3 eye-opening news items from Apple’s big morning

Apple made a major announcement this morning about buying back stock and issuing dividends—but that’s not what caught our attention.

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The company issued a press release and held a conference call in which it announced plans to spend $45 billion of its $97 billion in cash and cash equivalents to buy back stock and issue a dividend to investors for the first time since 1995.

The announcement sparked major buzz in the media and social media, and it was fueled by a handful of note-worthy asides from the conference call. Here they are:

With its cash reserves, Apple could buy six major companies together. The Wall Street Journal‘s live blog of the conference call put Apple’s $97.6 billion of cash and cash equivalent in perspective:

“It’s enough to buy Dell, Yahoo, Motorola Mobility, Activision Blizzard, Best Buy and Netflix together, all at nearly a 10 percent premium.

“It’s more than twice Google Inc.’s cash of $44.6 billion at the end of the year.

“It exceeds the gross domestic product of more than two-thirds of the world’s countries.”

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