>I feel like all this discussion of stock buybacks apparently not raising the stock price are kind of missing a key element here which is that stock buybacks don't inherently raise prices and are thus not always intended to. Stock buybacks may increase the price for one of two reasons: Firstly, they signal confidence in the company itself: it is a declaration that the company believes its own stock is a safe investment. Secondly, if financed through borrowing, it increases reliance on debt and reduces reliance on equity, which can – depending on the circumstances – be a more profitable arrangement. While evidently neither of these has panned out to increase the stock price, it's worth stressing that we do not know why specifically Anycolor chose to do a buyback. Increasing stock prices is one possible motivation for a buyback, but you can also do buybacks to take advantage of what you may believe to be an undervaluation of your company, so you spend money now to buy your own stocks while they're cheap, and then issue new shares to sell off should the price recover in the longer term. If the latter was the strategy, then it doesn't matter if the price didn't rise as much as hoped in the short term, because the thinking is medium- to long-term. And sometimes, if you're bearish about the market, it may not make sense to spend too much on hiring or infrastructure if it's unlikely to pay off, or if it's inefficient to do so, and so you'll spend money on financial stuff just so you're not sitting on a bunch of un-utilised capital.
>Now, for what it's worth, I think they probably hoped that there'd be a boost, but I don't think we can be certain that the aim was only, even mainly, to cause a short-term price hike.
