IBM: Cash is king

Wall Street has been drawn to tech companies during the recession because of their huge pools of cash and lack of debt. IBM (IBM) just proved the point of how valuable all that cash is by raising its dividend.

The big tech company showed that it can be a port in the stormy market by raising its dividend by 10 percent, to $0.55. Shareholders of record as of May 8 will qualify for the new payout.

Apparently IBM did not think the dividend increase was enough of an attraction in and of itself, so it upped the amount available to buy back its own shares by $3 billion, giving it a total of $6.7 billion available for that purpose.