Slashdot Mirror
Apple Posts 4th Quarter Financial Results
theanonymousbrit writes "From the AppleInsider article: 'Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2004 fourth quarter ended September 25, 2004. For the quarter, the Company posted a net profit of $106 million, or $.26 per diluted share.' This profit (on a revenue of $2.35 billion) apparently constitutes Apple's highest fourth quarter in nine years. In terms of actual units shipped, over 830,000 Macs and 2 million iPods were sold over the quarter. The strength of the new iMac G5 is also credited. Pretty impressive figures."
And even if there were someone with the passion and marketing-savvy to keep the RDF intact, Steve Jobs is the kind of person who would either 1)recognize this as an immediate threat to his "control" of the company, or 2)not recognize the potential usefulness of said person and instead not get along with them because they are similarly egotistical and/or bullheaded.
:)
Even pushing 50, Steve is still convinced he's going to be there for Apple, forever. There is no heir-apparent because Steve won't let there be one, not because one doesn't exist.
Listening to the analyst conference call, which is a pretty interesting thing to do, regardless of the company, Apple disclosed, and did not disclose, some interesting items:
(1) They have reached supply/demand balance with the G5 processors with the potential exception of the top market 2.5 Ghz which may have slightly more demand over the next three months than IBM can supply for.
(2) They would not discuss the possibility of FLASH based iPods and/or lower cost units to penetrate the low end market
(3) Apple reitterated thier interest in the $800+ desktop market and not the sub $800 market
(4) About 30% of Apple store sales are to people who have previously owned Windows boxes and their sales to people who have never owned a PC are down from the pervious year, which Apple attributed to there being fewer and fewer people who have never owned a PC before.
(5) The new iMac G5 is off to an impressive start and they wish they could have had it for back to school buying season.
(6) Their current iPod promption is an exclusive pre-release with U2. Apple feels very good about their strategy that is holding 70% of the on-line legal download market with Wal-mart and Real at 6%, Napster with 10%.
(7) iPod is in lots of channels including BestBuy (ed note, I have also seen for sale at Foly's department store in Texas and the HP iPod is for sale at Radio Shack). This is iPod only but Apple continues to look for strong retail partners for CPUs as well.
(8) An analyst said 'hPod' and the Apple person corrected him to the tune of the HP branded iPod or something of that nature.
(9) Apple's board from time to time considers stock buy back programs but is not interested in one at this time. This is noteworthy because many top level Apple execs (Jobs being most notable) have very large stock option packages but low salary (Jobs' being $1). Since a share of stock is a percentage of ownership in the company, when the company issues more shares, this dilutes the value of a single share already outstanding. By buying back stock in the open market, a company would increase stock value, because exisitng stock would have the reverse effect, it would become a larger percentage of the company than it was previously. Since Apple is trading at over $40 per share now, not buying back the stock could signal that Apple Corp thinks it over valued at $40, does not want to drive the stock price higher, or simply is interested in investing the cash into R&D, merchandising, etc.
(10) Apple did have a truly wonderful quarter and it is a shame we will never know how it would have faired with a larger suply of iMac G4 or quicker availability of the iMac G5.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
*rolleyes*
/seriously/ claiming that, at a time when Apple had about 3 billion in cash, a 200 million "injection" "saved" them?
Are you
Apple wasn't bankrupt in '97, nor anywhere near it. They simply lacked focus.
But then what does Apple do with the computer?
They've just taken a hit to their profit by offering a discount. They could:
but that would mean in a way "endorsing" non-apple computers
But where? Education
now they'd have to pay even more to dispose of them
Which would just mean a new supply of cheaper competitor machines enter the market(when the seller re-sells them) where they (Apple) have subsidized the cost difference between a new and used machine
I just don't see any way this would be a 'win' for Apple
However, the investment was a very big deal, and did help stabilize Apple's position. The reasons are far less simple than you are suggesting, though.
It showed that a big player thought Apple was worth investing it. It promised five years of Office updates. It stopped multiple lawsuits between the two companies. This helped reassure people that Apple wasn't going anywhere, but it was about much more than the money.
Also, as I understand it, Microsoft sold off that non-voting stock years ago, and is no longer making any money off of the deal.
My Photography - http://ian-x.com
The Deathlings (comic) - http://thedeathlings.com
Those who have built great companies have done so knowing that their time will come - either in death or retirement. Smart management requires the organization to not depend on a single point of failure.
True, Jobs is the living incarnatiuon of Apple, but Jobs did not deisgn the iPod. Jobs didn't design the iMac G4. Jobs didn't code OS X. In all these things, Jobs was part of the vision, in many cases at Apple, he seems to be the prime visionary, but this 'rubs off' and inspires others and will continue to.
Apple has a strong culture. Cultures don't change overnight and any Jobs replacement would have to fit the culture the Board wants to perpetuate.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
My order for my iMac G5 is in, ships next month. I think your fears about getting help are unfounded. As an experiment we got my wife an iBook... we'd never used a mac before (I admit I do know Unix quite well)... We were able to do most anything with no assistance (or even reading a manual) at all. Even setting up Xcode for Java for my wife's programming class at college. You try something, it just works. Don't have to worry about viruses, don't have to worry about active x controls installing spyware or taking over the browser - that is why people usually need "help" with their computer. So, now we are switching our main box to an apple... still have to keep a pc on hand for games, but for the most part, your fears are unfounded thanks to a very easy to use and elegant interface. It really does just work.
What saved them was not the $200m, but Microsoft's continued commitment to ship MS Office and other MS products for Mac.
I rather care about Apple giving the best computer-experience available right now. But if they have a healthy business strategy, great for competition and the consumers. Great news then !
Animoog.org
I'm an Apple fan but this arguement is just plain stupid. The developer problem facing Apple is not the lack of big names like Adobe and Microsoft but the lack of small names you're probably never heard.
Seriously guys, I have a windows 2 button usb mouse, and it works fine with my mac. So shut up about the mouse. It's just like complaining that you hate windows because it doesen't come with mozilla. -_-
Total shipments were 48.4 million for 2004q4. So, Apple's share of that is 1.7%. HP, in contrast, shipped 7.5 million PCs in the same time frame, a 15.5% share.
Why is it that there's constant hand wringing over apple's market share, and there's NOT constant hand wringing over BMW's (who holds less a share of the automobile market than Apple does of the personal computer market) market share? I didn't buy I mac because I wanted a Ford Torus. I bought a mac because I wanted luxury.
With that said, Apple's 90% share of the HDD based music player, and 70% share of the (DRMed) online music market is pretty impressive. I don't think either holds, but it will certainly be quite hard to unseat Apple from the top of either pile (with no real challenger in sight).
... about Apple's continued success is that there is no apparent successor to Steve Jobs. Back in the beige days before Jobs
Yes they do. (just to name a few)
Honestly, what is so important about market share? Apple is making a tidy profit, has a nice wad of money in the bank, is hiring new people, makes a great product, and has happy customers. If their market share is only 1.7%, well that means they have tons of growing room. Sounds like a good company in good shape to me, and they also sound like a lot nicer a company than most.
Technology: after the PC crash in fall 2000, Apple's competitors hunkered down and shed workers by the thousands. Apple invested in R&D, and came out with OSX, G5, and new iMac designs. I see no reason for that successful strategy to not continue in better times.
Development: The Macintosh has tons of good software. There are the big names already mentioned. There are all the shareware and freeware programs (just take a gander at VersionTracker). Thanks to Apple being savvy about Unix and Open Source, there is also a ton of software being ported over from Linux.
If you are all that amped by market share, Apple does have 82% of the mp3 player market.
"No one's going to die, mister. Mothra's going to come and save us."
Taiki Goto, "Mothra", December 14, 1996
(Released in Japan six days before Apple's surprise announcement of the return of Steve Jobs.)
Why is it that there's constant hand wringing over apple's market share, and there's NOT constant hand wringing over BMW's (who holds less a share of the automobile market than Apple does of the personal computer market) market share? I didn't buy I mac because I wanted a Ford Torus. I bought a mac because I wanted luxury.
Whether or not it's a Luxury machine, it's what you wanted. A BMW might have a low market share, but also the top selling sedan in the USA might also have a low market share when compared to the set of "All Vehicles". When it comes to the market share of cars, what matters isn't that comparison, but comparison to their direct competition. Whatever top selling passenger car there is, is competing against Other passenger cars, HP Servers compete against All Servers. HP Desktops compete against Desktops, Cheap & Cheerful PCs compete against other Cheap & Cheerful PCs, and so on.
Saying that Mack Trucks make only 0.3% of the total vehicle market sounds pretty fucked up, because it's a useless statistic.
One guy further down asked what Apple would do since its marketshare is so small, even though its total userbase is constantly growing.
Most of us who use Macs and PCs know how good the Mac and Mac OSX is. For us, the people who know both sides (and who really doesn't these days?) there is no question.
But the guy raised my interest because I wondered what kind of strategy Apple keeps up its sleeve in case a crisis hits such as the one in the mid 90's. What products and goals would Apple have if large Mac software developers started deserting the platform for Windows or perhaps even Linux in the future? (For instance a lot of Games studios now produce Linux versions, which they didn't before and even Macromedia is considering developing for Linux). What would Apple do if MS stopped producing Office for Mac OSX and Adobe decided that it isn't worth the money develpoing for Mac?
I think Apple under Jobs considers this scenario very often in designing products.
In order to ease the dependance on pure Mac sales, not that Macs will die anytime in the next decade or so, if ever (Dvorak, you clown, where are you?), I think Apple started the semi-independant iPod and iTMS products that, although loosely coupled with Macs in marketing and software, appeal to a far broader base of customers than Macs do. This division is so successful that it even allows Apple to use it as a marketing device for the new iMac.
I think Apple spends more time than possibly any other company in both product R&D and market segment R&D. I don't know any other company that makes as much effort to cater for its various market segments, with the iMacs and iBooks for consumers and education, PowerMacs and PowerBooks for professionals and XServes and XRaid for enterprise, with especially ahuge amount of effort being put into the i- range to make them more appealing than your run of the mill PC or laptop. Added to this the huge amount of research that they must put into OSX R&D in order to keep it as simple, stable and powerful AND goodlooking as it is.
Then there's Apple's software line, ranging from the extremely well thought out and simple but powerful iLife apps, to the professional video and audio applications in whose markets Apple almost dominates. And even the very nice small business database Filemaker belongs to Apple, to round things off.
But back to the main subject. What does Apple do to stave off Microsoft and Adobe desasters? In the first case, Apple has a not very well kept secret that it keeps OSX compiled and up to date for x86. This mere fact is probably enough to keep Microsoft on its toes and keep the Office version for PPC rolling. The strange CherryOS post of yesterday showed just how much interest there would be for OSX on x86. If I put on my tin-foil hat I would be nice a conspiracy minded and say that the CherryOS debacle would be in Apple's inerests in order to simply show MS how muuch damage Apple could do to MS' marketshare.
Then, anyone who's been watching the development of OSX 10.4 Tiger knows about the CoreImage and CoreVideo technolgies. Those two technologies allow developers to slowly start gnawing away at Adobe's domination in that market, by making it easy for graphics developers to make applications that now only Photoshop and Illustrator can do. Apple is extremely clever in doing this because it will be a slow process, one that Adobe won't notice and suddenly kill InDesign and PS and AI, until the competition slowly makes itself known, when it will be too late for Adobe to blackmail Apple the way Gates did in the 80's with Excell and Word forcing MacBasic out.
In doing this Apple is taking a page from Microsoft who orginally got its strong position by using developer power. (Ballmer didn't dance on stage for fun, you know. He really meant that)
I think Apple has an even rosier future than imagined.
But then again, maybe the new iPod with image capability will be an absolute dud, so you never know.
What would you say, perhaps, if in 5 to 10 years, Linux had captured 50% marketshare in the PC market? Would you also ask where the applications were now today? Or would you look at the growth in Linux in general.
But "the growth in general" was the point of my calculation: with only 1.7% of newly shipped PCs, where actually is the growth in Macintosh?
There are indeed corporations using OSX, often because the TCO is very low
Everybody likes to throw around TCO claims. If they are demonstrably low for OS X, why isn't everybody buying it? See, I think TCO claims are just hard to prove, for anybody.
That situation has now stopped and people are moving back to the Mac because of its superior colour management and stability and flexibility and simplicity.
You state those as if they are self-evident facts. I'm sorry, but to someone who uses OS X part time, they are not self-evident. Stability seems to have stopped being a distinguishing factor between systems anyway: all major OSes seem to be able to stay up, even under load. I keep challenging people to show me quantifiable data demonstrating that OS X has better usability, but nobody has. I don't even know how to measure "simplicity" and "flexibility", but informally, I just don't see much of a difference. (The Macintosh's built-in color management support is of no use to us.)
I used to be a Windows sysadmin, so I know what I'm talking about.
And I used to be a UNIX sysadmin, Windows sysadmin, and Linux sysadmin, and I've been exploring the use of OS X because of all those claims of lower TCO and simplicity. I don't see it. I think a mostly-Mac environment might be slightly simpler, but adding Macs to a mixed environment causes more work, not less, as far as I can tell.
and because it supports traditional Unix enterprise systems very well (The Java integration is the best available) [...] As long as Apple keeps on growing, developers will keep on making apps for the platform, even, with time, specialised ones.
So, Apple's technical vision of the future is to continue to make incremental improvements to Cocoa/Quartz/Aqua, keep offering Carbon, and keep offering Java? That is, as a language mix, people will keep writing software in Objective-C++, they will keep writing GUI apps built out of widgets in user interface builders, and occasionally write Java applications, often with non-WORA Cocoa API calls? Is that it, or are there any other major initiatives?
What would you say, perhaps, if in 5 to 10 years, Linux had captured 50% marketshare in the PC market? Would you also ask where the applications were now today? Or would you look at the growth in Linux in general.
I'm not even sure what that means: do you mean a single Linux-based distribution, anything based on a Linux kernel, Linux running PC apps in compatibility mode? I am also not sure whether the question even makes sense for Linux (since there are no "applications" in the OS X sense) or whether having 50% market share is even desirable.
In any case, based on your question, I conclude that you indeed believe that the PC market is a prize worth going for and that it is Apple's goal to get a large share of it and to get lots of applications for its platform. Is that the vision of the future that Apple has?
That's great, but what are they going to do with all their spare cash?
There's really no such thing as spare cash.
When Apple had about $2 billion in the bank, the company started building retail stores. That cost a lot of money to launch, and it's worked out very well. If the company had been in debt at the time, it would have been far more difficult to take the leap of faith and spend the millions that it costs just to find out whether Apple retail stores were going to work. After all, Gateway had already blown around a hundred million on their retail disaster.
The more cash on hand, the bigger the risks the company can afford to take, and make no mistake: launching a product like the iPod is very risky. If you blow it, it can cost you a fortune in damage to your reputation, willingness of resellers to carry your products, etc, etc, over and above your direct expenses to develop the product. But to be a technology leader, you have to take risks, and the cash you have on hand is what gives you the freedom of action to take those risks.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Software developers look at more than hardware marketshare.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.