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Apple is planning to hold an investor call today ahead of a potential bond sale, reports The Wall Street Journal. A banker working on the deal says that Apple may begin issuing bonds in Euros, as Deutsche Bank AG and Goldman Sachs Group are said to be arranging the call.
Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs Inc. are arranging a call for the firm with investors Monday, and a deal, possibly at least partly in euros, could come as soon as this week, according to a person familiar with the matter. The iPhone maker has never issued debt in currencies other than the dollar before.
Apple last entered the bond market in April with a $12 billion sale, which followed last year's $17 billion sale. The order book for Apple's bond offerings in April 2013 topped $40 billion, as investors oversubscribed and offered bids for more than twice the amount of debt issued. Apple's bond offerings are a part of its expanded capital return program, which centers around a major stock buyback program and a quarterly dividend. Apple has pledged to return more than $130 billion to shareholders by the end of 2015.
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So issuing debt now allows them to finance things like the capital return program and dividends more cheaply than using their foreign cash pile (the bulk of their savings) and bearing US tax losses when they repatriate those earnings .
tldr: Interest rate % for bonds are lower than tax rate % on cash
makes sense...
Cheers dude, I didn't really understand the article but you explained it really well.
Tax purposes. They got a lot of offshore cash. Giving it back to investors will add additional taxes for bringing it back to the US first. Alternatively, they can sell bonds and pay interest with offshore cash. And pay dividends to shareholders.
I think that quite a lot of their cash reserves are held overseas and they would have to pay a lot of tax to bring it into the US.