Apple Inc. is selling $17 billion of bonds in the biggest U.S. corporate offering on record.
Apple is issuing $3 billion of floating-rate notes and $14 billion of fixed-rate securities in six parts with maturities from three to 30 years, according to a person familiar with the offering.
Proceeds might help the company avoid repatriation taxes on its $102.3 billion of funds held overseas as CEO Tim Cook returns an additional $55 billion to shareholders through 2015 to compensate for a stock that's been hammered by signs of slowing growth.
“You'll see a meaningful amount of interest,” Ashish Shah, head of global credit investment at AllianceBernstein, which oversees $256 billion in fixed-income assets, said in a telephone interview. “It's a high-quality name which brings in a lot of different kinds of buyers.”
The offering, Apple's first since 1996, is being managed by Goldman Sachs Group and Deutsche Bank and follows a $1.95 billion sale last week from Microsoft Corp. The world's biggest software maker issued $1 billion of 10-year, 2.375% securities to yield 70 basis points more than Treasuries, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. They traded Monday at 100.2 cents on the dollar to yield 2.35%, according to Trace, the bond-price reporting system of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.
Apple's offering would be the largest dollar-denominated sale on record. Roche Holding tops the list with a $16.5 billion six-part deal from February 2009, Bloomberg data show.
The order book for Apple's offering, a gauge of investor demand for the debt, reached $50 billion, a person familiar with the transaction said.
