Apple’s Covid-19 Response
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In the last 24 hours I've received more than a dozen emails from random businesses that have my email address - many of which I have not interacted with in years - letting me know that my health and safety is their top priority. It's like someone in the marketing department realized "hey, here's an opportunity to send some spam without looking sleazy".
It's opportunistic and gross.
-sent from nuclear bunker
Disney is interesting because they have the deepest bench, so to speak in terms of catalog. They also have the kids stuff, and all the kids are at home. They also had their stock dip below $100 with the crash this week, had to shutdown their parks, and quite recently reorganized the entire direct to consumer business. I'd put some money on Disney coming out on top there.
Netflix relies on new content to reduce churn. If production is halted I don't know how that looks for them. However if you take out their capex on production, they suddenly become stupidly profitable. So who knows.
As for the rest of people, I agree that when you're competing with hundreds of other sources of entertainment and ways to spend your days, Netflix's catalog may not be amazing, but when most of the population is stuck at home, I'm sure there are plenty of stuff people will find and enjoy on Netflix.
Disney is definitely a runner up too. They've started moving releases closers. They just released Frozen 2 and the new Starwars movie digitally.
I don't think any analysis is valid right now since we don't know what long term even means at this point.
I think the companies that will benefit will be entirely unpredictable, because we're about to fall into a steep descent in our gradient and the optimization of companies business models and products is about to get crazy. Just like '08 and '01.
I've already tried buying some stuff I'd normally get at a store from Amazon and the lead time was questionable.
Better way to think is what is NOT going to change - food, shelter, utilities, telco, etc.
Will go down - luxuries, appliances, home improvement, cars, etc.
The only problem in the long run with streaming services is that they will soon run out of fresh content.
I find it guileful that they announced the closure in the middle of the night at the end of the week, a day after having announced the opening of their four remaining China stores to great fanfare from the equity market.
If they were only concerned about the virus, they would take the display models out of the showroom and continue to process pick-up orders. And they wouldn't shut down stores worldwide (ex-China).
No health body has recommended worldwide retail shutdowns, and no competing device vendor has closed all of its stores worldwide (ex-China). This is a ramification of the factory shutdowns we saw in China several weeks ago.
I suspect the answer is no, because I think those are likely all constrained on the supply side right now and money is not currently the problem.
It's sort of like a disaster happening in the area close to you. Maybe you go to try to donate your time to help others affected by the disaster. Maybe when you get there you see 50 other people standing around twiddling their thumbs because there's more people than they have useful tasks for at the moment. Do you stick around all day with nothing to do so you can say you helped, or do you leave after 30 minutes and promise you'll check back tomorrow to see if they have more use for you then?
Elon Musk tweeted "Coronavirus panic is dumb"[1]. When there were school kids stuck in a cave, he sent a team of engineers halfway round the world to try and build a submarine rescue effort. Instead of tweeting that, he could have tried to build cheap CPAP/respirators in bulk, on short notice and deliver them to hospitals.
I'm not saying he should have, but SpaceX dropped the price of rocketry a lot by trying and using off the shelf components; manufacturing is something which effort and money could plausibly move the needle on quickly, where research into speculative medication might not have any results, and that is something we can imagine him doing where we can't imagine a large company with big manufacturing experience pivoting to doing unexpectedly.
[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1236029449042198528?ref_...
Could he have? How long would it take to retool and retrain whatever resources are needed to be able to do that and actually start producing something? What capacity would he be capable of putting out, given that his his facilities are probably configured for a much difference scale (cars and large semi-bespoke aeronautical components)? If it's a 5% increase in CPAP machines 6 months from now, how helpful is that?
What if doing so means that 20% of the workforce no longer has work to do? What if not producing their actual product and CPAP machines instead leads to enough loss in money/market they need to let some amount of their workforce go?
At some level I don't think asking Musk or Tesla/SapceX to do this is really any different than asking you to work half days for three months and donate the other half your time to helping with Coronavirus issues in some manner while living off savings to help supplement less pay. If during or at the end of that time you don't have a job anymore (either because you weren't there or general market recession), or some major problem came up that you were unprepared to address because you've been reducing your savings, was that a smart thing to do? Did it help more than it hurt? What if you have a family to support?
Musk's responsibility is to his stock holders and employees. He should do his best to make sure his company runs well and is profitable enough that he's not laying people off, or causing the stock price to drop any more than it might because the general market is in free fall, which also negatively affects many (including retirees and pension funds).
Not that it's Apple's job to fix COVID-19, but this is the equivalent of an average US houshold income family crowing about donating $1.80 of their yearly $63k income. Using Apple's annual profit, not revenue. [Edit: correction $18]
> We’re also announcing that we are matching our employee donations two-to-one to support COVID-19 response efforts locally, nationally and internationally.
Plus everyone is still getting paid:
> All of our hourly workers will continue to receive pay in alignment with business as usual operations. We have expanded our leave policies to accommodate personal or family health circumstances created by COVID-19 — including recovering from an illness, caring for a sick loved one, mandatory quarantining, or childcare challenges due to school closures.
Seriously, Apple's leave policy didn't include "recovering from an illness"??
In fact, the only time I ever had to interact with Apple HR about time off was when I wanted 3 months off after my kid was born. I ended up getting paid for all of it except the last week. Any other time I’ve taken sick leave I just need to let my manager know, and I took 2 weeks once when I was hit by a car.
Don’t get the wrong idea, I don’t take sick leave at the drop of a hat, but I’ve been here for 15 years, and life happens. I currently have the max-possible 240 hours of sick leave available. In my view, Apple are fairly generous for a US company regarding sick leave. US companies pale in comparison to EU companies, but that’s the US for you.