Corporations should only return cash to investors (via dividend or stock buyback) if they do not have a high yield way to invest the money internally. A large stock buyback is the corporation admitting they do not have good uses for the cash. If Intel would take these grants, tax credits, and low interest loans and turn around and increase their dividend or do a large stock buyback then this would be a simple wealth transfer from the US to Intel stock owners. Even without this cash flow, these large grants feels like this unfairly benefits Intel shareholders at the expense of US Tax payers.
Intel's last stock buyback was in Q1 2021, which was $2.4B. There were $14B in buybacks in 2020 [0].
I'm not sure if this was your intent, but it sounds like you're describing the world as it actually works.
Companies execute stock BuyBacks when they don't have better internal Investments, and that's a good thing!
Intel doesn't care about more us-based Fabs, nor are they high yield. This is why the US government has to pay them if the US government wants those things to exist.
> I'm not sure if this was your intent, but it sounds like you're describing the world as it actually works.
This was in fact my intent.
I would just like to highlight there are alternative ways besides grants to encourage Intel to open US based manufacturing. Ultimately it's the tax payer that is funding this grant, so it's important they feel like they are getting a good deal. I think it's also telling that Intel didn't invest the $8.5B themselves when they clearly had the cash just a few years ago.
1. It's telling because if Intel thought this was a good investment then they would have made it without the grants. The stock buybacks show they had the cash to do it recently.
2. Alternatives to giving grants: Tax credits, low interest loans, import duty, law, executive action, threaten anti-trust lawsuit, purchasing shares, leverage intelligence agencies, nationalize. The most straightforward way would be to extend the regulations around exporting critical technologies to make it unfeasible for new chips to be manufactured overseas. There's pros/cons for all choices.
To me, unless a company is Nvidia, a stock buyback screams “we have no vision for the company’s long-term growth, let’s just prop up our options/shares for short term personal gain”.
That said, I’m not a fan of pointless acquisitions either…
Would executives actually do buybacks if they didn’t have company shares? I suspect not!
At the same time, a company shouldn’t get to underpay employees, do layoffs, and stock buybacks all in the same year…
> Corporations should only return cash to investors (via dividend or stock buyback) if they do not have a high yield way to invest the money internally.
*It should be noted that this is true due to the tax code rather than some underlying economic principle. Dividends are taxable whereas reinvesting is a tax deduction.
Intel's last stock buyback was in Q1 2021, which was $2.4B. There were $14B in buybacks in 2020 [0].
[0] https://www.intc.com/stock-info/dividends-and-buybacks