If Apple’s year had a theme, it was the year the company finally started to chip away at that colossal hoard of cash. After a little nudging by activist investor Carl Icahn, Apple boosted its share-buyback program in April to $90 billion and increased the pace of capital returns. New data from FactSet show that Apple has been the biggest buyback spender of 2014 among the S&P 500, pouring more than $56 billion into the program on a trailing 12-month basis as of the end of the third quarter.
This year, Apple spent three times more investing in itself than the next closest company in the S&P 500, totaling $56 billion on stock buybacks in fiscal 2014. Apple’s total buyback efforts for the fiscal year were calculated by FactSet, and highlighted by MarketWatch on Friday. The $56 billion spent by Apple well exceeded second-place S&P 500 finisher IBM Corp, which used $19.2 billion on buybacks. In the last quarter alone, Apple spent a massive $17 billion on stock buybacks. When that sum was revealed in October, it was estimated that Apple had spent $45 billion on repurchasing stock in fiscal 2014, but the latest data from FactSet shows Apple went even beyond that. In fact, Apple also owns the top two buyback quarters ever in the S&P 500 tracked by FactSet, since it began measuring the data in 2005. The $17 billion Apple repurchased last quarter is second only to the $18.6 billion it bought in the first quarter of fiscal 2014.
