Apple Preparing to Offer 'Significant' Dividend for Investors Early Next Year?
Bloomberg reports on comments from money manager Howard Ward claiming that Apple is preparing to begin offering a "significant" dividend to its shareholders early next year.
“We’re going to see a dividend announced for Apple at some point in the first half of 2012,” Ward, a money manager who helps oversee about $36.1 billion for Gamco Investors Inc., said in an interview today with “Street Smart” on Bloomberg Television. “That could easily be a 3 percent dividend-yielding stock or even higher.”
Steve Dowling, an Apple spokesman, declined to comment.
The basis of Ward's claim is unclear, but Apple CEO Tim Cook has signaled increased willingness to consider alternative uses for Apple's growing cash hoard.
Apple began offering a quarterly dividend to investors in mid-1987, but canceled it at the end of 1995 as the company foundered. With the return of Steve Jobs, the company was eventually able to turn itself around and become one of the world's largest companies, but has so far been unwilling to offer dividends again, opting instead to hold onto its profits for its own uses.
Apple has argued that its significant cash hoard gives it the ability to make major long-term deals for components at favorable terms, as well as putting the company in a position for a major strategic acquisition should the right opportunity surface. But with Apple's cash and investments now topping $80 billion, calls for the company to return some of that money to shareholders have been on the rise. And if Ward's claim is correct, it appears that Apple under Tim Cook may now agree with that sentiment.
Popular Stories
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
The upcoming iOS 17.5 update for the iPhone includes only a few new user-facing features, but hidden code changes reveal some additional possibilities. Below, we have recapped everything new in the iOS 17.5 and iPadOS 17.5 beta so far. Web Distribution Starting with the second beta of iOS 17.5, eligible developers are able to distribute their iOS apps to iPhone users located in the EU...
Top Rated Comments
Knowing this for sure would be incredibly valuable proprietary information.
I don't see the upside to Apple for for offering a dividend unless employee shareholders are clamoring for it.
"calls for the company to return some of that money to shareholders have been on the rise"
Flat wrong. It actually means that the company has to rely on cash perks to attract shareholders instead of achieving the same goal through market growth and innovation.
Besides, even a one-time distribution of dividends will lead to moral hazard in the sense that investors, from then on, will start factoring that expectation into Apple's stock price as a virtually-mandatory element for buying its shares.
Once more, I hope this is just a stupid speculator's rumor...nothing good can be seen in such a move by Apple.
nev-er.
Apple will be the industry leader for quite some time but if this is true, the culture of Apple is changing. And in the long run, it would be strange if it didn't.
however there are...consequences.