EXTRACT: It must be noted that 90 per cent of British share buybacks by value have been carried out by just 20 companies, led by Vodafone, BP and Shell, which between them spent £21 billion last year alone.
THE ARTICLE
May 19, 2007
Nick Hasell: Tempus
Last year may have set a record for share buybacks, but on the evidence of the past week British companies have lost none of their appetite for repurchasing their own stock.
Over the past five days alone, four FTSE 100 stalwarts, BT Group, Compass Group, Enterprise Inns and National Grid, have announced plans to mop up an additional £5.4 billion worth of their own shares. Given that corporate Britain is estimated to have spent £46 billion on buybacks in 2006, a heady 64 per cent increase on the previous year, declarations of intent to acquire a sum of more than one tenth that tally in a single week indicates that 2007 should be another banner year. Nor is this purely a domestic phenomenon. On Wall Street, the likes of ExxonMobil, GE, Goldman Sachs and Microsoft are mopping up their own shares with brio. S&P 500 companies are estimated to have bought back $110 billion (£55.6 billion) of stock in the first quarter of this year, on top of the $800 billion they have spent in the previous two years. read more
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