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Apple Has Too Much Money
Hugh Pickens writes "AP reports that last week during a question-and-answer session at the company's annual shareholders' meeting CEO Tim Cook said he believes Apple has more money than it needs and his next challenge is to figure out whether Apple should break from the cash-hoarding ways of his predecessor, the late Steve Jobs, and dip into its $98 billion bank account to pay shareholders a dividend this year. 'Frankly speaking, it's more than we need to run the company.' The question of how to handle Apple's cash stockpile is a touchy one, partly because company co-founder Jobs had steadfastly brushed aside suggestions that the company restore its quarterly dividend which Jobs suspended in 1995 when it was in such deep trouble that it needed to hold on to every cent to keep from going bankrupt. Marketwatch analyst Mark Hulbert writes that a compelling case can be made that a huge cash hoard actually represents grave danger for Apple. That's because too much cash often burns a hole in managers' pockets, and they end up doing a poor job of investing that cash—engaging instead in foolish pursuits like empire building. Hulbert adds that a good strategy for ensuring that Apple remains a hungry, growth-oriented entrepreneurial company might be for it to distribute much of its cash to shareholders."
Didn't Tim Cook take over day to day operations of Apple in 2006? Steve Jobs was always the official CEO, but Steve had been grooming Tim Cook for almost half a decade when he finally stepped down. Most of the decisions made in the last six years have been, in part, made by Tim Cook.
I don't think you really know what you're talking about when you say things like "So far, Tim Cook hasn't really done anything significant one way or another and has been kind of 'coasting' on the companies success." when in actuality he has been running the company for 4+ years.
moox. for a new generation.
In regards to #2, some of these factories are in the middle of nowhere because the land was cheap. If the companies didn't build dormitories, their workers would have had no housing as the factories were built so quickly that the local area has not been able to keep up with residential construction. This is the same reason some of the factories are mini-cities. There really isn't any place for the worker to eat or shop. Cars are not the norm in China so most workers can't just get in their car and drive to the nearest town for supplies and housing. Now if you don't build these amenities, your competition is ready to do so and get workers and the contracts you wanted.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
The problem is you're playing the greater fool game. If you intend to make money by selling a stock at a later date, then what you're saying is that you think you can find someone willing to buy AFTER you got the value out of it. Your buying strategy is also then based on inside information, "intuition" or some other divine insight, otherwise people would have already known and driven the price up. Another downside is that you have to actually SELL your assets to get any money from them.
That's not how it works. The stock price of a company has at least some relationship to the value of the company -- certainly it will almost never fall substantially below the liquidation value, because if it ever falls below it, there are plenty of vultures who will swoop in and buy it for just under that amount and then liquidate the assets at a profit.
So if you buy a stock for $100 and it goes up to $120, that is usually because the company is now worth more money. They might have more money in the bank, or their products might be more popular in the market and the expected future profits are higher, etc. The person who buys it is not (necessarily) a sucker -- they're buying something ostensibly worth $120 for $120.
What you're probably referring to is the efficient market hypothesis, which basically says that the risk-adjusted return for any stock is the same, because if it wasn't then market participants would sell stocks with lower risk-adjusted returns (thus lowering their price) and buy stocks with higher ones (thus raising their price), until the risk-adjusted return for both stocks is the same. (The ironic thing about the efficient market hypothesis is that it only works if market participants assume it isn't true -- because if people assume it's true it encourages people to be lazy in evaluating bargains and then it ceases to be true; but since they generally don't assume it's true, it tends to be true. Another way of saying this is "people who trade stocks on the basis of the efficient market hypothesis are suckers.")
But that doesn't have anything to do with whether someone who buys at a higher price is getting a better or worse deal. Stocks with higher volatility (like a lot of tech stocks, because fortunes change overnight in this industry) tend to have higher returns when they're doing well, because the probability is higher that you'll see losses than you will if you buy e.g. Walmart. In other words, the returns can be higher with Apple because the risk is higher which makes the risk-adjusted expected returns the same for both Apple and Walmart (and, if you buy the efficient market hypothesis, all other securities). There is no reason to expect that you'll do better buying Apple vs. Walmart, regardless of their past performance or anything of that nature ("past performance is no guarantee of future results"), because if there was any reason to expect that then the respective prices of those stocks would almost immediately change to reflect it and it would case to be the case.
The point being that if you buy a stock and then later sell it for a higher price, neither you nor the buyer are necessarily suckers. You just have different valuations of the value of the stock -- and the difference may be very small. If you think it isn't worth more than $100 and someone else thinks it's worth $100.20, you aren't having some great existential disagreement about the future of the company. You're disagreeing about whether the future risk-adjusted returns will be two tenths of a percent higher or lower and comparing that favorably or disfavorably with the risk-adjusted returns for other investments (which will be in the same range).
The old school way which is now gaining popularity again is to buy companies that pay dividends. This gives you a return without finding a fool to sell to or cashing out. It's how it's supposed to work. If the stock goes down, it's not even relevant unless they cut the dividend (there is eventually a c