Apple Pledges to Pay $38 Billion Tax Bill and Create 20,000 Jobs in the U.S

January 23, 201810:58 am394 views

Apple Inc., the world’s most valuable tech giant, has just revealed big promises for the development of American economy.

The company unveiled its plans on Wednesday (Jan 17) that it will pay $38 billion tax bill on cash taken from profits it has made overseas. It also pledged to invest $30 billion in U.S. facilities and add 20,000 jobs over the next five years. In its press release, Apple said that its move to bring home overseas profits and spend it to pay the $38 billion tax payment would likely be among the largest kind of its kind ever made.

The latest U.S tax rules passed late last year mean that corporate like Apple can no longer avoid paying taxes on past international profits by holding the cash outside the United States. At such, they are required to pay tax whether they bring the money back to the country or not. A number of American companies with global operations are now expected to pay hundreds of billions of dollars for the overseas profits they have collected in recent decades, CNN reports.

According to a source familiar with the matter, Apple has also informed its global employees on Wednesday that they would receive a $2,500 stock bonus in response to the new U.S. tax code. Bloomberg, which reported the news earlier, said the bonus would be available for employees below a certain senior level.

There are about 123,000 full-time workers employed by the company around the world. More than half of the number, or about 84,000 employees, are based in the United States.

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Meanwhile, Apple’s $30 billion investment plan to develop the company’s facilities across the U.S will include a new corporate campus in a location that will be announced in 2018. According to its press release, the campus will be designed to house technical support for customers. While there are no further details about the planned campus, Apple will disclose more information later this year.

In general, campuses refer to a sprawling facility where Apple employees report for duty. Such place is designed for them to work on everything from engineering to customer service. The company currently has two such facilities, one in Silicon Valley and another in Austin, Texas.

Additionally, the company said that at least $10 billion of the new investment will go toward building new data centers. Data centers are massive computer warehouses used to store information to support Apple services, including Siri, iMessage, and Apple Music.

So far, Apple already has data centers in seven states. In August last year, the company announced plans to build a new data center in Des Moines, Iowa, that would cost $1.3 billion and predicted to bring 550 construction and operations jobs. Apple CEO Tim Cook also updated on his Twitter account on Wednesday about a picture of a groundbreaking ceremony for a data center in Reno, Nevada.

Apple claims that with these new investments combined with its current pace of spending with domestic suppliers and manufacturer, the company expects to add about $350 billion to the U.S. economy over the next five years.

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