Norfolk County Council beats Apple in £385M iPhone row | Hacker News Reader

Norfolk County Council beats Apple in £385M iPhone row

bbc.co.uk

40 pointsIndySun10 comments

Seems pretty straight forward. Tim Cook says sales in China are not under pressure. Within two months it’s revealed that they’re stopping production lines because there is significant pressure. If it turns out this wasn’t new information between those two points in time then it was a fraudulent claim. Not the most interesting one imo.

This is a very large sum compared to the fines imposed by the EU, unless Norfolk County's pension fund is much larger that I think.

The class was led by Norfolk County's pension fund but seems to include a much wider range of investors:

> The claimants in this case were all investors who had bought shares between November 2018 and January 2019.

And the EU fines in the Spotify related case were just a bit under 1.8 billion euros / $2 billion, so still significantly larger but indeed an interesting comparison point.

The fund is just $5B but the lawsuit covers anyone who bought Apple during the period

The headline seems a little clickbait and I don't think it's HN worthy just because it has Apple in the title. This is really a dull "pension fund investor sues company" with little to do with iPhones.

isn't it entirely about iphone sales forecasts and an executive's public comments on them?

Apple settling for a significant amount of money on the question of whether CEO Tim Cook mislead investors about upcoming expectations for iPhone sales only feels dull from a tech point of view, but HN is a site for anything people find interesting not just tech-specific content, and from a business point of view it is a rather interesting story and it happens to be about one of the most influential tech companies in the world and involves them settling for a sizeable amount of money in response to the accusation that something Tim Cook said about iPhones fraudulently misled investors. The title is pretty much bang on and one of the most detailed, least clickbaity titles around - unless when you commented it was something other than the current "Norfolk County Council beats Apple in £385M iPhone row" (in fact it's almost under-playing it as it's local press focusing on the local aspect of a £5B pension fund who are one member of a class action of Apple shareholders).

£385M obviously isn't going to break Apple's bank balance, but it's 0.5% of their last annual profit so it's at least a noticeable slap on the wrist to not do it again.

From what little I know of the case I do actually feel it's weak and if I were magically to be made a judge and in charge of deciding this case, from this article & the couple of others I've read I would find in Apple's favour, but I'm not an expert in this area nor do I know enough about it to be confident it's even my best guess on which side deserved to win. However I think even if it were obvious and universally agreed that Apple didn't deserve this case and should or would have won rather than settling, the fact that it did happen and they did settle would keep it interesting (still as business news that happens to be tech-related, not as tech news).

Is this all above the board? This feels like the type of thing ready for abuse.

Are there different tax implications for settlements? Is this basically a stock buyback without being a stock buyback. Is it a more friendly dividend?

Is there any party directly harmed by this?

I'm not sure I quite understand your questions.

I'd say that Apple are directly harmed, by the court order to pay £385 million. I haven't seen any suggestion that there has been a transfer of shares as part of the settlement, so it wouldn't align with a stock buyback. Equally, this seems like the opposite of friendly, and the money involved here is tiny compared to Apple's dividend payments.

Corporations aren't people and apple is flush with cash, so I'm not sure what it means for apple to be harmed. Likewise I'm not sure apple is harmed if shareholders feel owning apple stock is safe. The only harm I sort of kind of buy is that it promotes future litigation against Apple.

From a software security perspective, the courts seem like a different "branch" with different properties, so a bad faith actor could explore the difference between what the legal system intends to do and what the legal system can actually do (much like software security is about what software can actually do rather than what the programmer intends it to do).

There are mechanisms for companies to transfer cash/value to shareholders, so if the input and output are the same, but the "stacktrace" of the transfer is different, I think that's worth a little scrutiny.

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