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> On the other hand, Tim Cook is weak. Instead of pumping money into R&D he is courting Wall Street. Dividends. Stock buy-back. Tim Cook has both pumped money
by jonknee 13y ago
> On the other hand, Tim Cook is weak. Instead of pumping money into R&D he is courting Wall Street. Dividends. Stock buy-back.
Tim Cook has both pumped money into R&D and into dividends/repurchase... According to their filings, R&D spending (in fiscal years):
2013 - $4.48B
2012 - $3.38B
2011 - $2.43B
2010 - $1.78B
He has also put a ton of money into operations (paying for factories, locking in huge volumes of components, all available air freight capacity, etc etc). And a ton of money into Apple Stores. At the end of the day $40B is a lot of cash to put to work.
Apple could hire 1,000 engineers at a cost of $250,000 per year and it would only be 0.625% of $40B (and it's actually more like $50B because that would be pre-tax). 10,000 engineers is still not far off from a rounding error.
Apple is waiting around until Democrats will let them bring back cash without a tax hit and then they'll make a special dividend. No financing magic needed.
- yapcguy 13y agoThanks for correcting me on the R&D, I was under the impression (based on product output) that nothing had changed and had in fact worsened. I still don't rate Tim Cook though - he allowed Maps out of the gate. Scott Forstall took the fall for that one, but Tim Cook was ultimately responsible.
- ghshephard 13y ago...And Steve Jobs let MobileMe out of the gate. If you rate anyone based on a few missteps instead of the aggregate of their performance, you are missing the big picture.
- yapcguy 13y agoThat's a fair point, although he did hire that British guy to head up retail... only to then fire him after just a few months. Let's see how he does in 2014.
- gress 13y agoMaps launched poorly, but the alternative - not launching it at all, or delaying it, may well have been considerably worse. That's why Cook let it out of the gate, but fired the engineering manager responsible.
- lostlogin 13y agoHeh, was talking about this today. A big MRI manufacturer's manager has been widely quotes in my little world as comparing their crashing/non functional MRI scanner software update to the Maps drama. Not sure how the two situations are related, but a crashing and non functional MRI scanner is kind of a big deal when you are sick. Mapping software not so much.
- kirtijthorat 13y agoI understand everything but "Apple Is waiting until Democrats will let them..." Really?
- jonknee 13y agoIt's pretty obvious... Republicans can't wait to give a corporate tax holiday. They did it in 2004 for example and it was largely a failure economics wise: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/05/business/05norris.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/05/business/05norris.html?_r=...