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Billionaire Investor Carl Icahn Sells Entire Stake In Apple (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Billionaire activist investor Carl Icahn said he has sold his entire stake in Apple, citing the risk of China's influence on the stock. The report comes after Apple announced its first earnings decline in more than a decade, where Apple's revenue is dropping 26% year-over-year. Icahn is concerned with the barriers to trade that China's authoritarian regime might put in place. Icahn said he wasn't concerned with interference so much with the country's "relationship" with Apple. "The thing that I'm worried about here in China doesn't affect the whole market. I'm not talking about China's economic status right now. I'm talking about, could the thing with Apple escalate a little bit? And if that does, what does that mean to Apple's profits during the interim?" Icahn acquired a stake in the company almost three years ago, calling the investment a "no brainer." What caused him to sell his 45.8 million Apple shares (priced at $240 a share) was China's economic slowdown and worries about how China could become more prohibitive in doing business.
"Activist investors" are a bane to every publicly traded company. Apple should buy back all of its shares and take the firm private. Then relocate to its own sovereign island nation so the creepy governments cannot demand access to the encrypted data on any of their products and services.
That's a name he and his PR people have made up because it sounds cool. He's a corporate raider: He buys successful companies on a heavily leveraged position, transfers all the debt to them, sells off their assets, and then leaves them to die. He tried to do it with Dell, but failed thankfully.
Let's say what you have suggested happens, that Carl Icahn makes another trillion dollars shorting Apple stock and then buy back at super low price
Let me ask you this --- is there anything wrong with what he does?
After all, this is the FREE MARKET --- If you get to do whatever you want with your own money, Mr. Icahn should have the same right and use his money the way he sees fit
Now, don't tell me about that bullshi 1% thing
They get to be 1% because they use their brain, and if you can't be amongst the 1%, hey, don't blame them, blame yourself for being too lazy to use YOUR brain
That says ... Carl Icahn has a point in saying Apple's over reliance on China (or any other country for the matter)
Ever since the death of Steve Jobs Apple's future has gone bleak. Cook is no Jobs. He ain't got the vision of Mr. Jobs nor the drive to identify the upcoming trend
All Cook has done was sitting on the helm doing nothing
I mean, what's so different between the latest iteration of iPhone with their previous version of the same product?
As far as I can tell, except for the hype, nothing much
Under Mr. Jobs, Apple went from one product to another --- from Apple to Mac to iPod to iPhone to iPad, --- and under Cook, what kind of new product Apple has come out with?
Apple might as well do what Yahoo is doing --- give away the hundreds of billions that it is sitting on to the shareholders, and close their doors, since there ain't gonna be any exciting new product coming, certainly not under Cook
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I doubt he would care to do that, because Apple's stock probably won't increase any time soon. The reason Apple saw a YoY revenue decline is because of the so called "peak iphone", and presently 65% of Apple's revenue comes from guess what. Unless by some miracle Apple can reproduce the same growth they've had in the last 10 years (smartphone market is now matured and saturated and is now starting to go through what the PC market is going through, so good luck with that) their stock is only going to decline for the foreseeable future. So yeah, it's a good time to get out of Apple.