Tapestry Plans to Hand Back $1.7 Billion Next Year — More Than a Fifth of What It Sells

Tapestry, the owner of Coach and Kate Spade, reported its fiscal 2026 fourth quarter and full year on August 13, 2026. Revenue for the year was $8.0 billion and diluted earnings per share on a GAAP basis were $7.27. The more revealing disclosure was what the company intends to do with the cash.

What went out the door in fiscal 2026

The average price is the useful figure in that block. A company reporting only a dollar total tells a reader how much it spent; reporting the average price paid tells them what it got. At roughly $118 across about 11.5 million shares, the arithmetic is checkable, which is a small but real difference in disclosure quality.

What is planned for fiscal 2027

Set against $8.0 billion of revenue, a planned $1.7 billion of capital return is more than a fifth of everything the company sells in a year. That is a striking ratio for a business that still has to design, manufacture and retail physical goods, and it is only sustainable if free cash flow conversion stays high.

The split inside that number is the signal

The repurchase figure is held flat: $1.35 billion in fiscal 2026, $1.35 billion planned for fiscal 2027. The dividend is not — it rises 16%, from a $1.60 annual rate to an anticipated $1.85.

Those two choices carry different weights, and the difference is the point. A repurchase is discretionary. A company can quietly do less of it in a difficult quarter, and many do, because no announcement is required to slow down. A dividend increase is close to a promise: once raised, reducing it is read as a statement about the business, so boards raise dividends only against cash flow they expect to persist.

Holding buybacks flat while raising the dividend by 16% is therefore a more confident act than raising the buyback would have been. It moves a larger share of the capital return into the component that is hardest to walk back.

What the company expects to fund it

The fiscal 2027 outlook is for mid-single-digit revenue growth, continued operating margin expansion and low-double-digit earnings-per-share growth. Those three together are the mechanism behind the capital return plan: revenue growing modestly, margins widening on top of it, and a shrinking share count converting both into faster growth in per-share earnings than in the business itself.

The repurchases are the reason the third number outruns the first two. Buying about 11.5 million shares in fiscal 2026 and planning a further $1.35 billion means earnings are divided across fewer shares each year, which turns mid-single-digit revenue growth into low-double-digit EPS growth without the underlying business needing to accelerate.