It's a signal that the finance people are becoming more important to the company, but not necessarily a bad thing; it's effectively a more (tax) efficient form of dividends, which isn't very controversial.

ASML is a fairly old company (40+ years), and they have been doing share buybacks since 2006: https://www.asml.com/en/investors/why-invest-in-asml/share-b...

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tehmillhouse 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Every time I can remember that the finance people have become more important to a company, it has led to the disappearance of the internal culture geared towards excellence that got a company to that point in the first place.

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repelsteeltje 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I guess it's simply the externalities issue. Finance people optimize finance, which among other things results in improved efficiency. But despite best intentions to map out all incentives that matter, it always fails to consider some aspects. Focusing on short-term profits, ignoring privacy, security or pollution because it's free, lobbying for favourable legislation that hampers competitors, etc.

These are things that don't show in a spreadsheet unless you're explicitly incentivized to look at them. But that's never the case because the number of KPIs is always finite while there are infinitely many aspects that could potentially be subverted.

	▲	Gud 23 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Why does "optimizing finance" improve the efficiency in an engineering company? Seems to me like "optimizing finance" could be absolutely detrimental for the bottom line.

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stingraycharles 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It’s largely true. I believe Steve Jobs had some talk about this phenomenon; basically, at some point, the scale of an organization means the product people make less of an impact than the sales / finance people, and they slowly take over.

Then over the span of a few decades, what’s left is a shallow organization without real innovation.

Intel and Boeing are good examples of this.

	▲	askvictor 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		And, indeed, Apple.

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Cthulhu_ 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's what they're afraid of, and that's one of the reasons why they're doing the big management reorganization - too many managers leads to lots of overhead instead of excellence.

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hayvan 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Indeed, finance people becomeing important is how you get 737-MAX disasters.

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jorvi 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

But both dividends and stock buybacks are terrible and really shouldn't exist. In a proper market, competition is so fierce that you cannot afford dividends / stock buybacks because your competitors will put all their money towards R&D and retaining & attracting the best personnel.

Then again, this has been going on for decades. Businesses used to be about being the best for your customers and personnel. But it's all become about sticking it to everyone for the benefit of the shareholders.