111–118 of 118 posts
> would not only strike a blow to the UK’s technological sovereignty ARM is currently owned by a Japanese conglomerate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arm_Holdings
Before that it was listed on the FTSE and NASDAQ, so owned by international investors. So what?
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On the claim these companies don’t pay US taxes, you should look at their SEC filings. Here [1], for example, is one for Apple, showing them paying an income tax rate north of 20%, for tens of billions of dollars. Then they pay payroll taxes, property taxes, import taxes, sales taxes, for many more billions. All the companies you claim aren’t paying taxes are. [1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/320193/000032…
That seem impressive numbers until you look at the total numbers that companies they move: https://fortune.com/2018/01/18/apple-bonuses-money-us-350-bi... You are taking the statement literally. In that sense you are completely right, that companies pay an amount of taxes above zero. But, if I pay $100 in taxes but I get back $110 then I have effectively not paid taxes. Even that is not literally true as I paid and t…
Should they also pay US Social Security and employment insurance on their foreign workers in foreign countries?
If you want to look at the foreign country equivalents of these SEC filings, they're all public, and you can look through them. When you do, you'll find Apple pays north of 20% of worldwide income, when totaled worldwide. I've been through their biggest several markets looking through financial data. It's all there for you to check.
You're just making my point - Apple paid all necessary US tax, and it's quite a significant rate (just like US law) compared to US profits. They also paid all required foreign taxes, also at a pretty high rate.
Also, if you think somehow Harry Potter accounting implies Apple accounting, then if I point to a company paying the amount of taxes you like, is that evidence Apple did too? Of course not. It's an invalid comparison or implication in either case.
Same for your made up $100 and $110 story. What if I make up the same story with $100 made and $110 paid in taxes - does that imply Apple paid more in taxes than they made? Of course not.
>That is after all the accounting magic.
What SEC number do you dispute, say for 2017: US sales of 229B, operating income of 61B, or 15B in taxes? These are all well documented, quite reasonable numbers. If they're lying on these, there are significant costs for them if caught. And there's thousands to millions of investors that also care a lot about how accurately Apple records numbers. It makes much more sense these are the legally correct tax numbers.
I presented you Apple's legal filings to cut through all this opinion piece nonsense, since for every opinion piece one way there's one the other way.
The truth in the matter are the legal filings: IRS and SEC. And they're pretty clear Apple pays more tax than the pop believer thinks.
If you want to argue Apple doesn't pay the proper taxes on US income, show me a SEC or IRS filing that shows it.
So you can believe opinion pieces that match your current beliefs. or you can look at the legal filings with the actual data, usually left out of opinion pieces. One will give you a much better and more accurate worldview. One is mostly designed to create outrage and pageviews - the more pageviews the more the opinion piece place gets paid.
Otherwise they, like you and pretty much every entity, pays the tax their required to be law. And like you, and pretty much every entity, they do their best to not pay more than the required amount.
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Would be curious on any Brits' opinions on if this (failure to support revolutionary technology) happens more there, and if so then why. Recognize biases of hindsight, but it seems like private equity markets in Britain aren't interested in technology at the requisite scale. There's an incredible historical tradition [1], but the majority tend to be either developed with the help of a (1) few angel investors (and the…
There are multiple examples of revolutionary technology from the UK: 1) ARM - dominates embedded systems, >90% of cellphones and IoT, sold to SoftBank, now on the way to NVidia 2) DeepMind - arguably global leader in AI, now part of Google 3) Illumina/Solexa - >90% of global DNA sequencing market, biotech leader, sold to Illumina for $600, Solexa sequencing now the basis for a $50bn market cap Britain has the problem…
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A few observations from person experience of working in small startups, and large companies. Being part of companies that were sold, and being both ends of attempted takeovers, all in comparison to what I've seen in US companies. 1. In terms of sensible investment, what I've seen is that success breeds success - one success creates wealthy individuals with experience that can lead or by part of the next round. 2. UK…
> So what you get is lots of interesting small to medium size companies - often started in concert with the strong UK academic sector, and/or diaspora from previous successes - and very few transitions to global players. In my view the biggest reason for the difference in success between UK/EU tech companies and US ones is simply the sheer size of the US market. Particularly for the current set of big-tech incumbents…
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I've come to the conclusion that many of the powerful in the UK view the nation primarily as a means for personal gain of one kind of another, and have no particular attachment to the UK's history, culture, and people, indeed, many of them seem to view the English (in particular) with barely disguised contempt.
Since 1066.
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100x this! I think it's our fault as Europeans that we don't value and invest in tech enough. Why is it the US's fault that they consider tech to be valuable to their economy and national security and we don't? What's stopping us from doing the same? As long as we'll keep treating tech as some cost center instead of a core business while we keep pumping money to keep afloat 19th century industries who's ships have sa…
That's a difficult and slippery slope type problem. If the Europeans stop the US from acquiring companies there, the US ends up doing the same to European companies trying to acquire US assets. We let Germany buy one of the most important companies on the planet in Monsanto. I consider Monsanto to be a national security level company, we should have never let it go. Seed & AG tech is critical for the coming century a…
Many things around have "global importance," and it is long past the time for any modern, globalised economy to undo that.
If China wanted to f__k up the West economically on the supply chain side, they have far, far, far more options to do so than the other way around, and this is not limited by companies on the extremes of labour intensity scale. They are plenty of both low, and high tech companies which are one and only in the world in China.
And so can many countries with industrial economies, not event necessarily large one. Take Thailand for example, and how they gave a fright of a lifetime to Internet companies with a single phrase "It may take at least a few years before the world can make new hard drives."
Or Taiwan, a Microchip embargo today from them may well be a worse thing than an oil embargo of 1970s to a modern economy.
Japan, and Korea both have a deadgrip on high material science products, and not so high as well. Both have giants which control chemicals used in 90%+ of all synthetic fabrics. Life without synthetic fabrics today will not be fun to anybody.
India has a generic drugs supremacy, and is relied upon by much of the world other than the West for just any drugs.
The one and only in the world top tier substrate plant went up in flames in China week ago. All major chip vendors been using their substrate for the package for a few years. If you see a chip with HBM memory, or any model CPU, it's their substrate which is used.
On the other end of high techness scale, China has 90%+ of global market for such essential industrial goods as screws, nuts, and bolts.
Neither of these examples avail to being easily substituted, and I can come with many more.
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> I couldn't do my job with out it. Yes. That is the point. The need exists. European companies will offer that services creating high quality jobs in Europe and they will follow European cultural norms instead of American ones. > There is literally no other platform that does something like fba. That is the monopoly part promoted by the USA and financed with public money. Amazon is a monopoly protected by a friendly…
What are european cultural norms? Are you really trying to claim Amazon is financed by tax payer money in the USA? Can you provide examples of this investment? Fba is monopoly because Amazon took a huge bet and invented it. Same with prime.
They don't pay taxes and pay workers like shit. The federal government gets no revenue, and still has to increase social spending and policing to avoid workers burning the place down, protecting Bezos' investment. Then there's Blue Origin, which involves direct handouts from Uncle Sam.