10.8B spent on dividends
66.2B spent on repurchase of shares
For context, Apple spent 16.1B on R&D. It’s amazing they can self-fund this kind of growth while still returning so much capital to shareholders.
Apple paid 14.4% in income taxes in fiscal 2020 and 16% in 2019.
Do your roads now lack potholes?
What if we increase that tax rate to 18% or 20%. Would the potholes go away? (nope)
The potholes have a lot more to do with vast government mismanagement of spending and a failure to raise gasoline taxes to fund infrastructure (at least in the US), than they do with a few billion dollars in tax revenue re Apple.
The federal + state + local government systems of the US have spent something like $70+ trillion over the past ten years. How much of that did they allocate to infrastructure?
They spent our trillions of dollars in infrastructure money occupying and blowing up Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria. A couple of billion dollars from Apple is just about the least of our problems.
Why lie about such an easily checkable thing? In 2020 Apple paid 13.3 BnUSD in income taxes and had a gross profit of 129.8 BnUSD.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/total-p...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/gross-p...
https://www.discoverci.com/companies/AAPL/effective-tax-rate
Jokes aside, I want to point out that the money is made from selling to people. The profit does not come from air. They were from people. You can argue how justified that the profit belongs to the company. But it ultimately comes from people, and should be used on them as well.
So why is the seller then obligated beyond prior agreements to expend the profits of the sale on the buyer? Where is your logic?
Simply put, point of sell is a micro transaction. But profit coming from people ought to be used on people, that's a macro concept.
Just like you won't service intelligence by focusing on individual neurons activity, you won't buy the idea that collective the profit should be used on the people as a whole.
So, why apple profit should be used on people?
Because apple depends on the whole society providing the materials talents social constructs for its profit making. For example, without us military, you can ganrantee that apple will need to pay a lot more in tax to other countries (not saying that's wrong). And without the education system, there won't be enough highly skilled engineer.
And you might ask, the exiting system already extracted tax from Apple business.
That's right.
But the investors of us military and education are not organized as stock based ownership, so that part of value creation was never reflected in Apple' ownership at all. I mean, why someone invest in actual captital be able to grab certain percentage of companies, far larger than the employee of the firm? Wasn't employee do 99.99% of the work instead of shareholders? Let's say us military and education system decide, collectively, Apple should grant certain amount of share from the company, do you think it will work?
No, that's because the system cannot support such mechanism.
Back to the original argument. If the system could not correctly assess the actor's contribution to the profit, then it has to be that the profit needs to be pulled together for the people. And I am sure that Apple took more than their fair shares of economy profit for a smaller group of share holders.
Therefore my statement.
A purchase has a buyer and seller who are making an exchange, both of whom in the United States and the majority of the States are already paying tax on their income. The sale itself may be subject to sales tax. The surplus from the sale at a price agreed upon by buyer and seller, after expenses are accounted for, is profit. This profit becomes taxable income to the seller, and the tax rate set in advance of the reporting period by elected representatives in respectable countries.
The State, both the State of the sale and the United States but referred to generically and collectively as “the State” so as to keep this discussion open to other countries and jurisdictions p, is responsible for its own revenues to cover costs (military, education, or whatever) which include taxes.
So when a seller’s tax obligations are satisfied, which is revenue to the State to cover the government’s costs, what obligation does the seller retain to the buyer beyond warranty and prior agreed-upon support service?
If you want to discuss tax rates, that’s a whole other discussion and definitely not one I’m keen on. What I’m getting at is your idea that profitable businesses remain indentured to their customers beyond the point that their prior obligations are satisfied. They do not.
Discussions cannot have meaningful progress like this.
As I said, in this existing system, one cannot measure the investment value of other parts of the economy. Therefore one cannot justly determine the profit sharing in such system.
If you insist on tax collection is enough to justify the profit ownership, then you are not acknowledging the fact that I totally agree, in the existing system, where there is simply no other alternatives.
But my point was that the system is the problem itself. I.e., this system cannot justly assess the profit ownership. The case in point is that the military and education are not treated as investment like other capital investment.
Income tax is federal, and federal roads are pretty darn good in the US.
iPhone, Mac, Watch, AirPods, etc. all have incredible customer satisfaction metrics.
However, I agree with the parent - you actually have to have great products and services that delight to become big and relevant... and stay big and relevant. This enables your sexy branding to be effective. Your sexy branding doesn't make your products and services better. It just lures consumers in, but that only works for so long unless you deliver on your promise. A brand is a promise kept as the old saying goes.
This is from 7 years ago but a pretty good: The Twilight of Brands - https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/02/17/twilight-brand...
"the rise of brands was a response to an information-poor environment. When consumers had to rely on advertisements and their past experience with a company, brands served as proxies for quality; if a car was made by G.M., or a ketchup by Heinz, you assumed that it was pretty good. It was hard to figure out if a new product from an unfamiliar company was reliable or not, so brand loyalty was a way of reducing risk. As recently as the nineteen-eighties, nearly four-fifths of American car buyers stayed loyal to a brand."
"Roku, a maker of streaming entertainment devices, has thrived even though its products have to compete with similar ones made by Apple (which is usually cited as the world’s most valuable brand)."
So let's say you buy Apple (just the name and branding and nothing else) - you still aren't going to be shit without everything else.
We aren't in an information poor environment. Consumers would know the brand was sold and that the quality could not be trusted.
Bad management decisions, or CEO replacements, can turn really bad, regardless of the current situation.