Apple sells $17 billion of bonds in biggest corporate offering on record

Apple Inc sold $17 billion (€12.9 billion) of bonds in the biggest corporate offering on record as the iPhone maker seeks to help finance a $100 billion capital reward for shareholders.

Apple issued $3 billion of floating-rate notes and $14 billion of fixed-rate securities in six parts with maturities from three to 30 years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Proceeds may help the company avoid repatriation taxes on its $102.3 billion of funds held overseas as chief executive officer Tim Cook returns an additional $55 billion to shareholders through 2015 to compensate for a stock that's been hammered by signs of slowing growth.

“It’s a high-quality name which brings in a lot of different kinds of buyers,” Ashish Shah, the head of global credit investment at New York-based AllianceBernstein LP, which oversees $256 billion in fixed-income assets, said in a telephone interview.

The offering, Apple's first since 1996, was managed by Goldman Sachs Group Inc and Deutsche Bank AG and follows a $1.95 billion dollar sale last week from Microsoft Corp.

Apple’s offering is the largest bond sale on record, Bloomberg data show. The deal topped Roche Holding AG’s $16.5 billion six-part deal from February 2009, which included $3 billion of one-year floating-rate debt, and AbbVie Inc.’s $14.7 billion six-part issue in November, the data show.