Here’s What Apple is Doing with Its $100 Billion

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Here’s What Apple is Doing with Its $100 Billion

March 25th, 2012

FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda

$100 billion is a lot. It’s also a little more than Apple has on hand. According to Mashable’s Todd Wassermann, it’s more like $97.7 billion.

That’s still more than the U.S. Treasury had as of July, when Apple’s cash hoard was a mere $76.4 billion. And with two major product launches since then — the iPhone 4S and the new iPad — Apple has accumulated more raw cash reserves in a little under a year than the gross domestic product of Jamaica and Iceland combined.

Some, like the comic artists at Geek Culture, have facetiously (and not-so-facetiously) made suggestions for what Apple should do with all of the cash … like give free health care to all of Apple’s employees and customers or increase the pay of the Foxconn assembly line workers that make Apple products. Here’s what Apple is doing with it — what it has announced and what it is currently doing.

Executive compensation

Apple’s late CEO, Steve Jobs, famously drew a $1 salary for much of his career (despite having other perks such as over $1 billion in stock and a $90 million Gulfstream jet). His successor, Tim Cook, received a base salary of $900,000 plus over a third of a billion dollars’ worth of stock for 2011. He’s not able to cash most of his stock for a few years, though, to ensure he stays with the company.

Hoarding components and monopsonizing supply chains

Apple uses its cash hoard to buy hoards of components for its electronic gadgets. More than that, it buys the world’s stock of the most cutting-edge components and signs exclusivity agreements that prevent high-tech electronics manufacturers from making certain parts for anyone else.

Adam Satariano and Peter Burrows of Bloomberg Businessweek describe “Apple’s Supply-Chain Secret.” So far it has done things like monopsonize the world’s supply of lasers small enough to punch invisible holes through metal (to make the seemingly solid surface of a MacBook Pro light up), and buy up all of the holiday air freight space one year. A “monopsonist” is a sole buyer who controls a market, and Apple’s cash hoard allows it to pay more than anyone else can offer for anything that it needs, as CNN Money’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt explains.

Buying back shares and paying dividends

Starting in July, according to Reuters’ Poornima Gupta, Apple will start paying stockholders $2.65 per quarter per share. It will also begin buying back its own stock.

As John Gruber of Daring Fireball observes, Apple nearly has enough cash to take itself private right now, and to no longer be answerable to shareholders.

Jared Spurbeck is an open-source software enthusiast, who uses an Android phone and an Ubuntu laptop PC. He has been writing about technology and electronics since 2008.