We brought you news yesterday on some of the risk factors Apple sees in the year going forward, gleaned from the densely informative 10-K form that they filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Of course, that’s hardly the only diamond in the 100-page rough, so here’s a round-up of other interesting details that have been extracted.
First up, Apple has apparently staffed up considerably in the last year, going from 21,600 full time employees to 32,000, an increase of 48%. Most of Apple’s employees work in retail and the company opened 50 new stores in 2008—between that and adding employees to existing store, it accounts for about 8,000 of those 10,800 new employees.
The second figure was a staggering increase in the number of Mac sales, which rose by 2.7 million units from 2007 to 2008, a rate of 38% in both units and net sales. Apple sold 9.715 million Macs in 2008 and, as TMO points out, the $14.2 billion in Mac sales trumped Apple’s total revenue of $13.93 billion in 2005. That’s quite a jump in just three short years.
As Infinite Loop reports, a special note was added towards the end of the 10-K spelling out Apple’s arrangement with outgoing senior VP Tony Fadell, whose title is now Special Advisor to the CEO. Fadell will continue to draw a $300,000/year salary and pull down benefits through March 24th, 2010 (Mac OS X’s 9th birthday, coincidentally?). While Fadell will lose 155,000 shares of unvested stocks, he’ll get 77,500 restricted shares that vest in full on March 24th, 2010—as long as he continues to work with the company. He also agrees not solicit Apple employees with employment offers for a year after he leaves the company, making me wonder if maybe Tony plans on striking out on his own.
Finally, a little game for you. The 10-K lists not only all the members of Apple’s executive team, but their ages as well. See if you can match the exec with the age (answers provided after the jump).
| 1. Steve Jobs | a) 48 |
| 2. Tim Cook | b) 53 |
| 3. Phil Schiller | c) 45 |
| 4. Scott Forstall | d) 50 |
| 5. Ron Johnson | e) 57 |
| 6. Peter Oppenheimer | f) 39 |
| 7. Daniel Cooperman | g) 47 |
Continue reading "10-K roundup: Employees and Mac sales get a boost and guess the executive's age!"
It's that time of year again: Apple has filed its annual 10-K report to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The required report on Apple's business activities, as expected, outlines lots of fun and thrilling info about Apple's financial activities. Boring, right? Wrong: the 10-K is pretty much the only public document that companies have to release in which they have to come clean about almost everything.
Among the items required are "Risk Factors". So what's Apple afraid of this year? Here's a few:
- "Economic conditions could materially adversely affect the Company."
- "The matters relating to the Company's past stock option practices and the restatement of the Company's consolidated financial statements may result in additional litigation. "
- "Future operating results depend upon the Company's ability to obtain key components including, but not limited to microprocessors, NAND flash memory, DRAM and LCDs at favorable prices and in sufficient quantities. "
- "At present, the Company is vigorously defending more than 21 patent infringement cases, 13 of which were filed during fiscal 2008, and several pending claims are in various stages of evaluation."
- "In certain countries, including the U.S., the Company relies on a single cellular network carrier to provide service for iPhone. "
- "Political events, war, terrorism, public health issues, natural disasters and other circumstances could materially adversely affect the Company. "
- "Unfavorable results of legal proceedings could materially adversely affect the Company."
- "The Company is exposed to credit risk on its accounts receivable and prepayments related to long-term supply agreements. This risk is heightened during periods when economic conditions worsen."
Now there's no reason to panic just yet--likely a lot of these are just to cover the company's posterior--but still, things to keep in mind.
[via Apple 2.0]
Somebody should tell Jerry Yang that it’s not seemly to reek of desperation. Earlier this year, the Yahoo CEO appeared to be pretty adamant that his company would not be sold to Microsoft. Redmond had rifled $44.6 billion in the Y!’s direction, a deal that Yahoo soundly rejected.
Unfortunately, things haven’t been going well for YMCA in the meantime. The company had secured an ad deal with search rival Google, but unfortunately, the agreement fell through after the Department of Justice raised antitrust concerns and Google decided it was best to leave.
Now, Yang’s changed his tune on an acquisition by Microsoft. That tune? The Jackson Five classic “I Want You Back.”
“To this day I would say that the best thing for Microsoft to do is to buy Yahoo,” Yang said during a keynote appearance at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday.
Come on, Microsoft. I know there were some harsh things said. You didn’t like my broccoli casserole, and I may have called your mother an overbearing battleaxe. And sure, when things fell through, I fled right into the arms of your worst enemy, who ultimately dumped me like a carton of two week old milk. But those are all behind us now! We can still be together.
Microsoft, for its part, is still smarting after Yahoo’s out-and-out rejection. At a recent event, when asked about the possibility of a merger, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was heard to sniff only “Yeah, who?”
Will two of the tech industry’s biggest darlings give it another shot? Will it end in wedding bells or tears and recriminations? Stay tuned for the next exciting episode of Desperate Corporations.
The world may be in economic free fall, but look at the bright side: some prices are going down too. Gas prices are getting back to reasonable levels (and netting us free software), now the fluctuations in the market are also encheapening iPods.
Well, to some places. And I guess “cheaper” is relative. According to the AFP, Australia is now the place to go if you’re looking to snag the cheapest iPods around. You might recall the iPod standard established by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia about a year ago. Well, Australia’s now jumped to the top of that list, thanks to the world’s economic woes. An 8GB iPod nano runs about US$131.95 in Oz, topping former champ Hong Kong (just in case you’re wondering, the most expensive place to grab an iPod is Argentina, where it runs a whopping US$353.20).
Of course, that’s somewhat offset for U.S. citizens looking to snag cheap iPods, as it requires travel or shipping halfway around the world. And that’s not even counting the myriad dangers of Down Under. Just pony up the extra $20 and buy one here, ‘kay?
Remember when we were all worried about the possibility of Steve Jobs being mortal? When reports of Jobs having a heart attack came in, the stock took a dive. It was quickly head off by Apple representatives, helping the stock recover.
The 18 year old man who dropped the bogus hint was apparently turned over to the authorities for stock manipulation allegation investigation. Remembering my tender 19th year of existence, I can sympathize with the urge to pull a few pranks (cellophane + toilet = funny), but none of my shenanigans ever caused a company’s worth to shift by billions of dollars.
That said, I find it unlikely that the actual intent was stock manipulation. It’s surprising how much traction the story got considering its source is a website that specifically says “That means the stories submitted by users are not edited, fact-checked or screened before they post. Only stories marked “On CNN” have been vetted for use in CNN news coverage.” Personally, I’d wait for a fact-checked story to make stock decision, but that’s just me.
Ever since the rumor sites pulled the rumor of a $799 MacBook out of thin air, the Mac web was abuzz with rampant speculation about its theorized impending appearance at the recent Apple special notebook event.
When such a product didn’t materialize, the Apple stock took another beating and the analysts came out of the woodwork, donning their Expert Hats™ and suggesting that lowering the price of entry for MacBooks to $800 would propel Apple into the magical land of all-encompassing market share, huge profits, and cute ponies.
Yesterday, during the Apple quarterly earnings call, Toni Sacconaghi, on behalf of Sanford Bernstein, asked Jobs whether we would “continue to see more affordable price points across the Mac product family and across iPhone going forward”.
To this, Jobs astutely replied:
“There are some customers which we choose not to serve. We don’t know how to make a $500 computer that’s not a piece of junk, and our DNA will not let us ship that. But we can continue to deliver greater and greater value to those customers that we choose to serve and there’s a lot of them. And we’ve seen great success by focusing on certain segments of the market and not trying to be everything to everybody.”
Given the choice between, on the one hand, owning a small percentage of the market and having guaranteed higher profit margins than most other companies and, on the other hand, aiming for a slightly higher market share by lowering the profit margins, Apple will always choose the former, and it makes sense for it to do so.
Continue reading "Are cheaper Macs critical to Apple's survival in the current economic condition?"
I am buzzing with excitement over Apple’s Q4 financial conference, which gets underway in just a short while. Or maybe that’s interference from my iPhone. Or a swarm of angry bees. So many potential sources. Anyway, as we get ready to liveblog the heck out of the Peter Oppenheimer and Tim Cook Power Hour over at the mothership (link below), here are the numbers from Apple’s own press release.
A nice tidy profit of $1.14 billion on a revenue of $7.9 billion was Apple’s taking for Q4, which ended on September 27th—that’s vs. $6.22 billion in revenue and $904 million in profit last year, so Apple’s still on its way up. Profits per diluted share were $1.26 for Q4 2008, vs. $1.01 in the year ago quarter. Gross margins were 34.7%, up from 33.6% last year at the same time, and international sales accounted for 41% of the quarter’s revenue.
Mac sales were strong, with 2.6 million shipped during the quarter, meaning 21% unit growth and 17% revenue growth over last year’s Q4. Apple also sold just over 11 million iPods, and an outstanding 6,892,000 iPhones, versus last year’s 1,119,000 in the Q4 2007, which puts them tantalizingly close to the vaunted 10 million mark (they ought to hit in next quarter, no problem).
And they said the economy is in recession. Paugh! And Apple’s all set to launch into its holiday quarter, which is typically its most profitable. It’ll be interesting to see how it all plays out. As always, you can follow our liveblog at the link below, where analysts will pepper Messrs. Oppenheimer and Cook with questions which they will dodge more adroitly than the presidential candidates.
