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Apple becomes the first $1T company

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company

#171

Post by temuze »

KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #145

Is Samsung Electronics ridiculously undervalued or what? It generates more profit than Apple https://wccftech.com/samsung-posted-higher-profit-than-apple... yet is valued at only $290 billion instead of $1000 billion. What the heck.

I think there's three big reasons.

Reason #1: Apple has 243.7B in cash right now. That'll already push them to nearly Samsung's valuation.

Reason #2: Samsung's business is more vulnerable. Most of their profits came from the chips division:

https://money.cnn.com/2017/07/27/technology/samsung-profit-a...

Samsung sells components to many companies, including Apple. In fact, Samsung makes more money from iPhone than they do from the Galaxy S8:

https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/10/2/16404430/s...

As an OEM, Samsung has a much more vulnerable moat. What happens when Apple starts to make those components on their own? They already started doing it with processors. What about memory? They buy a ton of memory from Samsung.

Reason #3: reality distortion field :)

Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company

#172

Post by craftyguy »

bepotts wrote: post #154
sharemywin wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because they're utilizing that money so well.

It's their money. If they have a $1 trillion cash sitting on the sidelines doing nothing that is their right to do so. Apple doesn't make money to support governments.

> Apple doesn't make money to support governments.

Sure, but governments do support Apple and its employees.

Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company

#173

Post by lowkeyokay »

drexlspivey wrote: post #76
pliny wrote: post #56

>“Apple’s $1 trillion cap is equal to about 5 percent of the total gross domestic product of the United States in 2018,” said David Kass, professor of finance at the University of Maryland. “That puts this company in perspective.” The comparison would be Apple net income (~$50B) vs. GDP, not market cap (which has units of USD) vs. GDP (which has units of USD per year).

GDP is more like a country's Turnover than Net Profit

That’s debatable. There are a number of ways to calculate GDP. One is the sum of value added, as in the value of the end product minus the value of input. Another is the total sum of income from labor and assets. Since it includes time spent it is not really net profit but it’s not turnover either. It’s some hybrid but, I would say it is closer to net profit.

Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company

#176

Post by wellboy »

captain_murdock wrote: post #158
pseudonym2 wrote: post #83

This will be very controversial, especially in HN, but market cap doesn't mean shit. Apple has roughly $50B in revenue and $120B in equity. Most of it's products could be replaced in less than 5 years by a competitor. Market cap is a measure of public trust among other things but not actual worth or value to society.

On top of the holes in your financial argument, you've overlooked something in your competitor argument. A competitor could replace most of Apple's current products in 5 years, but where will Apple be in 5 years? They'll be five years ahead.

Replacing means that Apple doesn't innovate further.

This always happens with big companies, Nokia, Ericsson, Yahoo, they are replaced by new companies.

5 years ahead for the big company means no progress.

Apple is where it was 5 years ago in terms of innovation. They havent done anything new that was meaningful and only reap the benefits of what jobs invented 15y ago.

Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company

#179

Post by coldcode »

mrtksn wrote: post #36
coldcode wrote: post #14

When I worked at Apple in the mid-90's (BS before Steve) they lost $1B while I was there. I left and moved away because I didn't want to be there when it was sold or went out of business. Exactly one year later Steve came back. Oh well. Being there at the time not one person would have ever thought Apple could be viable much less worth $1T.

Can you tell us a bit more about the morale and employees opinions back then? Was there a prevalent theory about what's wrong and how to fix it?

Press was brutal so it was pretty depressing, some people were still hopeful when Amelio came in, but after a month he vanished and we never heard much from him any more. They took away everything, plants, drinks, even the popcorn machine supplies to save money. Then we were building a new OS which everyone knew was a nightmare death march.
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