By Graham K. Rogers

In a posting on his site, Horace Dediu makes the point that, with Apple's share buyback program in full swing, the value of shares that have now been bought by Apple and retired is expected to total some $16 billion. So far 21,770,000 shares have been retired with the number of those outstanding going from 946,035,000 fully diluted shares of Apple stock to 924,265,000 at the end of Q2 2013.

Another 11 million shares are expected to be retired in the current quarter which M. Dediu calculates comes to something in the region of $16 billion in all. He suggests that if this is considered as an acquisition, this is larger than Nokia, or Blackberry and HTC combined.

For more information, link to Asymco and Horace Dediu.

Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand where he is also Assistant Dean. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs.