Regions

Analysts always state that the tech titan, Apple Inc., needed to utilize its growing cash heap on major purchases. Yahoo bought Tumblr for US$1.1 billion. Google spent up to US$1 billion on its latest Waze acquisition. However, Fortune's Philip Elmer-DeWitt pointed out that Apple outspent the other leading tech corporations by a massive margin. He said that last quarter, Apple acquired Apple.

"By my calculation, the company spent US$16 billion last quarter (US$4 billion in cash, US$12 billion through the so-called accelerated share repurchase program) to purchase 36 million of its own shares at an average price of just over US$444," Elmer-DeWitt noted. He wrote that with the similar amount of money, Apple could have purchased Nokia. Also, it could have spent one third of the amount to buy BlackBerry.

Last April, Apple reported that it boosted its huge program on stock buyback by US$50 billion. A new regulatory filing said that around 22 million of the recently reacquired stocks were retired last quarter. The figure would leave Apple with the remaining 908 million stocks. The rest would be retired during the current quarter.