Rio Tinto, the world's biggest mining company, said the move was spurred by a British decision to abolish a tax measure that made buybacks inefficient.
Only a handful of countries have made buybacks a reasonable option for cash-rich companies, but they are among the biggest: Germany and the U.K. rewrote corporate tax laws last year.
The 2003 tax cuts made dividends a more attractive option than they had been in the past, as compared with share repurchases, while the coming changes are set to work the other way, making buybacks more attractive than they currently are.
In other words, for the first time there will be a national gun buyback day, and next year plans are already being made to hold buybacks on the same day in at least 12 states.
However, the stock bounced back earlier this year as the firm made the buyback offer to the shareholders.
Goldman has also made share buybacks a priority, capitalizing on the weakness in the stock.
For starters, there are more than 200 million guns in circulation in the United States, making a buyback much more costly.
Those funds, including Third Point and Brevan Howard, are betting that to make the buyback succeed, the Greek government will have to meet their price demands.
Ma dismisses the idea that friction with Yahoo is getting in the way of taking Taobao public or that a prospective IPO would make the buyback of Alibaba Group shares that much more expensive.
The company, based in Montreal, which also plans a share buyback, made the announcements yesterday after reducing its profit outlook for 2006 to 1.80 Canadian dollars ($1.57) to 1.90 Canadian dollars ($1.65) a share from 2.05 Canadian dollars ($1.79) last year.
