Carl Icahn Buys Another $500 Million of Apple Shares, Posts Letter to Shareholders

Carl Icahn tweeted yesterday that he felt the Apple's Board was doing a great disservice to shareholders by not increasing the company's buyback program. Today, Icahn noted he bought another $500 million shares of Apple stock, bringing the total investment to $3.6 billion.

Bought another $500mil of $AAPL tday, bringing our total to $3.6 billion. If board doesn’t see AAPL’s ‘no brainer’ value we sure do.

Today we have put out a seven page letter to $AAPL shareholders discussing why buyback should be markedly increased:


In October, investor Carl Icahn has posted an open letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook urging him to increase Apple's stock buyback to $150 billion. Today, Icahn posted a seven page letter discussing why Apple share holders should push for an increased buyback program.

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Dear Fellow Apple Shareholders,

Over the course of my long career as an investor and as Chairman of Icahn Enterprises, our best performing investments result from opportunities that we like to call "no brainers." Recent examples of such “no brainers” have been our investments in Netflix, Hain Celestial, Chesapeake, Forest Labs and Herbalife, just to name a few. In our opinion, a great example of a “no brainer” in today’s market is Apple. The S&P 500’s price to earnings multiple is 71% higher than Apple’s, and if Apple were simply valued at the same multiple, its share price would be $840, which is 52% higher than its current price. This is a dramatic valuation disconnect that simply makes no sense to us, and it seems that the company agrees with us on this point. Tim Cook himself has expressed on more than one occasion that Apple is undervalued, and as the company states, it already has in place “the largest share repurchase authorization in history.” We believe, however, that this share repurchase authorization can and should be even larger, and effectuating that for the benefit of all of the company’s shareholders is the sole intention of our proposal. The company has recommended voting against our proposal for various reasons. It seems to us that the basis of its argument against our proposal is that the company believes, because of the “dynamic competitive landscape” and because its “rapid pace of innovation require[s] unprecedented investment, flexibility and access to resources”, it does not currently have enough excess liquidity to increase the size of its repurchase program. Assuming this indeed is the basis for the company’s argument, we find its position overly conservative (almost to the point of being irrational), when we consider that the company had $130 billion of net cash as of September 28, 2013 and that consensus earnings are expected to be almost $40 billion next year. Given this massive net cash position and robust earnings generation, Apple is perhaps the most overcapitalized company in corporate history, from our perspective. Regardless of what liquidity it may require with respect to “unprecedented investment, flexibility and access to resources” for innovation moving forward, we believe the unprecedented degree to which the company is currently overcapitalized would overcompensate for any such investments (including possible investments in strategic M&A, to which the company does not refer). Said another way, we believe that the combination of the company’s unprecedentedly enormous net cash balance, robust annual earnings, and tremendous borrowing capacity provide more than enough excess liquidity to afford both the use of cash for any necessary ongoing business-related investments in addition to the cash used for the increased share repurchases proposed.

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You can read the entire letter at the link below...

Apple is expected to hold their Fiscal Q1 earnings call on this Monday, January 27. Be sure to follow iClarified on Twitter, Facebook, or RSS to be informed on future updates.


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