Apple Inc.

[CityFarmer]

Will the financing strategy changes with the new CFO? The new CFO is new to Apple, and might bring in new idea...

Apple finance chief retiring
05 Mar 2014 06:12
[SAN FRANCISCO] Apple on Tuesday announced that the chief finance officer who served during the company's meteoric rise over the past decade is retiring later this year.

Peter Oppenheimer will leave in September, turning the position over to Luca Maestri, according to the maker of iPhones, iPads, iPods and Macintosh computers.

"Peter has served as our CFO for the past decade as Apple's annual revenue grew from US$8 billion to US$171 billion and our global footprint expanded dramatically," Apple chief executive Tim Cook said in a release.

"His guidance, leadership and expertise have been instrumental to Apple's success, not only as our CFO but also in many areas beyond finance." Mr Maestri joined Apple in March of last year and was said to already be managing most of the California-based company's financial matters.

Mr Maestri's professional background spans more than 25 years and includes stints as chief financial officer at Xerox and Nokia Siemens Networks, now called Nokia Solutions and Networks, according to Apple.
...
Ref: Business Times Breaking News

[CityFarmer]

There is a thin line between tax avoidance and tax evasion...

Apple moved S$11.3b in profits from Australia to Ireland: Report

SYDNEY – Apple has reportedly moved US$8.9 billion (S$11.3 billion) in profits from Australia to Ireland in the past 10 years, sparking renewed calls to curb corporate tax avoidance.

The Australian Financial Review reported that it has obtained documents from Apple Sales International, an Irish company that is at the core of Apple’s tax arrangements, which showed the company’s estimated income from 2002 to 2013. Apple reported pre-tax earnings in Australia that totalled just US$88.5 million last year, but sent US$2 billion of income to Ireland via Singapore in the same period, according to the AFR.
...
http://www.todayonline.com/business/appl...and-report

[rogerwilco]

http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_2...are-behind

New book says Apple's best days are behind it
By Patrick May
pmay@mercurynews.com

POSTED: 03/18/2014 03:06:34 PM PDT
UPDATED: 03/18/2014 04:44:37 PM PDT

Apple is not going to like this new book about Apple.

The title -- "Haunted Empire: Apple After Steve Jobs" -- pretty much says it all. While author Yukari Iwatani Kane does say on page 336 of her 338-page book that "it's not too late for Apple to dazzle the world again," by that point she's made her conclusion clear -- Apple's long slide began the day Jobs died.

"Without him," the former Wall Street Journal reporter wrote in her book, which hit stores Tuesday, "everything changed. The dilemmas multiply and deepen. Solutions slip further out of reach."

Kane is certainly not the first to predict the decline of the Cupertino tech giant. And she fails to drop any bombshells, other than a quote from Jobs calling television "a terrible business," suggesting an Apple TV may not be in the company's future after all. Instead, Kane serves up anecdotes from other books and press accounts, along with some original reporting.

Yet the author makes a cogent case that with the loss of Jobs' mercurial genius, the lingering legal battles and patent wars, and the thickening competition from tech companies on all sides, the innovative powerhouse that Jobs created may be slowly fading in his absence.

Neither Kane's publisher, HarperCollins, nor Apple responded to interview requests, although CEO Tim Cook did release a statement saying "this nonsense belongs with some of the other books I've read about Apple. It fails to capture Apple, Steve or anyone else in the company," adding that he feels "very confident about our future."

The book, which Kane says was crafted from interviews "with nearly 200 sources," including "past and present" Apple employees, lays much of the blame for Apple's woes at Cook's feet.

"Was Cook the best choice to chart Apple's future?" Kane asks midway through her tale. She obviously feels he was not, although she doesn't suggest a suitable alternative, implying that anyone running Apple in Jobs' wake would have been doomed to fail. "Forgetting him was like trying to forget the sun," she writes. "He still reigned over every hour of every day. That was his blessing, and their curse."

Starting with a brief history of Jobs at the helm, including his resentful tirade against his appointed successor when he felt Cook was getting too big for his britches, Kane quickly moves on to the post-Jobs era. She focuses on the challenges Apple has faced since Jobs' death and portrays Cook, despite his prowess at supply-side management, as stumbling from one pickle to the next.

"Cook was a seasoned businessman and arguably a better manager than Jobs," Kane writes. "He was organized, prepared, and was more realistic about the burdens of a company of Apple's current size. Many even considered him a genius in his own right. But no one could beat Jobs at being Steve Jobs, especially Cook, who was his polar opposite."

While Kane' book was praised by Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson for her "great insight and unparalleled reporting," other observers complained that the book did little to shine light on what's truly going on behind the Apple curtain.

"I thought there was very little that was new in the book," says Cult of Mac blog publisher Leander Kahney, author of "Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Products." "It's basically a rehash of public events over the past few years and I don't think there's anything new to learn here. The book does fill in some of Cook's biography, and she talks to some of his former school teachers, but there's nothing really revealing."

Kahney, who said Isaacson's book also failed to truly pierce Apple's infamous wall of secrecy, noted that he was hard-pressed to find a single quote from a named current Apple employee, calling the book "one more failed attempt to really shed any light on Apple."

Regardless of whether the unnamed sources Kane cites possess an accurate view of how things stand today behind Apple's walls, she seems convinced that a Jobs-less Apple is an Apple hopelessly adrift.

"Apple used to be exceptional," Kane writes. "Not necessarily in its behavior, which was often predatory. But certainly in its ability to inspire. Those days are waning."

Contact Patrick May at 408-920-5689 or follow him at Twitter.com/patmaymerc

[rogerwilco]

http://recode.net/2014/03/18/tim-cook-sl...-on-apple/

Tim Cook Slams New Book on Apple

March 18, 2014, 1:30 PM PDT

By Ina Fried

Apple CEO Tim Cook on Tuesday offered a particularly harsh take on “Haunted Empire,” a new book that chronicles Apple in the post-Steve Jobs era.

The book, written by former Wall Street Journal reporter Yukari Iwatani Kane, offers a critical assessment of how Apple has fared in the years since Jobs’s death.

“This nonsense belongs with some of the other books I’ve read about Apple,” Cook said in an email to CNBC. “It fails to capture Apple, Steve, or anyone else in the company.”

In the book, Kane paints a picture of an Apple that is struggling to find its way without its longtime leader.

Kane also goes to great lengths to describe the differences between Jobs and Cook.

That said, venting in an email to a reporter or customer is exactly the kind of thing Jobs did from time to time.

Cook, as he has in the past, repeated his confidence in Apple’s future.

“We’ve always had many doubters in our history,” he said in the email. “They only make us stronger.”

Update: In an email, Kane told Re/code that it seems her book touched a nerve with Cook. Here’s her full statement.

“For Tim Cook to have such strong feelings about the book, it must have touched a nerve,” Kane said. “Even I was surprised by my conclusions, so I understand the sentiment. I’m happy to speak with him or anyone at Apple in public or private. My hope in writing this book was to be thought-provoking and to start a conversation which I’m glad it has.”

[rogerwilco]

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/18...teve-jobs/

ONE ON ONE MARCH 18, 2014, 7:00 AM
A Conversation With Yukari Kane, Author of ‘Haunted Empire: Apple After Steve Jobs’
By BRIAN X. CHEN

More than two years after the death of Steven P. Jobs, Apple has continued to rake in huge profits with record sales of iPhones and iPads. But despite Apple’s ever-growing mountain of cash, some doubt the company’s success will continue without its visionary leader, whose unwavering obsession with quality helped make its products great and innovative.

Yukari I. Kane, a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal who was well known for leading news coverage on Mr. Jobs’s health, is one of those doubters. In her new book, “Haunted Empire: Apple After Steve Jobs,” she recounts Mr. Jobs’s final years at Apple and then zooms in on the state of the company under its current chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, who was previously chief operating officer.

In an interview, Ms. Kane talked about some of the highlights of her book. An edited transcript of the interview follows.

Q.
How has Apple changed under Mr. Cook? Is it for better or worse?

A.
Apple is becoming a more traditional, process-focused company under Cook. Project managers have more say than ever before and product development is accompanied by more rigorous financial analysis.

In terms of the role of the C.E.O., Cook is more of a delegator compared with Jobs, who got into the weeds of anything that interested him. Cook is also a better internal communicator. He sends out more all-staff emails and holds more town hall meetings. He also understands that people need to take vacations and have down time, whereas Jobs routinely made a habit of calling people back midvacation.

The question of whether these changes are for the better is complex. Cook brings more efficiency and organization to Apple, which is good because the company’s increased size and scale requires a professional, consistent leadership style that is more inclusive than Steve Jobs’s was.

But this style also adds layers of bureaucracy, which can slow down innovation. By a similar token, while it’s nice for employees to get more flexibility with vacations and such, you lose the intensity that is required to keep hitting home run after home run. It’s not a surprise that one of Jobs’s first acts upon returning to Apple back in the 1990s was to eliminate its sabbatical program.

Q.
In your book you portray Tim as a foil to Steve. Steve was a micromanager, obsessed with details and prone to temper tantrums. Tim, by contrast, seems laid back and steady-handed. What are the pros and cons to their different styles of management?

A.
I don’t think of Tim as laid back. In fact, he’s extremely intense. His intensity is just more quiet and dogged than Steve’s.

The advantages of Steve’s approach were that he was dynamic and involved. His demands could be outrageous – for example, people had to work on Christmas Day because he decided he wanted a different color iPod shuffle at the last minute. Not all of those little obsessions may have mattered, but together they added up into the company’s game-changing lineup of products and services.

Cook is more systematic and analytical. That means that he’ll run a tight ship, and Apple will be financially well managed under him. I’m not sure we’ll ever see his thumbprint on a product, though, because he’s not the type of person to get involved in the minutiae. I could see him running the numbers to make sure that new products are marketable, but he depends on his lieutenants to figure out the nitty-gritty.

One anecdote came up in my reporting that I think really shows the difference in their thinking. I don’t know if there was an official policy, but in the first weeks after launching a product, Apple would often replace damaged devices even if the customer is at fault.

When the idea was first proposed, Steve liked it because he saw how satisfied customers could bring in more business through positive word of mouth. His attitude was, “Hey, we’ve got to make people happy. If we’re spending an extra nickel, it’s O.K.”

Tim was initially opposed because of the potential costs.

Q.
Tim fired Scott Forstall after the embarrassing hiccups with Apple maps. Was this a mistake? Do you think Steve would have done the same thing?

A.
I think that Forstall’s departure is a loss to the company. He was a bright engineer with ambition and vision, and no company can afford to lose that kind of talent. But he was also the least-liked executive team member and was a controversial and disruptive figure. Jobs had the force of personality to rein in other strong personalities like Forstall’s, but if Tim Cook couldn’t control him, it was the right call to ask for his resignation.

It’s anyone’s guess how Steve would have reacted. It would have probably depended partly on whether he knew of the problems beforehand.

Q.
The book seems to conclude that Apple will go in a downward spiral without Steve as its leader. But Apple’s profits are still extremely high, and it continues to break sales records with iPhones and iPads. Why are those numbers not enough?

A.
In terms of profits and revenues, there is no question that Apple continues to be a successful company. But Apple’s own definition of success is much more. Its promise is to be exceptional – to make insanely great products that change the world. The latter is difficult to do without Steve Jobs’s reality distortion field. In its absence, Apple is simply less convincing.

If Apple lowers its bar of success to something closer to that of its competitors, then it could continue to do “great.” But then you’re talking about a great company on a more ordinary scale. And, likely, with lower profit margins to match.

Q.
Where do you see Apple going in a few years? Does it remind you of any other big companies, and if so, how?

A.
I can’t predict what is going to happen in the long term. Apple still has time to course-correct, and companies tend to go through cycles of peaks and valleys. What I do see is that Apple is currently struggling to cope with the loss of a visionary founder whose presence was an integral part of the company’s identity. At the same time, Apple is also trying to keep its dominance in a hyper-competitive industry.

The business challenges that Apple is facing would have been considerable even if Steve Jobs were around. His loss makes it all the more difficult because there is no one with the moral authority to take the kind of risks that made Apple so iconic in the first place. A hired manager will never have the same authority as a man who not only founded the company, but rescued it as well.

At the end of the day, Apple is just as mortal as everyone else. If Apple stays on the current trajectory, I think the danger is that it could turn into Sony.

[CityFarmer]

When more and more OTT services available over the "dump pipe", the telecom operators might be able to monetize further by providing premium "pipe" for time-sensitive OTT services. Will it happen to local RSPs, after more OTT services are getting popular?

Apple reportedly discussing streaming-TV with Comcast

UNITED STATES — Apple is in talks with Comcast Corporation to enter into a deal for a streaming-television service that would allow Apple set-top boxes to bypass congestion on the web, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

The discussions are in early stages and there are a lot of hurdles to be crossed before a definitive agreement could be reached, the Journal said.

Apple, which wants its television service’s traffic to be separated from public Internet traffic over the “last mile” for faster transmission, is looking for special treatment from Comcast’s cables to bypass congestion, the report said.

Comcast declined to comment, while Apple was not immediately available for comment outside regular US business hours.

Apple has been in talks for a faster television set-top box with Time Warner Cable which recently agreed to be bought by Comcast.

Apple’s US$99 (S$125) television box competes with similar streaming devices from Roku and Google.
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http://www.todayonline.com/business/appl...tv-comcast

[specuvestor]

Concur with Yukari Kane. But for anyone following tech trends it is a conclusion not difficult to arrive at. The interesting thing IMHO is that share price is still not trading below $400

If you have been following Apple and its business model, you will know that Apple is not an easy company to manage or emulate, which therein lies its competitive advantage. Steve Jobs is probably one of the few perfectionist people that can do it. Most companies I follow does not have such strong unique qualities, even Dell, which was an operational darling 10 years ago.

The apple model is a difficult model. Essentially it focused on design and usability. Problem is that these 2 often conflict, and hardware integration with software also is difficult. From the first day of iPhone it has been mocked as just another smartphone by Motorola to Nokia.

Today there are still many who still doesn't understand why the iPhone is like a mini miracle in design yet addresses a blatantly obvious problem then: full HTTP access with ease of use

Today I doubt Tim Cook who was a great Ops guy who contributed to the mini miracle, is however able to deliver the original unique driver of the iPhone or even the iPad. BTW the iPad blue print came out before iPhone and the idea of iPad is 30 years old

[orangetea]

A string of good news on surprised earnings last night. (See below)
But also some moves on the stocks

Apple (AAPL) has announced a 7:1 stock split.
Split-adjusted trading will start on June 9.

The company's buyback authorization has been raised by $30B to $90B, and its quarterly dividend hiked by 8% to $3.29 (2.5% yield).

Apple Inc. (AAPL) declares $3.29/share quarterly dividend, 7.9% increase from prior dividend of $3.05.
Forward yield 2.51%
Payable May 15; for shareholders of record May 12; ex-div May 8.

==========
Stronger-than-expected iPhone sales (carry higher margins than iPad/Mac sales) led Apple (AAPL) to post an FQ2 gross margin of 39.3% +180 bps Y/Y and above guidance of 37%-38%. GM guidance is set at 37%-38% for FQ3.

iPhone revenue (57% of total revenue) +17% Y/Y to $26.1B, an improvement from FQ1's 6% growth. iPad revenue -13% to $7.6B, a reversal from FQ1's +7%. Mac revenue +1% to $5.5B vs. +16% in FQ1.

iTunes/software/services revenue +11% to $4.57B (+19% in FQ1), accessories +3% to $1.4B, iPods -52% to $461M.
Exc. retail, Americas revenue +2% vs. -1% in FQ1. Europe +4% vs. +5%, Greater China +13% vs. +29%, Japan (has been a strong spot) +26% vs. +11%, rest of Asia-Pac (has been a weak spot) -17% vs. -9%. Retail sales were flat after growing 9% last quarter.

~$18B was spent on buybacks, providing a lift to EPS. As a result, Apple's cash/investment balance fell by ~$9B to $150B.

[specuvestor]

Share buyback of 1/5 market cap, stock split, hike dividend... from cash rich to debt ladened... Great ROE on financial engineering. Share price jump 8% post market but this is not going to be a gift that will keep on giving

iPhone sales growth mainly from new markets in BRIC

Rumour of iPhone 6 delay... I'm not even sure who around me is anticipating iPhone 6

[CityFarmer]

An acquisition of US$3.2 billion, should has good reasons...

Apple close to buying headphone maker Beats for S$4b: FT

NEW YORK — Apple is close to buying headphone maker Beats for US$3.2 billion (S$4 billion), the Financial Times reported.

The purchase of Beats, which also runs a streaming music service, would be Apple’s largest ever acquisition, the newspaper reported. It said the deal could be announced as early as next week.

Founded by rapper Dr Dre and music producer Jimmy Iovine, Beats primarily produces products under the brand “Beats by Dr Dre” and competes with headphones made by Skullcandy, Sennheiser and Bose.

“This is really puzzling,” said Forrester analyst James McQuivey. “You buy companies today to get technologies that no one else or customers that no one has.”

“They must have something hidden under the hood.”
...
http://www.todayonline.com/tech/apple-cl...r-beats-ft