When it comes to using stock buybacks for management to compensate itself, the crown might belong to Dell. From 1998 to 2006, according to the New York Times’ Floyd Norris, “Dell reported net income of $17.9 billion — and it spent $24.1 billion buying back stock.” The longer the time period you look at the worse it gets. From 1997 to 2012, Dell purchased $39 billion in shares — more than the company has reported in net income over the entire course of its existence.No wonder it went private.The timing of Dell’s buybacks was consistently terrible, but since the costs were paid by shareholders and the proceeds went to management, the C suite never seemed to care much. Harvard Business Review looked at the phenomena and called it “Profits Without Prosperity.” The runner up to Dell might be Qualcomm. As the Times’ Gretchen Morgenson noted this summer, during the past five fiscal years, Qualcomm repurchased 238 million shares at a cost of $13.6 billion.Despite that huge buyback program, the Times wrote, “Qualcomm’s average diluted share count has actually increased over the period by almost 41 million shares. That’s a 2 percent rise since 2010…because the company has been granting a treasure trove of stock and option awards to its executives.”Qualcomm paid an average of $56.14 a share for stock that now trades for about $4 less. In other words, it overpaid by almost $1 billion.This is a pattern we see over and over. Here’s another pattern: Although many companies seem to buy shares just before they start falling, managers tend to do much better at the timing game, selling their own shares right before the slide begins. Just a coincidence, I suppose. Given a choice between dividends or buybacks, I’ll take the quarterly check. But the bigger question is simply this: Why is management at so many companies bereft of better ideas and more productive uses for corporate cash?Maybe it’s because so much of the proceeds of buybacks end up in their own pockets.

Source: Why Management Loves Share Buybacks – Bloomberg View