With minutes away from conference call, Apple has announced a pair of initiatives for its “giant” stockpile of cash totalling approximately $100 billion, a stock buyback, which run over three years beginning in fiscal 2013 (starts from September this year) along with a per-share dividend of $2.65 to start sometime in fiscal Q4, which starts on July 1st.
CEO Tim Cook notes that the company is already investing heavily in the fundamentals, saying:
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. 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.
