Bill Gates urged to share his billions

NEWS Microsoft is sitting on a $36bn mountain of excess cash - and investors are asking when they can get their hands on it. Old economy companies typically return a proportion of their profits to their investors each year, to reward them for investing in the company. Start-up companies, and high-tech firms in particular, generally prefer to invest every cent they can in building their business. Investors are rewarded by the rising value of their stocks, rather than an annual cash payment. However, stocks have not been rising much in the past year and investors are now wondering why a company such as Microsoft, which has billions of dollars of cash reserves, cannot start to share them with its investors. Microsoft has traditionally preferred to invest its money in the business itself. Last year it also spent $600m buying back stock, to compensate for the downward pressure on the stock price caused by issuing its staff with stock options. A report in the Wall Street Journal says Microsoft is now being urged to start paying a dividend, as are Cisco and Oracle. None of these companies has as yet shown any indication that they intend to follow this advice.