At some point it becomes a liability. The reason is that it can be used to 'take over' Apple. It works like this:
Company has a stock price of $X and lets say a billion outstanding shares. Giving it a 'market cap' of $X * 1e9 or $x billion dollars. It has cash or cash equivalents of $Y billion.
If you try to buy control of the company by buying up all the shares is costs more than $X billion because as you buy shares the price will go up. But you can mitigate that by borrowing up to Y billion dollars that you will 'pay back' by looting the coffers and paying it back.
Now as long as your share price stays high, this is not a huge threat, but there are many, many examples of high tech companies whose share price was very high at one point, and nearly worthless a short while later. Look at Sun as an example $60 -> $1 in the course of about 4 years. So if you price plummets precipitously and you can't 'get rid' of your excess cash, well you end up on some corporate raider's dessert plate.
But corporate raiding aside (while it makes for great drama its not the best reason) the money in 'cash' isn't doing anything for Apple. Its not researching some useful thing, optimizing some operational expense, reducing risk or eliminating barriers to future growth.
Sure having "enough" cash is very important, but having "too much" can be dangerous, foolish, or both.
Company has a stock price of $X and lets say a billion outstanding shares. Giving it a 'market cap' of $X * 1e9 or $x billion dollars. It has cash or cash equivalents of $Y billion.
If you try to buy control of the company by buying up all the shares is costs more than $X billion because as you buy shares the price will go up. But you can mitigate that by borrowing up to Y billion dollars that you will 'pay back' by looting the coffers and paying it back.
Now as long as your share price stays high, this is not a huge threat, but there are many, many examples of high tech companies whose share price was very high at one point, and nearly worthless a short while later. Look at Sun as an example $60 -> $1 in the course of about 4 years. So if you price plummets precipitously and you can't 'get rid' of your excess cash, well you end up on some corporate raider's dessert plate.
But corporate raiding aside (while it makes for great drama its not the best reason) the money in 'cash' isn't doing anything for Apple. Its not researching some useful thing, optimizing some operational expense, reducing risk or eliminating barriers to future growth.
Sure having "enough" cash is very important, but having "too much" can be dangerous, foolish, or both.