How to Calculate the Number of Shares of Common Stock Outstanding

As a real-world example, here is some information from Johnson & Johnson's 2014 year-end balance sheet. The company has 4.32 billion authorized common shares, of which 3,119,843,000 have been issued as of December 31, 2014. Next, 336,620,000 shares were held in the company's treasury at that time, so subtracting this from the number of issued shares means that Johnson & Johnson had 2,783,223,000 outstanding shares at the end of 2014.

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