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Apple Gives Employees $2,500 Bonuses After New Tax Law (bloomberg.com)
Apple told employees that it's issuing a bonus of $2,500 of restricted stock units, following the introduction of the new U.S. tax law. "The iPhone maker will begin issuing grants to most employees worldwide in the coming months," reports Bloomberg. Apple also announced today that it would bring back most of its cash from overseas and spend $30 billion in the U.S. over the next five years. From the report: Apple confirmed the bonuses in response to a Bloomberg inquiry Wednesday. The Cupertino, California-based company joins a growing list of American businesses that have celebrated the introduction of corporate-friendly tax law with one-time bonuses for staff. AT&T, Comcast, JetBlue, and Wal-Mart also said they were giving bonuses.
Can any corporate finance experts explain why companies would do this? Should we buy that they're just being generous/trying to foster goodwill?
The combined income of the employees walmart has laid off since that announcement substantially dwarfs the "bonus" offered. The "bonus" was to people who had worked for Walmart for at least 20 years, btw. A pretty sad group.
Calling Bullshit on this. Bullshit!
Of course you could cite credible sources and prove your case.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
There are a million reasons I can think of.
If all you can do is ascribe selfish reasons to any action, then here is one for you - with some many companies having more money to spend, there were be a lot more poaching of workers going on, and companies are trying to head defection off at the pass by fostering goodwill among employees.
But again only for absolutely selfish reasons, could not be they are just passing along some good fortune to those that helped them get where they are.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Ask me how I know you've gone mental with liberal hate.
Ok, here's how I know - because the story is about APPLE. not WALMART.
APPLE just announced they are hiring 200k employees over the next five years and spending tens of billions more in the US, since they can finally bring money back from overseas. There are no layoffs.
Meanwhile in completely unrelated news WALMART is just one of many companies giving out bonuses, that just happens to also be laying off some workers. That does not change the benefit of what they are doing for the workers. Nor even does it recognize the reality of a company like Walmart being so large they have different cost centers...
There are many, many companies giving out bonuses and most of them are not doing layoffs. That they are giving out bonuses is mostly a good sign they will be hiring soon.
You seriously need to re-think your life at this point, four more years of good news will literally eat your brain and leave you destitute and unable to cope with life. Why would good news do that to anyone? Don't let it happen to you man.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
So I read the linked article, and I couldn't help but notice that the only thing joining the tax law and Apple's bonuses was temporal proximity. The author conspicuously chooses to use words like "after" and "following the introduction of," assiduously avoiding the more concrete "because of." The author also doesn't attribute anything the company actually stated to the tax law, citing instead some phoney-baloney hogwash about "confidence in Apple’s future."
In fact, if you read the text of the email sent by Tim Cook to Apple employees, you don't see mention of tax policy anywhere--which is weird, seeing as Bloomberg puts "New Tax Law" right in the headline.
It's almost as if Bloomberg.com were blowing smoke up our collective asses and calling it an invigorating Goop.com vapor colonic.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
More probably than not they're just trying to get all the EU profits they didn't pay any taxes on back home as quickly as possible on now after the EU knows about this after someone blew the whistle on their illegal and secret deal with the Irish.
"Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it."
So you're a big company, and you don't want trouble from the government. Of course you're going to do something, if you can, to make yourself look good!
But notice how all these announcements are about bonuses, not pay raises. A bonus is just a one-time event, pay raises keep on giving, month after month. These companies aren't really putting their money where their mouth is, they just want to make a splash in the news.
And they call that a bonus?
I'll bet the execs get unrestricted stock.
Same BS, different decade.
I was an engineer in the 90s and got stock options the day my company went public. The tee shirt I got on that day ended up worth more than the stock.
If it isn't cash, it's worthless. Don't accept this BS in lieu of money or even actual stock. It's a PR gimmick.