of Apple as fast as it can - Apple 2.0 -Fortune Tech
Apple acquires a $16 billion stake in... Apple!

 

[s2mikey]

Why would they do this? I always wondered what the motivation was.....

 

[Kaykaykay]

Why would they do this? I always wondered what the motivation was.....

Big reason for stock boom? Companies buying back stocks - NBC News.com

 

[neenaiphone]

I think they want to buy their own stocks so they can sell it at an higher price later. Apple always had the right business mind.

 

[scifan57]

I think they want to buy their own stocks so they can sell it at an higher price later. Apple always had the right business mind.

From what I understand after reading the source article, Apple is retiring these shares, not holding them.

 

[Brontesmith]

the same is what i am guessing as well ..

 

[Kaykaykay]

I think they want to buy their own stocks so they can sell it at an higher price later. Apple always had the right business mind.

From what I understand after reading the source article, Apple is retiring these shares, not holding them.

Companies that buy up their shares typically don't resell them again.