| Because to earn dividends you must be a owner i.e. actually hold company stock. To profit from buybacks you only need the option of buying the stock at a lower price than the buyback price. The CEOs and other CXXs of these firms often have large amounts of options included in their comp packages. This is why buybacks happen at market highs instead of market lows as sound management principles and common sense would suggest. Increasing shareholder value by increasing equity value is just a pretext. The real purpose of buybacks is a swindle to funnel company money directly into the pockets of the C-Suite through what in the books appears a routine management operation. These executives decide on the buybacks and exercise their share options just before, thus pocketing millions in company money and actually hurting shareholders. Shareholders get the blame despite having little to no power and seeing their investments ruined and looted. Also, in many firms, a lot of shareholders are also employees. You can find it better told here: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/08/the-sto... |
Like buybacks vs regular dividends, the main differences have to do with their taxability.
From what I can tell, the main complaint in the Atlantic article is that CEOs time buyback announcements to coincide with their stock sales. The first example they give is the Home Depot announcing a buy back (apparently in the Feb ‘18 earnings call), and then selling stock after the insider lock up window opened. In all likelihood, that sale was scheduled well ahead of time (execs have to do this to avoid insider trading charges).
So, the controversy seems to reduce to Home Depot having a strong quarter and buying back stock, making money for shareholders, including the CEO.
Note that if they’d issued dividends, and they pay retained dividends on unvested RSUs, the net effect would be exactly the same (except taxes).