Apple Inc. (AAPL) iBond-ies Must Watch For This

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Yesterday, Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) set records with its $17 billion offering of bonds, making it the largest corporate bond offering ever. Yet despite the unique attributes of the offering, Apple’s big bond sale has several lessons that bond investors throughout the market should pay close attention to in deciding how to allocate their capital. Let’s take a look at three of them.

Lesson 1: Companies are getting great rates.
Apple Inc. (AAPL)Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) didn’t just manage to get its debt sold yesterday; it locked in some extremely cheap financing costs. Among its fixed-rate issues, interest rates ranged from 0.511% for three-year paper to 3.883% for 30-year bonds, with intermediate rates of 1.076% and 2.415% for five- and 10-year notes. Those rates were in fairly tight spreads to Treasury rates, with premiums ranging from 0.2 percentage points at the short end of the offering to a full percentage point at the long end.

Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) isn’t the only company scoring attractive rates on bonds. Rival Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) managed to get even better interest rates on its five-, 10-, and 30-year bond sales last week, owing in part to its superior bond rating of AAA compared to Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL)’s AA+. Moreover, other companies, such as Colgate-Palmolive Company (NYSE:CL) and NIKE, Inc. (NYSE:NKE), were able to get slightly better terms with more modest offerings.

The low rates come from ridiculously strong demand. For instance, as Fool contributor Alex Dumortier reported yesterday, demand for Apple’s bond offering reached $50 billion, indicating that the issues were oversubscribed by a factor of 3-to-1. As long as bond investors want to buy debt that in most cases pays less than the rate of inflation, companies won’t hesitate to offer it to them.

Lesson 2: Companies are lending long.
The structure of Apple’s six-tier bond offering shows the emphasis that companies have placed on locking in long-term financing. Fully half the overall offering came in the form of 10- and 30-year debt, with three-year fixed notes representing less than 10% of the offering despite much lower financing costs for that debt.

Put simply, such a structure makes it clear that Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) and the many corporations that are following the same strategy believe that rates are heading higher, and it makes sense to pay slightly more in order to avoid having to refinance three to five years down the line at what could potentially be much higher rates. Despite the floating-rate component of the Apple offering — likely done to appease certain institutional buyers rather than as a capital-allocation decision on Apple’s part — the tendency toward longer-duration debt shows a recognition from companies that the good times in the bond market won’t last forever.

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