The company's objective is to spend the money to buy the shares...

The company's objective is to spend the money to buy the shares as low a price as possible. In this way they can reduced the number of shares in the market. They won't be pushing the price up, till they think it is ready for them to do so. Longer term wise the SP will go up, but in the shorter term, they may even keep the SP down so that they can buy back more with less money. We will have to be patient with this strategy.