Apple becomes richest tech company

SAN FRANCISCO: Apple Inc Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer faces a dilemma that perhaps every finance chief wishes to have: obscene amounts of cash and nowhere to put it.

The iPhone, iPad, iPod and Mac computer maker has accumulated a cash pile that totals nearly $46 billion, the biggest cash hoard among US tech companies and equivalent to one-fifth of Apple's market capitalization.

And yet, due to an ultra-conservative investment strategy and low interest rates, that cash is earning next to nothing for Apple, which rarely makes acquisitions and does not pay a regular dividend or buy back stock.

"Oppenheimer probably has the most enviable CFO job on the planet," joked Creative Strategies analyst Tim Bajarin, who has been following Apple since the early 1980s.

Analysts say Apple's near-death experience in the 1990s helps explain why it likes to remain liquid by investing in safe but low-yielding US Treasury and agency debt. The company earned a mere 0.76 per cent on its cash and investments in its most recent quarter, down from 1.43 per cent in fiscal 2009, 3.44 per cent in 2008 and 5.27 per cent in 2007.

Despite these low returns, Apple does not face much pressure these days to put its cash to better use. Any dissenting investors are probably appeased by the meteoric rise in the company's share price, which has tripled since 2007.

"When a company is growing as fast as Apple, cash management is pretty far back in people's thoughts," said Pacific Crest Securities analyst Andy Hargreaves.

"But that'll change at some point," he added, estimating that Apple's cash could hit a cool $65 billion by the end of fiscal 2011 if the company continued to generate free cash flow at the current pace. For now, Oppenheimer has a mantra that he repeats on every quarterly earnings conference call: He tells Wall Street that Apple's investment priority is the "preservation of capital" with a focus on "short-dated, high-quality investments."

Bajarin said Oppenheimer's cautious approach dates from his time at Automatic Data Processing Inc, but Apple's conservatism is also driven by Chief Executive Steve Jobs. Both Jobs, 55, and Oppenheimer, 47, subscribe to the Silicon Valley maxim that "only the paranoid survive," he said.

They remember the dark days when Apple was struggling to stay alive and had to lay off thousands to cut costs. When Oppenheimer joined the company in 1996 as its controller for the Americas, a series of bad management decisions had eroded profits and sent its share price diving to less than $5. Things got so bad that one of the first things Jobs did when he returned to Apple was take a lifeline in the form of a $150 million investment from Microsoft Corp in 1997. REUTERS