As promised during Apple’s most recent earnings call , the Cupertino, California headquartered consumer electronics powerhouse is set to open on Monday at $92.22 a share as the company puts forth its plan to split stock, its fourth stock split to date.
All common stock owners will receive six additional shares for each share in existence. As a result, the value of each individual share will drop accordingly, but the value of their total holdings will not. Read on for the full reveal…
Apple’s opening price of approximately $92.22 per share this morning compares favorably to its all-time high of $705.07 in September 2012 and last Friday’s closing price of $645 per share.
How’s so? Well, dividing $705 by seven yields about $100.72 so $92.22 per share post-split isn’t too shabby. AAPL is up 46 percent year-over-year.
As The Wall Street Journal [1] rather succinctly summed it up, “nothing’s changed about the business, and Apple remains the world’s most valuable company by market capitalizationâ€.
Bloomberg TV investigates whether the split sets the stock on the path to the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
Among the possible reasons for the stock split:
• Apple said it wanted to make stock “more accessible†for everyone. Splitting the stock makes individual shares more affordable to a wider range of customers.
• The company wants to see itself included in price-weighted indices, namely the Dow Jones Industrial Average index where such Silicon Valley giants as Cisco, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, AT&T and Verizon are being traded.
• More investment, as Apple potentially gets listed on major indices.
• Reset expectations by breaking from the past. AAPL has had a rough ride since its September 2012 all-time high and investors have slammed Tim Cook, blaming the drop on Apple’s lack of new product categories. By splitting the stock in seven equal parts, AAPL now trades at $92 per share so estimates of Apple’s future performance can’t draw parallels to pre-split stock performance.
It’s worth pointing out that Apple’s share repurchase program has resulted in a sharp reduction of the number of shares outstanding, dropping from 899.7 million in the fourth quarter of 2012 down to 861.4 million in the second quarter 2014, as explained by Philip Elmer-DeWitt of Fortune [2] .
In addition to this 7-to-1 stock split, Apple put in effect 2-for-1 splits in 1987, 2000 and 2005. Since its December 1980 IPO price of $22 per share, Apple’s stock would give a return of roughly 23,400 percent over the period of 33 years (taking into account the aforementioned splits).
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