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Apparently Apple has more cash on its books than combined market values of Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Nokia, Yahoo, Sprint Nextel and Research In Motion.

Where do companies like Google and Apple keep their cash? Large banks?

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You can find out the general types of investments by reading the public corporation 10-Q report that is filed with the SEC it can be accessed via the EDGAR system.

It will not tell you what securities they have, but it does identify the short term and long term investments categories and their value.

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Short term investments, treasuries, current accounts.

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  • Cool, they do like me. :-) – Marco Demaio Jul 25 '12 at 18:11
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They are using several banks, hedge funds or other financial institutions, in order to diversify the risk inherent to the fact that the firm holding (a fraction of) their cash, can be insolvent which would makes them incur a really big loss.

Also, the most available form of cash is very often reinvested everyday in overnight*products and any other highly liquid products, so that it can be available quickly if needed. Since they are aware that they are not likely to need all of their cash in one day, they also use longer terms or less liquid investments (bonds, stocks, etc..).

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  • 3
    Wow. You really like to bold words. – Pete Jul 25 '12 at 16:37
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For tax optimization, cash is stored mostly overseas, according to the New York Times.

For Apple, everytime a song or an app is bought in Europe, Africa or Middle East, money flows to iTunes Sàrl, in Luxemburg. Royalties on patents flow internally from Apple in California to Apple in Ireland. Then profits flow to the Carribean.

The problem is that cash cannot be brought back to the USA without huge taxes.

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  • "stored mostly overseas" means... what? That Apple bought bonds in Germany, or that they have huge piles of US dollar bills in Luxemburgish warehouses? – RonJohn May 9 '17 at 14:36
  • Most probably, it means that some variable in some computer program in some bank on some island has a value of 250,000,000,000. – mouviciel May 9 '17 at 18:52
  • these are publicly traded companies, not movie stars trying to hide their earnings from the IRS. – RonJohn May 9 '17 at 18:54
  • Earnings are not hidden, they are just kept far from IRS. – mouviciel May 9 '17 at 19:36
  • But that in no way answers in what financial instruments those earnings are stored. – RonJohn May 9 '17 at 21:45

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