Apple’s sitting on a considerable pile of cash — nearly $100 billion — and they’ve scheduled an early morning conference call to discuss what they plan to do with it. Word of their financial machinations happened to break before the call though, as a release from the Cupertino company just hit the wires stating that they intend to issue dividends to their shareholders as well as kick off a share repurchase program later this year.
“We have used some of our cash to make great investments in our business through increased research and development, acquisitions, new retail store openings, strategic prepayments and capital expenditures in our supply chain, and building out our infrastructure,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook. “Even with these investments, we can maintain a war chest for strategic opportunities and have plenty of cash to run our business.”
Apple expects to shell out $45 billion over the next three years for these programs, though Tim Cook notes that the company will periodically revisit their dividend and stock buyback efforts.
Apple plans to pay shareholders a quarterly dividend of $2.65 per share sometime in Q4 2012, which for Apple begins this July. In case you were wondering, the last time Apple paid dividends was in 1995 — a move that netted shareholders $0.12 per share.
On top of that, Apple’s Board of Directors gave their blessing for the company to buy back $10 billion of stock over the next three years. The repurchase program is slated to begin in September 2012, and is meant to help neutralize “the impact of dilution from future employee equity grants and employee stock purchase programs.”