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> they have no way to put cash they have to work Apple could have built the most incredible semiconductor mega-hub in the world with the money it spent on divi
by totalZero 5y ago
> they have no way to put cash they have to work
Apple could have built the most incredible semiconductor mega-hub in the world with the money it spent on dividends and buybacks in the past decade.
In-house R&D is still a thing. Capital expenditure is still a thing. Pay raises for rank-and-file staff are still a thing. Please don't suggest that acquisitions, buybacks, and dividends are the only ways for Apple and Google to put their free cash flow to work.
Not to mention that both companies carry debt.
- dalbasal 5y agoWaymo is Google's big, speculative in-house R&D project. It's pretty big. They're in for $20-$25bn so far, and it'll require that much again before viability^. That's over a decade, and it is pretty risky. Meanwhile, besides search, most of their big successes were acquisitions: adwords, youtube, android, docs... all acquisitions at core. All extremely cheap, in retrospect. Tesla joining the elite "tech company" ranks has made for some good juxtaposition. They are a "textbook" company, because the textbook more or less assumes that firm = manufacturing. The way they were financed (pre-insanity equity markets), the way they consume capital, etc. Apple, Alphabet, FB, etc aren't like this. ^if