Research archive for AAPL

I could not find the official news on the Apple Inc. website, I had however noticed that Sir Jony Ive had been promoted to Chief Design Officer at the company. If you have been watching the company over the years, you will know exactly who Jony is. According to Wikipedia, Steve Jobs said that Jony was his spiritual partner at the company. They designed many of the products together. Ive has been at the company since 1992, 23 years of being involved with all of the products at the business, having an intimate knowledge of all of them, all of their launches and the inner workings. There are apparently only 22 folks at Apple and the core (no pun intended) have been there for the better part of two decades, they must know each other pretty well. Cult of Mac (yes, really) says that this team rarely gets together for photos of the public kind, here they did recently for the announcement of the watch: Here's the first group picture of Apple's new Industrial Design team.

You cannot keep a good man down. I had to laugh when I saw the Reuters headline: Icahn says "dramatically undervalued" Apple should trade at $240. This link above refers to the open letter to Tim Cook, the Chief Executive Officer of Apple Inc. I like the self back slapping, Carl Icahn is not short of confidence. He speaks about the company having heeded their advice: "We are pleased that Apple has directionally followed our advice and repurchased $80 billion of its shares (yielding the company's shareholders an excellent return), but the company's enormous net cash position continues to grow while the company's shares are still dramatically undervalued." Thanks Carl for that. Stop saying that you are not able to do something, rather adopt the mantra: "Icahn, like Carl". The stock closed up 1.1 percent on the day.

Apple HomeKit, what is it? It is basically your home connected everywhere at any time, i.e. reachable from your mobile phone. Let us say for instance that you go away for the weekend. You do not need the same power that you needed before, right? Less power to be used is a cost saving to you. You can visit the HomeKit developers page for now, that is available. Set your home into zones, connect all the devices, it is all part of the internet of things. Things being devices that we would not necessarily associate with having connectivity, more recently we accept that TV's, fridges, cars, all our lighting and central heating/cooling systems will be integrated into the phones/notebooks/tablets that already connect to the TV. One extra "thing" to remember, the Internet of Things has an acronym that I saw for the first time, memorise it, it is here: IoT.

Apple. Just wow. Their last quarter once again blew estimates away. In truth there is only one risk to their business and that quite simply is a superior product. A superior product to theirs that is adopted with the same uptake of their flagship product, the iPhone. Out there, there could and might be a better product. What it lacks is the adoption and more importantly, the ecosystem. What I mean by that is pretty simple, the ecosystem of Apple draws you in. It is evident in the company numbers, away from the iPhone itself. Mac Sales, a device on which I am writing this message, are set to grow 10 percent this year and continue to take market share away from their peers. Sales in China of Mac units grew 31 percent in the last quarter, when the rest of the PC market went backwards! In total, the company sold 4.56 million Macs, their old flagship product.

I saw a tweet that suggested that it took Apple 74 days to sell their first one million iPhones, you know, the first version. According to some early projections, they may very well have sold 1 million Apple watches on Friday. There was something interesting about that, expectations were probably for more, signs are that there are production problems with the watch. The company will no doubt put on a brave face through these "challenges". Some are cheering the fact that Apple are failing to meet the demand, they were just being cautious is my best guess. The Apple products are awesome, it is hard to wrap your head around the fact that the iPod is only 14 years old, and that is in October this year. iTunes is 11 years old. The iPhone turns only 8 this year in late June. The iPad is only 5 years old. The watch is a few days old, in fact you could argue that many people will take time to adopt the technology.

With the Apple watch becoming available to the retail market tomorrow, this is the most comprehensive review that I have seen so far - Apple Watch Review: You'll Want One, but You Don't Need One. The general consensus is that no one really knows how well the watch is going to do. Great looking product though!

Apple got their first 1 trillion Dollar call last night. By that I mean that Cantor Fitzgerald stuck a target price of 180 Dollars on it, meaning with the current number of shares in issue, 5.82 billion, that equates to 1 trillion bucks. Got it? See the FT story associated with that 180 Dollar price target: Apple climbs after $1tn valuation call. There you go, someone called it.

Apple fleshed out the watch last evening and for us Mac lovers (the electronic kind) released what looks like an amazing new sleek model, in the air category. I switched over to the business channel whilst Tim Cook was delivering his piece and my eldest daughter expressed a desire to get one. In her world the company makes excellent products, they are better than anything else she knows. In the same way for her search is associated with Google and online videos are associated with YouTube. I am not too sure how powerful that is, I am guessing that if I was paying more attention when I was growing up I would have associated pictures with the Kodak brand, we all know how that turned out.

Apple inc. joins the Dow Jones Industrial average. iDow is what they are calling it. AT&T gets booted out on the 18th of March this year, the telecommunications company has been a part of the Dow since November of 1999. General Electric has been part of the index since 1907, that is continuity for you. There are five other companies that have been part of the index for a lifetime, they are in chronological order (first to last) ExxonMobil (as Standard oil) from 1928, Procter & Gamble from 1932, DuPont from 1935 and United Technologies (previously United Aircraft) from 1939. The most recent entries are Nike, Goldman Sachs and Visa, all from September 2013. Apple is the sole new entrant, see the release: Apple Set to Join the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

Apple have announced that they will be building two facilities in Ireland and Denmark, the first of their kind outside of the US. They are to be data centres, the support all of the applications that you iOS users will know so well. iTunes, Siri and iMessage, those types of applications being closer to all of the users in the region and have the speeds a whole lot quicker. Check it out on the Apple website: Apple to Invest 1.7 Billion Euros in New European Data Centres. And most fabulous of all? The facilities as you see will be leaving the world a better place after than before, they will take out the exotic tree forest and replant with indigenous ones. Amazing. The company's shares closed last evening at 133 USD, a market capitalisation of 755 billion Dollars.

Apple passed through the 700 billion Dollar market capitalisation last evening, by the close that is. At 122.02 Dollars a share, 5.843082 billion shares in issue = 712.97 billion by my calculation, the WSJ suggests that it is 710.74 billion Dollars. I must have something wrong then, perhaps the number of shares in issue which was reported at the last set of results is a little less. i.e. They (Apple treasury) must have bought more shares back over the last two weeks. The WSJ article that points out the "first", titled Apple: $710 Billion and Counting, that as a result of a fast growing customer base in China, Tim Cook reckons that the law of large numbers does not apply. If you think about it, whilst Apple has the smartphone profits share (remember yesterday), they certainly do not sell the most phones. Quality over everything else. I jotted down a few points for an interview: Apple through 700 billion Dollars as a market cap, that is pretty interesting. = (at current exchange rates) 8.343 trillion Rands. What Apple pays in dividends is about what we (South Africa) pay annually in interest on outstanding government debt. That is astonishing.

Did you see that Apple are basically the most or only really profitable company that manufactures smartphones. Check this BusinessInsider article out: Apple is taking 93% of the profits in the smartphone industry now. As you can see, there is no information for private phone maker Xiaomi. That is amazing, Apple has 93 percent of all the industry profits, their phones are clearly too expensive. Then again, according to a WSJ article that I read the other day, there are only two distinct kinds of phones, expensive ones that are high end and cheaper ones that are lower end. Apple does not want to really make a cheaper phone, for what? You can either afford one, or you cannot, they do not want to be a mass product, the price is part of the allure. Talking of cheaper, Apple are raising money in Switzerland, where the government there enjoys low rates. No, the Swiss government gets people to pay them (negative rates) for their debt. Retail demand should be strong, so says a credit strategist at UBS, when quoted in this WSJ article: Apple Plans Debut Swiss Franc Bond Sale. The mind still boggles how Nestle and the Swiss government are able to raise money at such low rates, Apple has noticed this too.

Apple raised more money yesterday, 6.5 billion Dollars to be exact. Why would the corporate with more money than any other company raise money in the debt markets? Well, remembering that US corporate tax laws are not kind to companies that earn money offshore, bring it "home" and you will be taxed. Even though you have paid tax on it already. President Obama is exploring a once off repatriation of cash at a lower rate once off, and then an ongoing tax rate (at a lower rate) in order to get this un-stuck. The issue of cash repatriation. Businesses like Apple, with strong balance sheets, awesome credit ratings and great cash flows can sell debt in the yield starved markets at rates of around 3.5 percent and less. Use it for what exactly? As the FT article points out, Apple taps bond markets for $6.5bn, via the SEC filing proceeds are to be used for "general corporate purposes, including repurchases of our common stock and payment of dividends under our program to return capital to shareholders, funding for working capital, capital expenditures and acquisitions and repayment of debt." The company can use existing cash flows in the US to service their debt, buy back shares and pay dividends.

How can everyone get their estimates on Apple so wrong? So very, very wrong. In a good way for the company that is, and by extension their shareholders. The company absolutely blew away any expectations that "the street" had for the last quarter, crushing it. Last evening Apple inc. presented their results for the quarter to end 27 December 2014, their first quarter of the current financial year. Check it out: Apple Reports Record First Quarter Results. This was the most successful three months of any company in corporate history.

Sometimes it is what other people do that impacts on your business, a copy of some sorts. Apple is a great finisher of products, not in the raw style of Lance Klusener, rather more like the pure clean hitting of David Miller. That six over the Golf Course end stand on Sunday was the biggest that I have ever seen, it is a pity that we lost that match. Anyhow cricket aside, another chance pending today, Apple Inc. yesterday according to iPhonehacks earned a patent for a GoPro-like camera. GoPro stock sank 12 percent. The stock is down over 40 percent in the northern hemisphere winter, since the beginning of October. With a market cap of just 7.24 billion Dollars, relative to the Apple cash pile 20 times that size, Apple obviously want their users to have the ability to use a similar product. Time will tell, sometimes you have to watch what others do, and not what you do.