Apple Inc.

[CityFarmer]

Apple is always a demanding partner in JV. It is a huge market, and will attract other big guys...

Apple Pay system hits setback

SAN FRANCISCO — Apple’s bid to replace the consumer wallet with its mobile payment system ran into a roadblock as CVS Health and Rite Aid disabled the technology in their pharmacies.

CVS and Rite Aid are among 220,000 United States merchants that already have technology in place to read the short-range wireless signals that enable customers of Apple Pay or similar services to make a purchase by waving their smartphones.

The pharmacies, which are part of a consortium developing a competing payment system, stopped Apple Pay last week, said a person familiar with the situation who asked not to be named.

“This act by CVS and Rite Aid heralds the advent of the imminent battle in the mobile pay system,” Mr Anindya Ghose, a marketing and information-technology professor at New York University, said in an email.

CVS has about 7,700 retail pharmacies and Rite Aid has about 4,570.

At stake is a market that is projected to jump to US$90 billion (S$114 billion) in 2017 from US$12.8 billion in 2012, said Forrester Research. Apple’s entry into mobile payments follows efforts by Square, Google and Softcard — a wallet application backed by the three largest US wireless carriers — that all failed to gain widespread appeal.
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http://www.todayonline.com/tech/apple-pa...ts-setback

[CityFarmer]

Apple CEO fires back as retailers block Pay

LAGUNA BEACH Calif. - Apple Inc CEO Tim Cook fired back at CVS and Rite Aid on Monday after the drugstore chains blocked the iPhone maker's mobile payments service, saying there were plenty of other retailers around the world to sign up.

Apple Pay launched about a week ago and saw more than a million credit cards registered over the first 72 hours. It already totes up more transactions than all other "contact less" payment methods combined, Cook said, citing Visa and Mastercard data.
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http://www.todayonline.com/business/appl...-block-pay

[CityFarmer]

This is definitely a game changing union, if successfully formed

Apple, Alibaba eyeing mobile payments union

LAGUNA BEACH (California) — Put Apple’s Mr Tim Cook and Alibaba’s Mr Jack Ma under the stars together and a partnership just might bloom.

Those were the signals from both men last night at the WSJDLive tech conference in Laguna Beach, California, as they took to the stage separately and spoke about working together on mobile payments.

“I’m very interested in that,” Mr Ma, founder of the Alibaba Group, said when asked whether it made sense for his company’s Alipay Wallet mobile system to team up with Apple Pay. “As always, a good marriage needs both sides working hard. I respect Apple and respect Tim very, very much.”

The Apple chief executive officer, who was sitting in the audience, took to the stage afterwards and was asked about the possibility of a partnership. “We’re going to talk about getting married later this week,” Mr Cook said. “I love what he’s done, I think he’s a brilliant guy. I think he has brilliant people at the company, so if we can find some areas of common space, I love it. I love partnering with people like that.”
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http://www.todayonline.com/tech/apple-al...ents-union

[CityFarmer]

It is a war out there in mobile payment market...

Wal-Mart and allies in face-off with Apple Pay over mobile payments

CHICAGO - Suddenly it's Apple versus Wal-Mart in the fight for shoppers' digital wallets.

With the development of a new mobile payment system, a group of retailers led by Wal-Mart Stores is aiming to upend the $4.5 trillion credit card market and control the precious transaction data generated at the checkout line.

The difficulty of the task became clear this week when drugstore chains CVS Health Corp and Rite Aid , in a move apparently aimed at shoring up the retailers' pay system, stopped accepting payments on Apple Inc's iPhones. That prompted consumers to complain that they were being denied a user-friendly payment option.

The “skirmish,” as Apple CEO Tim Cook put it this week, is the latest dispute to emerge from the Byzantine world of payment systems, which is dominated by banks and credit card firms.
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http://www.todayonline.com/business/wal-...e-payments

[CityFarmer]

An alternative accessory besides LV bags...

Gold-plated iPhone 6 on sale for S$9,440

SINGAPORE — Not satisfied with your gold-tinted iPhone? For US$7,300 (S$9,439.85), consumers can now buy an iPhone 6 plated in 24-carat gold, with the Apple logo encrusted in VS1 white diamonds.

The limited 24-carat gold iPhone 6 is available online at luxury electronics store Ademov (http://www.luxuryelectronics.com/).

According to a description on the website, the phone will come in a custom wood box, with a maintenance kit and accessories supplied. Customers can also choose to add a personalised engraving at no additional cost.

Ademov will supply a one-year warranty on the phone’s hardware and plating, and a three-year warranty on its jewelry. The company also claims to use a special plating process on their customised phones.

“Our process ensures proper adhesion, a perfect finish, correct color tone, and zero corrosion over the life of the product,” it writes on its website.
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http://www.todayonline.com/tech/gadgets/...sale-s9440

[greengiraffe]

How Apple’s $1bn bet on iPhone screens failed
DAISUKE WAKABAYASHI THE AUSTRALIAN NOVEMBER 21, 2014 12:00AM

Hard rock
Hard rock Source: TheAustralian

JUST before 7am Pacific time on October 6, the chief executive of GT Advanced Technologies called an Apple vice-president with bad news — GT, which was to supply Apple with superhard sapphire screens for its new iPhones, had filed for bankruptcy.

The filing surprised Apple because the companies had been negotiating changes in their contract to ease GT’s financial strain, according to a letter Apple later sent to GT’s creditors. Executives of the companies had planned to meet the next day.

A year earlier, Apple and GT had hailed a $US1 billion plan to build an Arizona factory that would produce 30 times as much sapphire as any other plant in the world.

Instead, the alliance turned into a rare, and public, misstep for Apple, From the making of the first iPhone in 2007, Apple has pushed its suppliers to achieve the improbable, driving hard bargains on price and time to market.

The Apple-GT marriage was troubled from the start. GT hadn’t mass-produced sapphire before. The company’s first 262kg cylinder of sapphire was flawed and unusable. GT hired hundreds of workers with little oversight; some bored employees were paid overtime to sweep floors repeatedly, while others played hooky.

GT’s meltdown underscores the promise and peril for Apple suppliers. An Apple deal can generate billions in revenue. But it also means adapting to huge fluctuations in demand, at razor-thin profit margins and little room for error. “This is not easy money,” said an executive of a long-time Apple supplier in Asia.

GT chief operating officer Daniel Squiller told the bankruptcy court that Apple had turned his company into a captive supplier, “bearing all of the risk and all of the cost”. GT couldn’t make a profit at Apple’s “dictated pricing”, he said.

Apple put blame for the deal’s failure “squarely at the feet of GTAT’s own management”, according to the letter to GT’s creditors, which Apple allowed The Wall Street Journal to review.

The company turned to GT to solve a big problem with iPhones: scratched or broken screens. Sapphire is one of the hardest materials on earth, now typically produced synthetically, in furnaces that reach 1900C. But it is more than five times the cost of glass.

Apple consumes a quarter of the world’s supply of sapphire to cover the iPhone’s camera lens and fingerprint reader. Early last year, it began looking for a much larger supply, to cover the iPhone’s screen. GT made furnaces for producing sapphire. GT told Apple in March last year it was developing a furnace that could produce a sapphire cylinder, known as a boule, weighing 262kg, more than twice as large as what were then the biggest boules. The larger boule would yield more screens, reducing costs.

GT said in its bankruptcy filings that Apple expressed interest in buying 2600 of the new furnaces.

A few months later, Apple switched gears and asked GT to make the sapphire. Apple didn’t want to pay GT’s typical 40 per cent margin for the furnaces, a person close to GT’s operations said. Apple was having trouble finding a sapphire manufacturer. An executive at another company Apple approached last year said it couldn’t make a profit producing sapphire at the price Apple wanted.

Apple offered to lend GT $US578 million ($670m) towards building 2036 furnaces and operating a factory in Arizona. Apple would buy and retrofit the factory for an additional $US500m and lease it to GT for $US100 a year. On October 31 last year, GT and Apple signed an agreement, a few days after the first 262kg boule emerged from a GT furnace. The cylinder was cracked so badly that none of the sapphire was usable. GT said the quality would improve, and Apple was encouraged by GT’s track record of making successively bigger furnaces.

GT was intrigued, because the agreement would provide more consistent revenue than equipment orders. Moreover, GT’s business making equipment for solar cells had fallen on hard times. GT’s 2013 revenue was down 66 per cent from two years earlier.

GT quickly set out to hire 700 staffers. Hiring moved so quickly that at one point more than 100 recent hires didn’t know who they reported to, a former manager said. Two other former workers said there was no attendance policy, which led to an unusual number of sick days. GT managers authorised unlimited overtime to fill furnaces with materials to grow sapphire. But GT hadn’t built enough furnaces yet, so many workers had nothing to do, two former employees said. “We just kept sweeping the floors over and over,” one of the former employees said. “I just saw money flying out the door.”

Producing sapphire proved to be the biggest problem. It took roughly 30 days and cost about $US20,000 to make a single boule. People familiar with Apple’s operations said more than half the boules were unusable.

Mr Squiller, the GT operations chief, told the bankruptcy court that GT lost three months of production to power outages and delays building the facility.

Apple was responsible for building the facility to GT’s specifications and providing power. Apple told the creditors that GT failed because of “mismanagement”, not power interruptions.

Apple’s comments were “purposely misleading, out of context or inaccurate”, GT said in a brief statement for this article.

Late this April, Apple withheld the final $US139m it was supposed to advance GT, saying it hadn’t met the contract’s output or quality requirements.

GT said in its bankruptcy filing that Apple repeatedly changed specifications for the sapphire. The filing said GT spent $US900m — more than twice the $US439m Apple provided — to get the factory up and running.

In August, a former worker said, GT discovered that 500 sapphire bricks were missing. A few hours later, workers learned a manager had sent the bricks to recycling instead of shipping. Had they not been retrieved, the misfire would have cost GT hundreds of thousands of dollars.

By that point, it was apparent that sapphire wouldn’t be used for the screens on the new iPhones.

Apple offered to give GT $US100m of the $US139m loan instalment and delay the repayment schedule, sources said.

Then came the early-morning October 6 call, when chief executive Thomas Gutierrez told Apple his company had sought bankruptcy protection. Sources said GT executives hadn’t told Apple about the bankruptcy plan because they feared Apple would try to thwart them. GT shares collapsed 93 per cent on the news of its bankruptcy, wiping out roughly $US1.4bn in market value.

[greengiraffe]

Apple’s market value tops $US700bn
AFP NOVEMBER 26, 2014 7:30AM

A RISE in Apple shares has pushed the market value of the trendsetting US tech icon above $US700 billion ($A757 billion), making it the first company to hit that milestone.

Apple shares rose nearly one per cent in morning trade in the US to $US119.75, lifting its market capitalisation to some $US701.7 billion.

Its stock is up 48 per cent in 2014 and has been strong since late April, when the company announced a series of moves intended to bolster its share price. Apple announced its first stock split in nine years and said it would buy back another $US30 billion in stock. It also raised its quarterly dividend.

The maker of the iPhone and iPad is by far the world’s most valuable company by stock market value, well ahead of Exxon Mobil at $US403 billion and Microsoft at $US394 billion.

Investors and analysts were upbeat on Apple at the start of the holiday shopping season, expecting strong sales during the gift-giving period that kicks off in the US with Friday’s (AEDT) Thanksgiving holiday.

“We believe the stars are well aligned for Apple to shine bright this holiday season,” said Brian White at Cantor Fitzgerald in a research note, adding that he expects to see heavy demand for the new iPhone models and a refreshed line-up of iPads.

Apple has also launched its new mobile payment system that allows consumers to purchase goods at some merchants with a tap of the iPhone, and is working on a smartwatch for release in 2015.

AFP/AP

[CityFarmer]

A reaction by algo, due to recent oil price decline? But Apple is nothing to do with oil price, right?

Apple tumbles as much as 6 percent in unusual trading

NEW YORK - Apple Inc shares tumbled shortly after the start of trading on Monday, briefly suffering their largest price drop in at least three months on an unusual spike in volume.

Selling accelerated just before 9:51 a.m. EST (1451 GMT), with more than 6.7 million shares trading in a one-minute stretch, the heaviest minute of trading in Apple since Oct. 29, according to Thomson Reuters data.

The stock lost over 3 percent in that minute, falling as much as 6.4 percent to $111.27. At midafternoon, it was down 3 percent to $115.45.

The cause of the decline was not yet clear, though traders pointed to institutions using selling programs across a wide swath of stocks. Steve Hammer, a trading educator and founder of HFT Alert in Santa Barbara, California, which monitors algorithmic trading, said about 300 different stocks showed elevated price traffic beginning about 9:50 a.m. EST, a sign of institutions putting on sell programs.
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http://www.todayonline.com/business/appl...avy-volume

[CityFarmer]

Apple Pay continue to grow...

More companies sign up for Apple Pay

NEW YORK — The list of companies working with Apple Pay continues to grow.

Apple announced that in recent weeks the company had signed up dozens more banks, retail stores and start-ups for Apple Pay, the company’s e-commerce product, which allows customers to buy things with little more than a wave of their iPhone.

The companies that recently agreed to work with the service include SunTrust, Barclaycard and USAA. Ten more banks, including TD Bank North America and Commerce Bank, backed the new form of payment yesterday.

Staples, the big-box office supplies retailer, accepts Apple Pay at its 1,400 locations in the United States. Chain grocers such as Winn-Dixie and Albertsons take it, too. And on Friday, Amway Center, the home to the Orlando Magic basketball team, will accept Apple Pay at many of its retail and food and beverage stands during games.
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http://www.todayonline.com/tech/gadgets/...-apple-pay

[Behappyalways]

Secret video of 'exhausted workforce' in Chinese factory making Apple products
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-30540538