With the new $2.65 a share quarterly dividend asnd a $10 billion three-year stock repurchase plan, the company will be giving back about $45 billion to shareholders over the next three years. But all of that will come from domestic cash. The company has $64 billion of its cash outside the country. But due to the large tax bill the company would face from repatriating the cash, it will continue to pile up outside the country until the tax law changes or Apple figures out something else to do with it.
Apple is one of a number of tech companies that have lobbied Congress for a change in the tax law to make it easier to bring some of the cash back into the country; Cisco CEO John Chambers has spoken out on this issue, which also affects Microsoft and Google, among other companies.
One option for the cash is to make acquisitions outside the country; Microsoft used overseas cash to buy Skype, and Cisco will use overseas cash for its recently announced $5 billion acquisition of the cable equipment provider NDS. Whether there are any companies outside the country that Apple might want to buy is not clear; there certainly aren't many things the company could buy outside the U.S. that would chew up a big chunk of the $64 billion already overseas.
Other options would be to expand facilities outside the country: they could build more retail stores, or add overseas data centers, or start building their own components. But the most likely scenario is for the cash to keep piling up, awaiting a change in the U.S. tax code.
AAPL this morning is up $11.12, or 1.9%, to $596.69.
