Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) held its annual shareholder meeting on Wednesday, and CEO Tim Cook didn’t have much to say about the company’s cash hoard. All he would say is that they were “seriously considering” the best way to return some of Apple’s $137 billion cash hoard to investors.
David Einhorn strongly believes the company should issue perpetual preferred stock, or iPrefs, as he called it, to return some of its cash to shareholders. Einhorn and Greenlight Capital won the case they filed against the tech giant in relation to Proposal #2. However Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) faces few repercussions from that loss. It simply removed the proposals from the shareholder vote and held the question and answer part of the meeting.
Some experts believe the company won’t take the iPrefs proposal Einhorn presented last week, and if Tim Cook’s demeanor at Wednesday’s shareholder meeting is any indication of how the rest of the company feels about Einhorn, they’re probably right.
Quartz reported that when Cook was asked about Einhorn at Wednesday’s meeting, he dismissed the question. He has called Einhorn’s lawsuit “a silly sideshow,” but he assured investors that he didn’t believe the “issue of returning cash to shareholders is silly.” The issue of Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL)’s cash was then dropped, and no formal action was taken on it.
MarketWatch reported that New York State Comptroller Thomas Napoli stepped into the fray on Wednesday, issuing a statement saying that his office was “disappointed” that the company did not have a proposal to return some of its huge $137 billion cash stash to shareholders. Thomas Napoli is the New York State Common Retirement Fund’s trustee, and the fund holds almost 3 million shares of Apple, which adds up to about $1.3 billion.
We will have to wait for more information from Apple to find out more what its capital allocation strategy is.