Absolutely. If you're the water utility or an energy company or some other company not positioned as a "growth" company, sure, hand back your extra cash to investors. But if you're a tech company, a stock buyback just says "we're out of ideas but still want the stock price to go up".
> We belive out stock is undervalued, so we will buy it ourselves. This will reduce our cost of capital and generate value for our shareholders in the long term.
this phrase makes no sense because it's an executive buzzword: the value of a stock is what someone will pay for it
no stock is undervalued, it's at exactly the correct value. Executives conducting buybacks thus simply want the stock to be valued more than it is (so they can make more stock-priced-based-compensation money)
that an executive from a company like Shopify has options for cash like creating value via growth, or paying their workers better, but instead chooses to just increase their personal wealth (and, incidentally, that of shareholders as well), is precisely the leadership failure being pointing out here
