Merrill Lynch & Co., Inc. (NYSE: MER - News) today announced that its board of directors has authorized the repurchase of up to $6 billion of the company's outstanding common shares."This authorization will enable us to continue to be active and flexible in managing our equity capital," noted Jeff Edwards, chief financial officer. "We seek to balance increasing our return on equity and growing our book value per share. To achieve this goal, our primary focus is to deploy capital into profitable growth opportunities. But to the extent we generate excess capital, we will continue to use share repurchases, as well as cash dividends, to return capital to stockholders."
The authorization will be exercised from time to time, subject to market conditions, the relative attractiveness of other capital deployment opportunities, and regulatory considerations. Any repurchases are intended to make appropriate adjustments to the company's capital structure.
Merrill Lynch is one of the world's leading wealth management, capital markets and advisory companies with offices in 37 countries and territories and total client assets of approximately $1.6 trillion. As an investment bank, it is a leading global trader and underwriter of securities and derivatives across a broad range of asset classes and serves as a strategic advisor to corporations, governments, institutions and individuals worldwide. Merrill Lynch owns approximately half of BlackRock, one of the world's largest publicly traded investment management companies with more than $1 trillion in assets under management. For more information on Merrill Lynch, please visit www.ml.com
No comments:
Post a Comment