According to the latest earnings report published on Tuesday, Apple now has $256.8 billion in cash and investments which is a huge amount of money. Almost all of this money is stored overseas for tax purposes, and Apple CFO Luca Maestri stated that $239.6 billion is outside the US borders. However, this may soon change because President Donald Trump wants to bring the cash back to the US.
If Apple decides to bring back the money to America, the company can do something useful and productive instead of just piling it up. According to the companies announcement, its quarterly dividend will be increased by almost 11% to 63 cents a share. Just an annual payment of $2,52 a year for each of the company’s 5.25 billion shares would cost them $13.2 billion.
Speaking of money, they have lots of it, and they can invest it in research and development, hire new workers, build facilities, but if they want to grow, they can’t just release one iPhone after another. Apple doesn’t just need to pile up cash to avoid massive legal costs.
Back in 1997, Microsoft invested $150 million in the company to settle lawsuits, and this move saved Apple. At that time, Steve Jobs had come back as the CEO, and they didn’t produce iPods or iPhones. Some investors believe it’s high time for proper use of its money for acquisitions and there have been some speculations that Apple has been building a war chest for megadeals for a while.
So far, Apple has acquired Dr. Dre’s headphone company Beats, but this cost them just $3 billion while in 2015, one analyst at FBR made a shopping list for the tech giant. According to this analyst, they should go for Adobe, GoPro, Tesla and Box. If they were to buy all of those companies, they would have to pay $122 billion with most of the money directed to Tesla and Adobe.
Did you know that Apple can buy Detroit’s Big Three – GM, FCA, and Ford for only $110.6 billion which means that they would have $146 billion left on their account. However, this will not happen, but it is just to show you how powerful Apple is.
Rumor has it that this tech giant might buy AMD and Pandora for under $10 billion and $2.5 billion respectively. Some speculations suggest that a purchase of Netflix ($67 billion) or even Disney ($180 billion) is a possibility as well. It is funny when you realize that they could buy both.
Moreover, Apple would only need $11.7 to purchase San Francisco Giants, Oakland Raiders, San Francisco 49ers, San Jose Sharks, Oakland A’s and Golden State Warriors, says Forbes. We are waiting for the Cupertino-based company to make a huge acquisition.
