Apple's Cook plans offshore cash repatriation during 2017

Apple could repatriate several billion dollars of its enormous overseas cash reserves to the US in 2017, chief executive Tim Cook said on Thursday.

Speaking after the European Commission ruled that Apple should pay €13bn ($14.5bn) in back taxes to the Irish government because its tax arrangements in the country were illegal under EU law, Cook signalled a shift in the tech giant's longstanding reluctance to move cash back to the US.

“We provisioned several billion dollars for the US for payment as soon as we repatriate it, and right now I would forecast that repatriation to occur next year,” Cook said in the interview with Irish broadcaster RTE.

Apple has long said that it would only move a chunk of its near-$215bn liquid offshore investments back to the US when the corporate tax rules would not make the move so costly, while it can hold the funds overseas at lower tax rates.

US firms must pay a corporate tax rate of 35% on global profits which are repatriated.

In February, despite its gigantic cash reserves, Apple issued bonds worth around $12bn that was chiefly so that it could return money to shareholders without repatriating any of its overseas funds.

It has been calculated that US companies are offshoring more than $2trn of cash, with Google, Apple and Microsoft alone accounting for around a fifth of that sum.