A "spin-in" is a form of R&D in which a company is the sole investor in a startup. It sends a team of employees off to build an experimental product and then buys that startup for a predetermined and very healthy price.
Cisco has spent on average $763 million to acquire each spin-in that these three men have founded, even though Cisco was also the sole investor in each.
https://www.businessinsider.in/why-cisco-has-showered-these-...
I don't know about you, but that seems likely to be an excessively inflated figure to me (a la the dot-com bubble.)
Comparing any company's value to its valuation during the dot-com bubble seems silly to me.
Functionally speaking when a company issues a dividend of $x the stock price S will drop to S-x on the ex dividend date. This makes sense as the company now has $x less per share. The shareholder is at a wash as well. They had S before and now they have S-x+x. No value was created, money was simply moved.
Given the above you can more or less value dividends using discounted cash flow. A ~3% dividend is CSCO’s case isn’t worth paying more (increasing the share price over) on its own because the cash used to buy the shares is worth ~5.5% today according to the risk free rate.
In fact if one were considering the dividend alone then the company should be worth less. Obviously factoring in future growth, etc… the market has landed on the current price.
This will be wrong but true enough to make my point; With a market cap today of ~$215 billion, had CSCO not paid out dividends, their market cap would be $215 billion that represents current cash and the discounted value of future cash + the $54 billion that would also be in cash -- for a total of $269 billion. That's enough to add ~$15 to their share price.