Stock buybacks and their effects upon the broader economy are a useful subject of study. Near all commentators do manage to get it wrong of course. All money is one of two things, either consumed or invested. This is true whether money goes to the workers or capitalists, whether this is done inside the company that made the original profit or outside it. And yes, both investment and consumption grow the economy.
But that’s, you know, a subtle argument. At which point The New Republic might care to consider hiring someone who can count:
Apple beat Amazon and Google in the race to become the first trillion-dollar company in the U.S. on Thursday afternoon, when its stock hit $207.0425 a share……The road to a trillion was paved with iPods, iPads, and iPhones—and, crucially, with the rollout of stores that NYU Stern School of Business professor Scott Galloway has described as “temples to the brand.” But Apple’s recent success on Wall Street isn’t due to its technological innovations or its sleek products. Instead, its stock has been juiced by a record-breaking number of buybacks, in which the company buys shares of its own stock, causing the supply to drop and the price to rise.
Yes, supply drops, price rises, what does that do to the overall valuation of the company? Well, nothing, not in the first iteration at least, for we’ve now got fewer and more valuable stocks. Number x price before the buyback is going to equal number x price after it. That’s why it’s done, after all. Some stockholders get cashed out with the surplus cash and those who remain now own a slightly larger percentage of the less cash but equally productive company. The stock price rises. Indeed, it’s one of the standard little questions in the Kiddie level financial analyst exams how much would the stock price rise as a result of a buyback of this size? The method of working it out being to assume that number x price as a total is the same before and after.
That is, Apple makes buybacks, each stock becomes more valuable, but there are fewer of them. We do not expect this to change the overall valuation of the company, indeed we generally assume that it won’t as we do our sums. Buybacks will raise the price of each individual Apple share as there are fewer of them – not change Apple’s overall market valuation.
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the stock buybacks are going to at least be partially offset by option exercises, though more cash will probably be used in the buybacks than received from the exercises.
Entirely so, RSAs and options will be a decent part of the buybacks.
Yes, it's always amusing when a corporation pats itself on the back for giving us shareholders essentially a dividend, on which we will pay at most capital-gains taxes, and at a date of our own choosing — while simultaneously patting itself on the back for procuring stuff with new shares instead of precious cash — doing well by us by moving in opposite directions.
Apple only redefined the unit of measurement (1 share). No organization can inflate/deflate/revalue its way to prosperity, though it may manipulate psychology. The media's sole preoccupation with buybacks is that the wrong "class" may have benefitted.
In AAPLs case, they report cancelling stock options as a separate line item (they call it Nett Share Settlement) from stock buybacks. Effectively they buy the stock with which they fulfil exercised options from the open market.
Separately, surely a share buyback would reduce the overall value of the company -- similarly to how shares typically drop by the value of the dividend when they go ex-dividend?
Let's say Company X has 1bn shares outstanding at $100, and tangible assets of $20bn, thus valuing the business at $80bn. If Company X decides to spend $1bn of those tangible assets buying back 10m shares, the value of the company is now $19bn in tangible assets and the business itself remains 'worth' $80bn, so there are 990m shares in a $99bn company which gives us the rest of the shares still being worth $100 each. The two reasons for doing buybacks rather than dividends are:
1) Capital gains are normally taxed at a lower rate than income, so it is better for shareholders
2) The company's management is normally awarded a number of shares in options, so making those shares a larger proportion of the company is better for management at the expense of shareholders
In any modest scale buyback, (1) will outweigh (2); this requires that the %age of the company being bought back is lower than the difference between the tax rates on income and capital gains. In Apple's case, the buybacks have been large enough that regular investors would have been better off paying the extra tax. I know that stock is part of an overall remuneration plan and absent stock buybacks, salaries might need to be higher, but how much of what we see is just management gaming the system because they think they can get away with it in a way that they wouldn't be able to get past a remuneration committee?