Posts tagged: business
Asymco:
Today Apple announced both a dividend and a share re-purchase plan which, when combined, will consume 45% of Apple’s current US cash reserves.
The dividend will be $2.65/share/quarter and the buyback will cost $10 billion over three years. The dividend will therefore cost about $2.5 billion per quarter (starting next quarter) and the re-purchase will cost about $833 million per quarter (starting next fiscal year).
However, note that Apple’s cash has been growing far more quickly. It increased by $16 billion last quarter or $37 billion over the last year. This rate of increase is itself increasing.
…
This means Apple’s total cash should still grow by more than $35 billion this year.
TL;DR—Apple’s cash inflow grows at an increasing rate, that even this cash dispersion strategy will not dampen.
So, it has come to this. They’re earning so much money that they can’t spend it anywhere else, and fast enough. While I’d think that Steve Jobs might disapprove of this measure, but after some thought, I think this move might actually take some pressure of managing such a huge cash-pile off the CFO’s back.
In fact, it is said that Apple’s CFO can probably be considered as a large hedge-fund manager.
Hopefully with this move, we would finally see the market value Apple’s stock appropriately, after so many years of undervaluing AAPL.
Zach Holman:
Apple commands their words exceedingly well. They aren’t the originator — or even the owner — of their particular voice, but they are the most visible.
Mechanically, The Apple Voice is characterized by short, declarative sentences that are informally and personally delivered to you with a hint of smugness.
An interesting article on “the voice” used in copywriting.
The Next Web:
The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) in the UK has given the green light for Amazon to takeover The Book Depository, almost four months after the planned acquisition was first made public.
Very sad.
NYTimes:
“The best clients, to my mind, don’t say that whatever you do is fine,” Mr. Bohlin said last week, a few days after Mr. Jobs’s death. “They’re intertwined in the process. When I look back, it’s hard to remember who had what thought when. That’s the best, most satisfying work, whether a large building or a house.”
Just as Mr. Jobs transformed the notion of the personal computer and the cellphone, he left an indelible stamp on architecture, especially the retail kind, traditionally a backwater of the profession.
Quite interesting to see the holistic confluence that Steve Jobs brings to everything that he is involved with.
Asymco:
When Apple committed to the North Carolina data center in mid-2009 the iPhone was two years old. Only 26 million iPhones had been sold to date (about as many as Apple now sells every quarter.) Clearly if the commitment was on such a scale there must have been a plan. A big plan.
And iCloud is offered free to all iOS 5 and Mac OS X Lion users. Which company on earth will invest so much (close to $1b) in a feature that they don’t intend to sell as a product (but only as an auxiliary feature)?
This is what makes Apple, uniquely Apple.
Fortune Tech:
From Steve Jobs down to the janitor: How America’s most successful - and most secretive - big company really operates.
Quite an interesting article. It speaks of a paradigm of management that is very different from what most business schools teach, including mine.
About his recent sale of Lifepath.me, Dustin Curtis wrote:
For some reason, the default assumption is that charging for things on the web will never work, but, once you try it, even for something stupid like a life timeline, you might realize that assumption is incorrect.
I agree, I think people are willing to spend, as long as it’s frictionless and the price is low enough.
iOS powered devices generate more revenue than all of Microsoft’s products put together
Looks fantastic for a company which was dying less than 10 years ago.
“Loh Keng Fatt explains why an admission fee to read at Borders has merit”:
In May 2009, I wrote a blog arguing that bookshops like Borders should charge people a $2 admission fee to recoup some money from the hordes who come to browse and read for free and in air-conditioned comfort.
I totally disagree. Borders going into insolvency isn’t exactly caused by people freeloading its books. It has a more serious threat than that—competition from technology.
If the writer is correct, Kinokuniya should similarly be in financial trouble, but that’s not quite the case.
Borders suffered from years of strategic mismanagement. It didn’t respond to trends in the industry. With the rise of competing online bookstores and cheaper brick-and-motar bookstores, I could hardly recall the steps Borders took to make themselves more competitive or attractive.
By charging an admission fee to Borders, they may actually kill themselves by reducing all casual traffic flow to the bookstore. Most of the time, people will buy books that are found worthy of keeping, and allowing people to browse through just increases the probability that such people will come across the books that they’ll like to keep.
There will always be cheapskates. Some of them will never ever buy anything. For some others however, it’ll be a matter of converting them to buy your products because they find value in them.
In 1999, I think right after the iMac came out in a range of colors, I happened to sit in on an internal meeting at Apple, one in a large theater filled with employees.
A case of leadership, so well exemplified.
Isaac Asimov wrote a very interesting series of novels called “The Foundation.” In them, his character, Hari Seldon, developed a science called psychohistory, with which he was able to accurately predict the large scale course of human events. It’s a great series, and was added to by some other popular science fiction writers over the years.
This idea, that one man could both predict and influence human events, is both fascinating and incredible.
And yet we have our own Hari Seldon. It’s Steve Jobs.
Fascinating. Remember the 1997 WWDC keynote?
After stumbling on a Facebook page dedicated to posting hurtful comments about local high school students, McKendrick did a little investigative work and discovered the page was created by a group of teenage girls that the photographer had booked for future photoshoots.
“It was beyond ‘your clothes are ugly’ or ‘you don’t have any brand clothes’ or ‘you are ugly, your hair is not right,” she told Pittsburgh’s 6 News. “It was vicious. It was talking about sexuality.”
McKendrick promptly contacted the real-life mean girls and their parents via email, explaining she could no longer provide her photography services.
Nice. Encouraging to see people taking a stand with ethical businesses.
Google doesn’t want to do what Motorola Mobility does (sell phones); it wants the company because it’s got a big heap of patents—seventeen thousand, apparently, with seven thousand more under review. And this is why today’s news is profoundly depressing.
I can sense that other Android OEMs, such as Samsung and HTC, would be rushing to find an alternative mobile OS, and Windows Phone 7 looks the most attractive thus far.
The smartphone landscape would be exciting to watch as upheavals are really threatening competitors without their own mobile OSes.
