Just two weeks after it reported its fiscal Q1 2014 results — which set records in many areas but disappointed iPhone-focused investors — Apple CEO Tim Cook has revealed in an interview that the company has repurchased another $14 billion of its own stock , on top of over $40 billion spent on buybacks over the past year. Some $12 billion of the new purchase was part of the regular buyback program, with another $2 billion bought separately on the open market.
Cook told the Wall Street Journal that he was “surprised” by the eight-percent decline in the company’s shares following its Q1 results. Though sales in nearly all areas had grown ahead of the industry as a whole, iPhone sales did not quite meet analysts projections — even though Cook took pains to point out that some deferred revenue from sales meant that it actually did move about the number of units expected. Investors were also spooked by lower-than-expected forecasts for the current quarter, in which it was thought the first results of the China Mobile deal might offset normally-lower Q2 revenues.
In an interview with the newspaper, Cook said that the company has now returned more than $40 billion to investors through the share buyback program in just the past 12 months (and an apparent total of some $55 billion through the program since its inception) — the largest amount ever spent on repurchasing stock over such a short time period. Apple had originally committed to buying back a total of $60 billion in shares by 2015, but expanded the goal to $100 billion following pressure from some investors.
Activist investor Carl Icahn, who has been trying to get Apple to buy back an additional $50 billion in its own shares on top of the expanded program and is bringing a proposal on the matter to the shareholder’s meeting at the end of this month, told the paper he was pleased with the unexpectedly aggressive acceleration of the buyback program. Cook said he was “really confident on what we are doing and what we plan to do,” and Icahn replied “so am I” when asked for comment. Icahn currently holds about $4 billion in AAPL at present.
