Alphabet Overtakes Apple To Become Most Cash-Rich Company (theverge.com) 81
According to The Financial Times, Google's parent company Alphabet has overtaken Apple to become the most cash-rich company in the world. As of the second quarter of this year, Alphabet holds $117 billion in liquid reserves, compared to $102 billion net of debt, for Apple. The Verge reports: Despite the obvious benefits of hoarding so much cash, earning the title of "Cash Kings" might not give much cause for celebration. As the FT notes, such a conspicuous display of wealth could increase pressure from shareholders who'd like to see the company spend more of its money on share buybacks or dividends, and could lead to increased scrutiny from regulators concerned with Google's dominance. Google and its parent company have been hit with around $9.05 billion in antitrust fines by the EU in the past two years, and the company is also facing heavy scrutiny by U..S lawmakers.
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Hush now, troll. Everyone knows that Xerox gave those ideas away because they couldn't figure out how to profit from them. You'll get no traction here. Congrats, though, you've got the lowest uid of any troll I've seen yet.
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In Western societies, free spending of money is held equivalent to free speech (literally when used to amplify or extend speech). No polite person will criticize you for buying a sweater, a swimming pool, or talking trash about the Broncos' defensive line.
It's cute how you criticize people's speech here for talking trash about how Google spends its money. That's not enforcing a social norm, it's violational. One only crosses the line when raising violent action as a remedy - that's the France method, for
$117bn? $102bn? $9.5bn? (Score:2)
I know they're companies and not people. But seriously... In real life, most people deal with $1000, $10k, $100k in the bank. Billions does not belong to real life, that real people experience for real. There's a total disconnect between these people and us...
Re:$117bn? $102bn? $9.5bn? (Score:4, Insightful)
I know they're companies and not people. But seriously... In real life, most people deal with $1000, $10k, $100k in the bank. Billions does not belong to real life, that real people experience for real. There's a total disconnect between these people and us...
To put it in a slightly different perspective, $117 billion is about $30 per Internet user (worldwide).
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I know they're companies and not people. But seriously... In real life, most people deal with $1000, $10k, $100k in the bank. Billions does not belong to real life, that real people experience for real. There's a total disconnect between these people and us...
Corporations are people too my friend
-- Mitt Romney
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A typical person may accumulate wealth in the millions in order to retire. Alphabet has over 100000 employees. So why does a number that is generated by the combined effort of many people not belong in the world?
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It's better to think of it as a percentage.
GOOG has a market cap of 828 B. That means about 1/8th of their market cap is held in cash, not benefiting shareholders in any way. What a waste.
If GOOG can't find anything useful to do with the money, and it's increasingly clear they can't, they damn well need to return that money to shareholders. It's far past time GOOG started paying a meaningful dividend.
MSFT made that transition, to a "grown up company", many years ago now, and it's worked out well for them
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I know they're companies and not people.... There's a total disconnect between these people
You claimed to know the difference between companies (organizations that pool the resources of large numbers of people) and people... but I don't think you really do.
Did I miss something? (Score:2)
'such a conspicuous display of wealth could increase pressure from shareholders who'd like to see the company spend more of its money on share buybacks or dividends'
Isn't that something that is decided by the board of directors representing shareholders? And, seeing how they are the largest and first in the industry, wouldn't a large amount of cash be perfect for contingent liability issues, whatever they may be?
I hardly think anyone vested in the security would have an issue with too much
Re:Did I miss something? (Score:5, Informative)
Isn't that something that is decided by the board of directors representing shareholders?
Google/Alphabet has a capital structure that denies voting rights to most shareholders.
I hardly think anyone vested in the security would have an issue with too much cash.
The cash hoard inflates the price of the stock without adding to operating profits. So it causes the stock's performance to regress to the mean.
Google should either do a buyback, or invest more money in growth.
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My understanding was that they keep all that cash out of the US to avoid paying tax on it. You know, the usual "double Irish" tax dodge.
If anything should be done with their cash mountain, they should be paying the local taxes in the countries where they do business.
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they should be paying the local taxes in the countries where they do business.
They do pay local taxes.
What they don't pay is American tax on money earned in Europe, by European employees, selling goods and services to European customers.
Why should they?
As long as they don't move the money to America, they have no legal obligation to pay American tax on money that has nothing to do with America.
It is not Google's fault that America has stupid tax laws that incentivize companies to invest and create jobs elsewhere.
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While liquid assets for contingency is a sign of a healthy balance sheet, enormous cash reserves like this a more of a symptom of a business that no longer knows how to grow or innovate. Literally the best thing they can do is dump it into treasuries and other short-term investments because they're out of ideas for what to develop or invest in from a business perspective.
Personally I think that corporations whose cash-equivalent holdings exceed some threshold of the company's valuation should have those ho
Advertising is lucrative (Score:2)
McMann and Tate got nothing on Google.
Ads (Score:1)
Block the ads and enjoy your internet again.
Where are the words "Publicly Traded"? (Score:3)
The story FAILS to point out that the data is ONLY for publicly traded companies.
How much cash does Saudi Aramco [nytimes.com] have?
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How much cash does Saudi Aramco [nytimes.com] have?
Aramco does not hoard cash. They transfer it to Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's Sovereign Wealth Fund [wikipedia.org], which has assets of $320B USD.
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How much cash does Saudi Aramco [nytimes.com] have?
Very little. Oil companies generally do not horde cash and in general suffer to actually make cashflow. Being the most valuable and having cash is two different things.
Just look at publicly traded oil companies as a proxy. They have massive massive market caps, massive operating revenue, generate large operating cashflow ... and then re-invest most of it and pay out much of what is left as dividends.
If an oil company is hording cash they are outright stupid and will very quickly become irrelevant.
Already surpassed.... (Score:2)
Berkshire Hathaway has $122B in cash as of today's news.