Apple's Cash Dilemma
aboveavalon.com
aboveavalon.com
I was hoping for a little more information on the reason Apple's foreign subsidiaries can't buy Apple stock without repatriation of funds (and whether or not this would require Apple shares to be tradeable on a foreign exchange), or what it would take for Apple to reincorporate where the money is as a way to eliminate the need to repatriate at all.
EDIT: For everyone who thinks Apple is somehow in the wrong for this, your energy would better be directed at getting the tax laws changed. Apple's board and management have a fiduciary responsibility to pay only the tax they actually owe.
This does not mean they have responsibilities to build as many legal (last I checked, my iPod was not designed by Apple in Ireland) fictions as possible to lower their tax burden.
Apple's corporate status does _not_ absolve them of the ethics of their decision.
That said, getting the laws changed would be more useful.
How? Who among us can outspend lobbyists from the corporations?
But yeah I was surprised it wasn't all in the United States. Perhaps I'm just naive.
Well, it is a publicly traded company that has
to do what's best for its bottom line
“When we work on making our devices accessible
by the blind, I don’t consider the bloody ROI,”
Cook said, adding that the same sentiment
applied to environmental and health and safety
issues.
They can spend money on features that have a shitty ROI (like color blindness features) and still not want to waste money on taxes that don't need to get paid (movement of money across borders leading to taxes).
I'll hate on Apple all day, every day... but it would be stupid not to use the loopholes in the system - if selling something overseas and keeping the money overseas is a "Loophole" because selling a phone in China doesn't give the US taxes on that sale...
I'm also all about USA and holding my stars and stripes with pride... but it is down right stupid that a company can't make money over seas and then bring the money back without a massive hit - and 35% is a massive hit on money not made in the USA.
If everyone plays by the same rules, great! But that isn't the case, because not every company is American.
That's a laugher. All of this financial chicanery neither impacts Apple's ability to compete nor drives its share price.
If Samsung (a Korean company) can sell devices in other countries while shifting profits (already taxed in those countries, BTW) between them freely, not having to pay additional tax to take the money back to Korea first (which they wouldn't, but that is another story), isn't that a huge advantage for them?
Why do you want Apple to play by rules that are different from Samsung? Why should Apple pay more tax than Samsung on profits for a phone sold in...China (barring reasonable taxes on value added by R&D where the R&D was done, which almost every country has).
In the past, we've had tax holidays were they made it a bit cheaper, seems sensible to wait and hope it happens again.
Alternately, they could buy companies overseas. It's obviously going to be hard to invest that much money, but if they can find interesting options it'd be a much better use of the money than paying a really high tax.
If they wanted to bring $100B back, they would pay up to $35B (the use repatriation fee - minus the foreign taxes). So they really only managed to bring back ~$65B, that was created largely overseas, just for moving an asset across international borders. That is a sensible thing, to just toss away the valuation of Uber, to bring money into the US?
Legally fine, but it is not sensible.
Realize that Apple could theoretically spin these foreign cash-holding subsidiaries off into independent entities that will never pay any taxes to the United States. Apple has no moral or legal obligation to bring the money home other than the duty to shareholders to realize returns - and that same duty is the one that has them avoiding paying more tax than necessary.
Also, consider that in the case of a tax holiday, Apple will pay an optimum amount of tax (i.e. the maximum amount Congress believes it can charge while still bringing foreign cash home), and then repurchase programs will increase share prices, which will lead to sales of stock which will incur capital gains taxes from domestic shareholders. So, the United States treasury will be receiving more than just the repatriation tax. If Apple repatriated cash at a higher tax rate, they would repurchase fewer shares, leading to a lower price and fewer domestic sales of stock.
You have two bank accounts, only in this example they're different currencies. One in Pesos, one in Francs. Let's make things easy and pretend that 1 Peso is worth 1 Franc.
Your customers pay in the currency they have. Lots of people pay in you Pesos, but some pay you in Francs. So after a while you have 100 P but only 20 F.
Now most of your bills have to be paid in F. You have some you can pay in P but the money comes in fast enough that will never run dry. Unfortunately the F account may not be so steady between paychecks and you may overdraft. If that happens people with pitchforks will come after you. You need to do something to make sure that you always have enough in the F account.
So there are two obvious options. You can move some of your Pesos over to Francs, but there is a BIG FEE for transferring to that account. You'd like to move 80 Pesos over, but after the fee you only get 40 P in your account. So instead of 100 P and 20 F (for 120 units, since it's a 1:1 exchange) you have 20 P and 60 F (for only 80 units). You can still pay all your bills, but you just lost 1/3 of your money and now your spouse is mad at you.
Or you could do something else. You could take out a loan in Francs when your balance gets low so you can pay your bills until more F come in. Banks are happy to lend you F because you have a nice house and plenty of P and they have a lot of money to lend right now. You have to pay interest, but that's like 5 F so it's not a big deal. Do things this way and in the end you have 100 P + 15 F (a total of 115 units of value) so you've only lost about 4% of your total net worth and you were still able to pay your bills on time.
Did that help? After reading it back over I get the feeling I just spent 10+ minutes but it's not going to clear things up for people.
Here is a maybe a stupid idea, what if they just keep investing in a new company in the US with their offshore money, and then Apple buy the company for $1? what about buying lands? Can they keep more foreign money with lower tax rate that way?
My understanding is that they'd have to repatriate any money they use towards this effort.
Sorry if this is obvious but just want to clarify this for myself: Do you plan to pay back the entirety of the loan, with interest with the account in French Francs? If not, aren't you just delaying the inevitable? If yes, is there any reason to keep the peso account locked up (for lack of a better term) in liquid assets? Perhaps you'd be better served by taking risks with that money?
It's not delaying "the inevitable". It's delaying until there is tax reform, hopefully with better conditions e.g. lower tax rates. Laws are made by humans, after all.
Of course. You earn more than enough Francs to cover your expenses; it's just cheaper to borrow money right now than to convert from Pesos.
> If yes, is there any reason to keep the peso account locked up (for lack of a better term) in liquid assets? Perhaps you'd be better served by taking risks with that money?
The problem is precisely that: there's no good place to put that much money. Apple literally can't think of enough things to put all that money to use. Interest inflation rates are pretty low, so keeping it in TBills or whatever isn't really hurting them.
That at least, is my understanding.
I'm curious what they'll end up doing with all of that foreign cash. Are the options outlined in this article realistic / the best or only choices? Are there other possibilities?
People talk about foreign cash as if it somehow belongs back in America. But if you are Chinese, you definitely wouldn't see it that way (Apple makes more money selling iPhones in China, why does that money need to go the US? Ridiculous!).
Building and running factories in China with the money it is making from Chinese consumers seems a more prudent choice than paying a chunk of US taxes so it can do share buy-backs?
This is not without precedent in other industries; owning the entire vertical would be hugely advantageous from a strategic perspective.
So yeah, it's time for Apple to pay for its 35% share in funding the above items.
In the end, Might secures your rights. Freedom against someone subjecting their rule over you and how your domestic businesses are able to operate internationally is paid for with having the biggest guns.
Every first world country has court systems, copyright laws, and many of them are more respected than we are. Samsung likely benefits as much as apple does for any of these things and yet they don't pay US taxes on sales in China. They only pay US taxes on sales in the U.S.
You don't need a military until the one day you do.
And come on, you know what I'm talking about with respect to force projection and protection of assets.
2. If that did happen, we'd be in a world war, and I'm guessing that would lower iPhone sales and nobody would much care about repatriation taxes.
3. Every other country in the world has the same concerns of incredibly far fetched ideas as this, and yet they don't take 35% for protection money. In your world the U.S. Govt sounds a bit like the mafia. I'm not sure that's how it's supposed to work.
Now, you want to take money that's already been taxed elsewhere and return it to the US, subjecting it to further tax. Why? As I said, they've already paid taxes here in the good ol' USA.
Probably more importantly, the foreign profits are disproportionately gains baised on research and development conducted in the US which the foreign subsidiaries pay no royalty for at all.
If, for instance, 50% of the value of an iPhone sold in China represents the value of the engineering of the device, we have a tax loss which adds up to half of the nearly $200 Billion held as foreign profits by Apple.
Apple should be forced to pay these taxes. This represents a real and tangible loss to the people in the US and an unnecessary subsidy handed to the most valuable public company on earth.
You really can't start dictating the terms of contract agreements between domestic and foreign entities with regard to "royalties" or other such payments. It would adversely affect any other companies as well that are not subsidiaries. And before you attempt to limit the rules to "subsidiaries" consider that although "Apple Ireland" is somehow affiliated with "Apple, Inc" in the US, they are wholly separate companies with a contract to behave in certain ways. Should Apple Ireland, being a separate company, decide to 'go rogue' breaking the contract and doing whatever they will with all 'their' money, they just get cut off from the Apple, Inc ecosystem and a new entity is created that will play the game correctly.
So how do you force "Apple, Inc" which is a separate company from all the other "Apple $PLACE" around the world to pay tax on money that, legally, it doesn't have ... without also adversely affecting any number of smaller companies that couldn't possibly bear such a tax burden?
What is 10% of 100 billion? 10 billion.
10 billion is more than 0 dollars, so it makes sense. 0 is what they will get if the keep the rate the same as it is now.
>If the IRS is going to give Apple a tax holiday, can they give me a tax holiday too?
That sure would be nice, I wouldn't mind one. That being said, we don't have billions of dollars to offer, and it's unlikely we have money overseas that needs repatriated.
Let Apple continue to deplete its US reserves until it MUST start repatriating the cash. If they want to be part of the USA, then pay the taxes in the USA.
Alternatively borrow money for the buybacks from their own foreign subsidiaries either at zero percent or very low or at prime and then default?