It is good to be the (rich) prince

Nick Wingfield has an article in The New York Times about way too much money:

Apple has finally decided what to do with its cash hoard of nearly a hundred billion dollars.
The company issued an unusual media alert on Sunday evening, saying it planned to announce on Monday morning the long-awaited outcome to a discussion by its board about what to do with its cash balance. It will announce its plans in a conference call at 9 a.m. Eastern time.
Apple, which recently released the newest version of its iPad, said it would not provide any information about how its business was going in the current quarter, restricting the discussion with reporters to questions about its cash.
Apple, based in Cupertino, California, is widely expected to announce a plan to issue a continuing dividend to its shareholders. As its cash has piled up, Wall Street analysts and investors have begun to call more loudly for Apple to return some of it to shareholders as dividends. Although having too much cash is rarely seen as a burden for a company, Apple earns less than one percent in interest on the cash, which many investors view as wasteful.
Until recently, Apple had resisted pressure to issue a dividend, a practice often associated with mature companies that have settled into slower rates of sales and earnings growth.
While it is more than three and a half decades old, Apple has been on a growth spurt that is highly unusual for a company of its age. The success of new products like the iPhone and iPad has propelled both revenue and profits; during the holiday quarter, for example, the company more than doubled its profit from the same period in the prior year.
Apple issued shareholder dividends earlier in its history, stopping in December of 1995.
Since Apple’s current chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, took over last fall, he and other executives have signaled their willingness to consider a plan for the company’s cash other than letting it accumulate. For months, Apple executives have said they were in discussions with the company’s board members about developing such a plan.
Steve Dowling, an Apple spokesman, declined to comment about Apple’s plans before the conference call on Monday.
A. M. Sacconaghi Jr., an analyst with Bernstein Research, said one challenge Apple faced was that its stock had appreciated so much that some growth fund managers were bumping into limits on how concentrated their funds can be in any single stock. Sacconaghi said that issuing a dividend could help Apple appeal to new types of value investors. He said that a recent increase in Apple shares had partly been caused by more of those value investors’ buying the stock in anticipation of a dividend. “It will attract a broader class of investor,” he said.
It is possible Apple could announce other plans for its cash, including an acquisition of another company, though Apple has never made a multibillion-dollar acquisition. Apple could also use its cash to buy back shares from investors, but that is a technique often used by companies trying to raise their earnings per share, something Apple does not need to do. Sacconaghi said a share buyback would be less helpful to Apple, since its earnings were already growing so quickly.
While Apple ended last year with a cash balance of $97.6 billion, it cannot easily gain access to most of that for a dividend because roughly 66 percent of the money is held by its foreign subsidiaries. To bring that cash back to the United States, Apple would have to pay hefty repatriation taxes, very likely more than thirty percent.
That leaves it with about $34 billion in cash in the United States. In a recent report, Sacconaghi estimated that Apple could issue a 2.5 percent annual dividend to shareholders without touching its cash in the United States, financing the payout entirely from new cash it generates from its business operations. At Apple’s current share price of $585.57, that would amount to a dividend of $14.64 a year for every share.
If Apple wanted to pay a higher dividend, Sacconaghi said, the most attractive option for the company could be to raise tens of billions of dollars in debt at current low rates. That would give it the ability to pay a sizable dividend for years while waiting for a possible change in American laws that could allow it to bring its foreign cash back home without big taxes.

Rico says it's a nice problem for Apple to have but, since all his shares went in the divorce, it's only of academic importance to him personally...