Welcome to Industry Focus, the podcast that dives into a different sector of the stock market every day.

It's Friday, December 2nd, and we're talking about Facebook's $6 billion plan and tech share buybacks.

I'm your host, Dylan Dylan Lewis and I'm joined

on Skype by fool.com senior tech specialist Daniel Sparks. Daniel how's it going?

Good Dylan thanks for having me on the show. Yeah, so Daniel, a surprise announcement about two weeks ago.

Unfortunately, we missed hitting this because of the Thanksgiving holiday.

Facebook said it plans to buy back $ billion dollars worth of its own stock.

I think that surprised people a little bit.

Yeah, yeah, definitely came surprised at me.

Yeah, you know, you typically think of some high-growth tech company as one that will not be spending

cash on its own shares.

What are some of the terms that they announce?

Well, let's see, so it's a six billion dollar program goes into effect in the first quarter next year.

There's no expiration date on it or really any stipulations as far as the timing goes.

Management seemed to suggest that, you know, it would be that the

stock price would matter.

They did mention that as one of the factors that would determine how much they're buying back. But at $6 billion, you know, it could be somewhat just to offset stock-based compensation. We'll talk about that in a little bit. But, you know, this is a 320 billion dollar. based conversation

so six billion isn't isn't too big but it is notable

they have 26 billion dollars on their balance sheet right now, of which $4 billion is overseas.

So they do have the cash despair, they have free cash flow coming in, so that's kind of it in a nutshell.

Yeah, very often with these announcements you'll see management says,

we will buy back shares opportunistically, right?

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