CUPERTINO, calif. — The world’s most valuable publicly traded company has finally found something to do with its hoard of cash.
In a conference call Monday, Apple chief executive Tim Cook announced the company would initiate a dividend and share-repurchase program beginning later this year, using $45 billion of its nearly $100 billion cash on hand.
Subject to the board’s approval, Cook said the company plans to offer a quarterly dividend of $2.65 a share sometime in its fiscal fourth quarter, which begins July 1.
“We have used some of our cash to make great investments in our business through increased research and development, acquisitions, new retail-store openings, strategic prepayments and capital expenditures in our supply chain, and building out our infrastructure. You’ll see more of all of these in the future,” Cook said during an unusual conference call with analysts early Monday. “Even with these investments, we can maintain a war chest for strategic opportunities and have plenty of cash to run our business. So we are going to initiate a dividend and share repurchase program.”
In a separate announcement Monday afternoon, Apple said it sold more than 3 million iPads in the tablet computer’s first three days of availability to set another record.
“The new iPad is a blockbuster with 3 million sold — the strongest iPad launch yet,” Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, said in a news release.
Apple has been increasingly under pressure by investors to give back some of the $100 billion in cash it had accumulated in the past few years thanks to red-hot iPhone and iPad sales. In January, Apple unveiled another stellar earnings report, its first of 2012, with a breathtaking 118 percent jump in profit. Yet the mountain of cash just kept getting higher.
Because of the tax hit Apple would take if it tried to bring back cash it was holding outside the United States, the dividend and repurchase program would be paid for with its pile of domestic cash.
“We also looked at other things we might invest money in that would come out of domestic cash. After we’d done that and allowed for a war chest for things we can’t predict, we had extra cash left over. We have plenty to run the business, and we felt it would be the right action to declare a dividend.”
