I’m glad he’s not Apple.
This is the real killer for me:
However, the temptation of the $97.5 billion cash hoard would remain and management would still dream of the $100 billion acquisition that could revolutionize Apple’s prospects.
What in all of Apple’s history has ever even given the hint of that sort of thinking coming out of the company? I’d be far more worried of Google getting another $20 billion to spend on a company that isn’t making money than Apple doing anything of the sort.
That quote really shows that he doesn’t know the company he is trying to talk about. Everything else is exactly something an investment banker or money manager would recommend a company do and listening to those people has worked so well for the world in the past, right?
Just dumb.
2 replies on “Apple and Money”
I do wonder what they’re planning to do with $100B on hand. That’s more than a rainy day fund…but being gun shy about future solvency is probably ingrained in the corp culture based on their history. Kinda like people who lived through the Great Depression.
I think a healthy dose of “we want to be able to take things slow” along with what they are doing now: leverage in component purchasing. It’s nice to be able to say “we’ll write you a check, today, for the next five years of DRAM chips off of your assembly lines” and not have that check bounce. Ever.
They also have a MAJOR infrastructure buildout happening as well with the expansion of iCloud. Data centers cost time and money … luckily they have one of those to make the other go away a little bit.