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  1. Business
30 April 2013updated 12 Oct 2023 10:40am

With a thirty-year bond yield, Apple enters corporate adulthood

Take off the pullover and put on a suit and tie – you aren't a tech stock anymore.

By Alex Hern

Last week saw Apple turning a final corner in its long development as a company. It is no longer just a tech stock – it’s now a boring old blue-chip.

During its quarterly earning earnings call, the company increased its dividend by 15 per cent (it will now pay $3.05 a share every quarter), boosted the size of its share buyback plan sixfold, to $60bn, and, most interestingly, announced a bond issue to pay for it all. The company now intends to return $100bn in total to its shareholders by the end of 2015.

Today, Apple filed its draft prospectus for the bond issue with the SEC, confirming the durations it will be borrowing for and the banks in charge. Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank will be jointly overseeing the issue, which is of sets of two floating rate notes, due in three and five years, and four fixed-rate notes, in durations of up to thirty years. That’s barely shorter than the entire lifespan of the company to date, making the investment a real punt in the dark for anyone buying into it.

We don’t yet know how much of each duration Apple is planning to borrow, nor – crucially – the rates they are offering. But the plan looks likely to have very little to do with the typical reasons for corporate borrowing: Apple still has an enormous pile of cash, which means that investment isn’t the name of the game.

Instead, the company appears to be using its extraordinary creditworthiness – as well as the ultra-low bond yields which are a sign of our times – to overcome an issue it has with that cash pile: most of it is kept overseas.

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The US only charges tax on cash which has been “repatriated”, so while Apple leaves money from overseas operations overseas, it doesn’t have to pay any tax on it. It’s waiting – as it has been for years, now – for a “repatriation holiday”, when it hopes a future government will temporarily lift that tax to encourage the companies to bring cash home. Until then, if it needs money domestically, borrowing is as good as any other method. And if its rates are low enough, it might even make a bit of money on the deal.

But with dividends, bond yields, and share buybacks, Apple has entered a new – and dull – stage in its corporate progression. These aren’t the actions of a high-growth tech stock; they’re those of a company bedding in for the long-haul. Apple expects to be here in thirty years, and still be largely the same when it is, and its asking investors to bank on that. Fun for them, but the white-knuckle days are over for us.

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