Cashback!

Returning cash to shareholders is becoming increasingly common in the tech sector.

Spectris today announced it's going to return up to £75m to investors. Last week, nCipher said it too was going to return all but a few million of its cash pile to shareholders, through a tender offer.

This isn't generosity. Institutions have certainly been asking whether companies are going to use that cash, or hand it back.

The legacy of the dot com boom is that most tech companies - even once they're profitable - run with a healthy amount of cash on the balance sheet. In other sectors, such as hotels or engineering, most companies are geared; it's relatively unusual to be fully equity funded.

Now that tech isn't a synonym for cash burn, there's no reason why they should retain large cash reserves. So perhaps the exceptional handouts mark the transition for tech from explosive growth stock sector to profitable growth.