Too embarrassed to ask: what is a share buyback?

There are two main ways for companies to return cash to shareholders. 

Dividends tend to be preferred by income investors; a dividend is a cash payout to shareholders, typically issued on a half-yearly basis. 

The other method is to use a share buyback. This means just what it says – the company buys back its own shares. 

It’s easy to see why shareholders like dividend payouts. But how do buybacks benefit shareholders? Well, when a company buys and cancels some of its own shares, the remaining shareholders are left holding a greater proportion of the company. 

Let’s say a firm has one million shares in issue, and the share price is £10 per share.  It made one million pounds profit last year. So it has earnings per share of £1. 

Let’s say it wants to return the whole one million pounds profit to its shareholders via a share buyback. It buys back 100,000 shares at £10 a share and cancels them. This leaves 900,000 shares in issue. 

That means earnings per share has increased from £1 to just over £1.11, because there are now fewer shares. In turn, assuming that investors keep valuing its earnings on a constant basis, the share price would rise to just over £11.

Fans of buybacks argue that they are more tax-efficient than dividends. For managers, buybacks are also more flexible than dividend payments. Shareholders tend to react more negatively to a dividend cut than to a reduction in buyback levels.

Critics argue that executives have an incentive to use buybacks to meet performance targets linked to share-price growth. So they may curb investment or borrow too much to fund buybacks. 

Timing can also be a problem. Some studies suggest that larger companies in particular have a bad habit of buying back shares near the top of the market, when they’re expensive, rather than nearer the bottom, when they’re cheap.