Apple Versus Wall Street
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
This is hearsay, clearly, but the point is obvious. Apple management wasn't worried about their near term financials, they were looking at the long game. While Jobs was an amazing focal point and product guy, I suspect the engineer culture at Apple is still focused on the long game.
Yes, a stock drop of $700 to $450 is a big one, but what percentage of Apple employees are overly impacted by such a drop based on the rapid rise -- mainly those hired recently. Those that have been around awhile, I suspect, are in it for the long term.
Stock prices are ment to be about the future earning potential, not so much the current. This is why Amazon has such a high stock price, despite making very small profit compared to say Apple.
However it has come apparent to most investors that Apple is not really going to be able to see much growth, there was dare I say almost a blind hype, a bubble regarding the value of Apple.
There is absolutely nothing poor about having a company with the market cap Apple has, they are cash rich, they have great revenue (who here wouldn't be stoked to own such a firm), but it simply doesn't match up to such a high price.
Right now I think the price is held up by speculation of an iWatch which will once again become the must buy and potentially create an industry which has never managed to exist before (discounting luxury mechanical, or Microsoft's smartwatch, or the one that was on KickStarter).
The question is, who ever thought it was worth $700 per share, where was that growth going to come from?
People had gotten used to Apple being so disruptive, the iPhone I laughed at when launched, £1800 GBP it cost in the UK with the cheapest contract applied. Sat as the computer geek for a hedge fund desk we all scoffed at it, do they not know thats 1/10th of the average salary in the UK? They demonstrated that they could create something which was considered essential. I know students who are scraping buy, in debt, on maybe £6k a year, who will still own the latest smartphone on a contract which puts an annual cost of £500. When out in a rural part of Thailand (trying to de-stress and live like a digital nomad) A local bar owner explained you can tell the girls who are for rent, they own an iPhone 4S. Apple realised people will sell their bodies for such a device.
I was one of the many people, perhaps with a little too much money for his toys to understand why someone would pay so much for such a thing.
Then they did it again. Tablet Computers where not new, but ones that sold, and really sold were.
If Apple are able to do this again, with the sucsess of the iPad in say the watch market, then frankly their current share price could be a steal.
I don't think they will be able too, but what did I know, I was wrong the first time.
There is no real reason to hold a stock that does not pay dividends, except for its potential appreciation, and Apple at 700 was overly hyped indeed, given recent history and outlook.
[1] http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/apple-makes-big-bucks-pro... [2] http://gigaom.com/2010/02/01/apple-makes-at-least-200-per-ip... [3] http://www.thestreet.com/story/11718458/1/heres-how-much-app...
http://www.google.co.uk/finance?cid=22144 http://www.google.co.uk/finance?q=NASDAQ:MSFT&ei=Cr4wUdD...
Apple P/E ratio, 9.82 Microsoft P/E ratio, 15.2
9.82 isn't particularlly growth stock territory, have a look at ones the market thing more highly of: http://ycharts.com/rankings/pe_ratio?p=1&s=calc&d=de...
(This is not intended to be any kind of buy/sell advice)
Only if your expecting growth. People like to use stat trading as if its simple. Just because a company is healthy and has a P/E ratio below 10 doesn't make it a buy.
In fact you can do some fun stuff with historic P/E values, implied volatility, realised volatility and price. Basically Implied Vol is what the options market (and other derivs) is suggesting the future value of the price will be. Realised is what it was historically, if you have the data points you can look at how the convergence of those worked. P/E is another kind of market sentiment, it suggests how much growth a company is expected to achive. When you look at sentiments vs announcements you can get a simplistic view of how sentiments have historically matched reality.
When you start looking at that, Apple is an interesting stock, I wouldn't suggest anyone to buy it based on these things.
Source: Desk 'geek' bitch for a very sucsessful greybox trading fund, who after two years earnt comparatively jack shit.
Although in numbers, techies and entrepreneurs are a minor customer of Apple, they have disproportionate influence and are trend setters.
I remember back in 2001, there was a lot of chatter among techies about OSX. It was all about how it came with a BSD licensed core, good terminal, a standard Unix environment, Perl out of the box, etc.
It was a fresh alternative to Windows which was a lot more open than iOS of today but still pushed software development in non standard and monopolistic directions compared to the Unix based OSX.
Thus began the rise of OSX. It was a credible technical platform and at the same time it would spawn some killer consumer features, a nice and fast simplified desktop environment and well integrated innovative consumer accessories such as the iPod. Sure Apple pretty much always limited their OS to their own hardware, but it didn't matter to techies as long as they played well with others by staying mostly compatible with Unix standards. Entrepreneurs were also free to sell software for it directly to their customers. You could buy a subscription on the devices without giving 30% of the revenues to Apple.
I tried to run a Perl script on my mac the other day and a perl module wouldn't compile because of some error with PowerPC compiler flags. PowerPC! Clearly Perl on OSX has not been maintained for a while.
I'm currently writing a subscription web service along with apps and the 30% cut to Apple is a dilemma for management.
Amazon doesn't let just anyone run apps on their Kindle devices either. However Amazon devices are meant to be pure consumption devices mostly for Amazon products whereas Apple wants iOS to be the main computing platform of the 'post PC era'. Pure consumption devices have a much more limited market than computing platforms. When Apple locks up their platform they are limiting themselves to this much smaller market.
No developer wants their computing platform to be locked down, non standard and encumbered by huge revenue levies.
The software development and entrepreneurial world needed a credible alternative thus came Android. None of them wanted another closed, non standard, fee encumbered platform thus failed, Palm, BB and Windows Phone and eventually Apple.
I do development work in perl in OSX. One of our problems is that Apple does update Perl versions etc.
It's a shot in the dark but I'd suggest editing /System/Library/Perl/5.10/darwin-thread-multi-2level/Config_heavy.pl and removing all instances of '-arch ppc'
Hope this helps
>Thus began the rise of OSX.
I can't say I buy it. In the early 2000s I remember the calls of "the year of Linux on the desktop". If techies were so influential, why didn't that happen? Plus this ignores the introduction of the iMac:
http://www.nytimes.com/1998/10/15/business/company-reports-a...
That was a consumer device released in 1998, responsible for Apple's first profit since 1995, the "third-best-selling computer model in the country", and it didn't run on OS X, it didn't even run on OS 9, which wasn't released until 1999. There's a clear pattern of Apple creating devices aimed at a more mass-market appeal, as opposed to trying to generate buzz with techies.
Is there some way for a company to amicably go private and delist when they no longer need investment? The only example I know of recently is Dell, but that was an unsuccessful company with a low value.
Has been widely known that Japanese companies focus on longer term business goals instead of month-to-month gains, and I argue that worked alright for them.
Instead of valuing so much secrecy I'd make public a ten year business plan, and offer to buy the shares of those who lack the vision, patience, or interest in the company's goals. Thus giving freedom to the company by making those funds available to invest on a long term business plan. This would turn out to be much more affordable for the company.
[1] - http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/11/28/maximizi...
We have seen Michael Dell buying back Dell, companies like Facebook and Zynga getting nothing but grief for having publicly traded stock, Elon Musk making it very clear that SpaceX will stay private so that it will be capable of long-term planning, and now this silliness with Apple that does appear to be just market griping over what is clearly a very strong company looking to the future.
Which is fine, it's their job to make money for the clients and funds they manage, but honestly it's coming across as crying over spilt milk. There's people who took a gamble and came in late, rather than playing the numbers and thinking logically that the price was unsustainable and got burnt, now they're punishing the company and trying to extract something to cover their losses.
Another POV is, that when company pays dividends, they are not sure what to do with the money, they have nothing interesting in pipeline and therefore they can not provide better return on investment than the investors individually can.
I think it makes (common) sense that this is a signal of ending innovation, however, Apple has so much cash, it is difficult to fathom what they could possibly do with it other than return it to the shareholders (which they ARE doing).
That is the other strange thing I see about all of this, they ARE returning value to the shareholders in terms of dividends, are these big shareholders (Einhorn et al) just not happy with the rate at which they're being paid?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dividend_tax#United_States
It's more of a strategy question.