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Technology Stocks : Apple Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sr K who wrote (124591)	1/26/2012 10:07:02 AM
From: Keith Feral	Respond to of 213182

Many good point to ponder. I'm not a big fan of any kind of special dividend. Apple has $40 billion in US cash and the other $60 billion in foreign cash. I expect Apple will be growing foreign cash at a higher pace than US cash going forward with higher sales growth coming out of China for the next couple years. I think a stock split has to preceed a dividend, whatever the case. If Apple's tax rate went from 25% to 30% to pay a dividend, it wouldn't bother me in the least. I don't see anyone paying a 39% tax rate in the US, so I'm not too worried about that tax level. As for option charges, those don't worry me in the least. If the company does a split where people could actually afford to buy the shares at $50, stock trading would more than replace the reduction in options trading. It's amazing that Apple is only trading 11 million shares a day for the most sought after company in the world. Even a 5 for 1 split back to $100 would get the number of shares trading every day up to 55 million, which would be in line with MSFT's daily volume. Your comments about Iger are very interesting. Apple could always borrow a bunch of money very cheap to start paying a dividend too. That might reduce some of the tax issues that you talked about. Why not borrow $40 billion in 5 year notes at 2%? That would be an easy way for them to fund a dividend program they could easily repay. Apple can do just about anything they want.