If Companies Shared Their Cash With Employees...
Don't hold your breath, but you'd be sitting pretty if firms decided to share their cash hoards.
John Waggoner, USA TODAY 1:22 p.m. EST January 19, 2014
Excluding banks, the Standard and Poor's 500 stock index has 216 companies that are sitting on $1 billion or more in cash or short-term equivalents. If each of those took just 5% of its cash hoard and gave it to employees, each employee would get more than $3,000 -- but don't hold your breath.
It's no secret that many companies are sitting on enormous amount of cash – a total of $1.25 trillion in companies in the S&P 500, according to Standard and Poor's Capital IQ. That number, incidentally, eliminates banks and other financial services companies, which are highly cash-intensive.
The five companies with the largest cash holdings – Microsoft, Cisco, Apple, Google and Pfizer – have a combined $247 billion in cash. Microsoft's stash alone is $76.2 billion, and Cisco has $50.6 billion in cash in the coffers.
The non-financial companies in the S&P 500 have 20,254,000 employees in the USA and abroad, according to Howard Silverblatt, S&P Dow Jones Indices Senior Index Analyst. Splitting the S&P 500's cash hoard among them would give each employee $61,000.
No company would give away all its cash. Companies need cash for unexpected events, acquisitions, building new plants and buying new equipment. By and large, companies have favored using excess cash to buy back shares or pay out special one-time dividends to shareholders.
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http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/markets/2014/01/19/if-companies-shared-cash-with-employees/4496341/
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