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Apple's $22.8 Billion in Executed Repurchases Set Another Record

The $22.8 billion-worth buybacks that Apple showered on shareholders is a record, according to a tally by S&P.

Apple's $22.8 Billion in Executed Repurchases Set Another Record
A person takes a photograph with an Apple Inc. iPhone of Cloudera Inc. (Photographer: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg)

(Bloomberg) -- The $22.8 billion that Apple Inc. showered on shareholders in the form of buybacks from January through March is a record, according to a tally by Standard & Poor’s.

Apple's $22.8 Billion in Executed Repurchases Set Another Record

Not that it’s anything new for the iPhone maker. Of the 20 biggest quarterly repurchases ever carried out by U.S. companies, nine were by Apple. The company’s repurchases in the period exceed the current market value of more than 270 firms in the S&P 500, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

Apple boosted its dividends from 63 to 73 cents a quarter, or $2.92 a year, implying an annual payout of $14.8 billion. That tops the $13.9 billion by Exxon Mobil as the largest by any publicly traded U.S. company, Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst at S&P, said in a note. Apple has decreased its shares by a fifth over the past four years as it increased its per-share earnings.

Apple's $22.8 Billion in Executed Repurchases Set Another Record

The stock is up 3.4 percent in post-market trading. The options market implies a 5.2 percent advance in the shares a day after the earnings report.

Apple's $22.8 Billion in Executed Repurchases Set Another Record

“It’s a great thing in the fact that they’re giving that capital back to shareholders in the way of a buyback and reducing those numbers of shares is just going to spread those earnings,” said Gary Bradshaw, a portfolio manager at Hodges Capital Management in Dallas, which owns about 250,000 shares of Apple for its clients. “That’s what I love to see in making an investment.”

--With assistance from Sarah Ponczek

To contact the reporters on this story: Elena Popina in New York at epopina@bloomberg.net, Lu Wang in New York at lwang8@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Chris Nagi at chrisnagi@bloomberg.net, Richard Richtmyer

©2018 Bloomberg L.P.