“Apple’s enormous cash hoard grew to $237.6 billion in the fiscal fourth quarter, up $6.1 billion from the previous quarter,” Christine Wang reports for CNBC.
“If the company’s massive cash pile was its own company,” Wang reports, “it would be the seventh largest in the S&P 500 and the fourteenth largest public company in the world.”
Wang reports, “The company’s cash reserves have long fueled speculation of acquisitions that Apple might make.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple has more money on hand than AT&T is worth – with $12 billion left over.
SEE ALSO:
MacDailyNews presents live notes from Apple’s Q416 conference call – October 25, 2016
Apple beats Street, services revenue grows 24% to all-time quarterly record of $6.3 billion – October 25, 2016
Let’s tax them
I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money
That would apply, more aptly, to certain individuals identified as super-rich. Why pick on corporations that advance society whilst ignoring aging trust-fund leeches with more yachts than IQ points?
If they’re IQs are low then no need to fret. After all, fool and his/her money are soon parted.
Dynasties last for generations. Fools and their money are protected precisely because they have money.
All this money and we still can’t get the tower Mac Pro’s, the updated iMac’s, updated Mac Mini’s and dedicated 5K monitors we want?
Exactly. Tim Cook is incredibly weak, unable to walk and chew gum at the same time. Apple should be firing on all cylinders now, pounding out enormous numbers of new products.
Did you hear the conference call yesterday? All you can hear from Tim Cook is excuse after excuse how they can’t supply enough iPhones. Apple can’t make more than 45 million iPhones today and expects to make nearly 80 million in the next 3 months?
Suuuuure Tim, Sure.
Fire Tim Cook!
Birdseed, you are correct that Apple can and should be doing more. But your rants are getting increasingly ridiculous. it is not worth my time to enumerate your weaknesses.
Tim Cook is not Steve Jobs, it is true. And he may not be the perfect guy for the CEO spot, but who is? He is doing much better than you and your “FTC” crowd will ever admit. So it is impossible to take you seriously when all you do is repeat the same BS.
I will admit NOTHING about Tim Cook doing a good job. He isnt.
Apple Music- Botched completely at the start. Miserable adoption rate, considering the massive iPhone base.
Apple TV- Epic fail. Nothing compelling about this product. Following others, not leading.
iMac Lauch during holiday season (2014? 2015?) Botched. Supply horribly lacking.
AirPods launch- Botched….not available at launch of iPhone 7.
iPhone 7 launch- Botched…not enough supply.
Apple Watch 2- Botched, again not enough supply.
Apple Macs-Botched, now a laughing stock of the industry, INCLUDING Mac friendly publications.
Tim Cook is borderline incompetent and should be FIRED immediately. Shareholders should demand better.
I *am* an Apple shareholder, Birdseed, albeit a very minor one. Along with many of the long term members of this forum, I have supported some of Apple’s decisions over the years and been critical of others. We learned from Steve Jobs to expect greatness and target functional and aesthetic perfection wrapped in intuitive simplicity as the magical goal. As a result, we are easily disappointed. Despite being called “lemmings” and “fanboys” by others, we are actually some of Apple’s harshest (legitimate) critics.
We learned from Steve Jobs. We don’t need some mouthy, anonymous ignoramus like you telling us what to believe or do. The simple fact that you label Cook as “borderline incompetent” is sufficient to identify you as an idiot. Cook is widely regarded as a supply chain genius and a critical element of Apple’s growth to its current lofty status. He may lack some of the visionary aspects of Steve Jobs, but that does not make him incompetent. By that definition, nearly everyone would be incompetent.
It should also be noted that an initial lack of supply of a new product is not sufficient justification for labeling the effort “botched.” There is almost *always* going to be an initial undersupply of a consumer electronics product whenever the demand is high at its release. The only way around that is to delay the release and build up a huge inventory over months to cover the initial surge. But that delayed release approach has its own issues. It is not cost-effective to ramp up early production rates to meet the initial surge (if that is even possible due to the limits of the component supply chain and the reduced assembly yields early in the production learning curve) because the steady state rate is lower. Use your freaking birdbrain!
Apple’s products are highly complex and involve a broad supply chain. Manufacturing iPhones is not like blasting out injection molded toys for Happy Meals.
Very well said but not likely to sink into his simplistic bird-sized brain.
I kinda of have to disagree in the sense that supply/demand has had enough cycles by now in the iPhone eco system to know the median units to manufacture. And since Apple has so much cash, why not CREATE NEW manufacturing jobs and hire more people to meet the demand and diversify the resources to make the units. I would start in America and hire people here. When you’re as large as Apple, you can CREATE whatever you want and need.
What Apple is going to do with this money?. Just let it’s sitting there in Ireland forever collecting dust?.
Nice cash pile…
Can someone tell me, how exactly that number is calculated?
I found this condensed data sheet: http://images.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/Q4FY16ConsolidatedFinancialStatements.pdf and don´t see the $237bln number there …
Some more questions for the investment gurus:
Total liabilities grew to $193 bln- is that something to worry about?
Retained earnings are $96 bln. What does that exactly mean?
Thx in advance.
For your questions, you should focus on the consolidated balance sheet. Note the $321.7 billion in assets, most of which is in the form of cash/cash equivalents, short term marketable securities, and long term marketable securities. Add those together and you get $237.6 billion.
Notably, very little of Apple’s assets is tied up in inventory (couple of billion) – very efficient!
Under liabilities, Apple’s long term debt appears to be in the roughly $80 billion range. So Apple could pay off its debts and still retain a massive reserve of cash/securities. Even if you dig deeper and work through accounts receivable/payable, accrued expenses, etc., Apple is still an incredibly stable and well-funded corporation. No worries that I can see (although, to be clear, I only know a little about finances/accounting).
Another note, for the bloggers that often describe Apple’s assets as “cash gathering dust” — cash and cash equivalents are $20.5 billion, less than 10% of that $237 billion. The majority of Apple’s investable assets are in long term marketable securities. And it goes without saying that Apple is receiving more in interest on those securities than Apple is paying to borrow money from others. That is one of the reasons why Apple is borrowing rather than “paying cash” for the stock buybacks and dividends. The bigger reason is that most of Apple’s liquid assets are located outside of the U.S., and Apple would have to pay a lot of taxes to repatriate those assets to use for buybacks and dividends.
Buy Microsoft.
Merge the desktop OS’s.
The time has for there to be only one desktop OS. Let other manufactures make desktop boxes. Apple can have a list of requirements for them. Apple doesn’t make much money on desktop hardware anymore anyway.
The future is mobil. Apple shines there.
Sure…there could not possibly be any anti-trust issues with that approach!
Besides, Apple does not need to “buy” Microsoft to establish a dominant (or single) OS – desktop, mobile, etc. It just needs to keep developing MacOS, iOS, and the variants, then merge them when/where it makes sense.
does not make sense at all. – Even if there were no anti-trust issues.
Think monopoly: when there´s no competition, quality degrades because incentive to improve is missing.
Remeber Netscape Navigator? When that SW basically killed itself, the market was taken over by IE that pos software became really ugly. Only the rise of firefox and subsequently chrome pushed MS to improve.
Here’s a thought, take 1% of that, hire a team specifically to upgrade your hardware more often and your YOY won’t suck Tim.
love it. – won´t happen though.
Just as Apple killed the floppy drive, the dock connector and lately the headphone jack, desktop hardware is a (soon-to-be) goner.
The one things that keeps Apple manufacturing Macs is the missing XCode for iOS. – Once that works, desktop macs will be dicontinued and two years later all notebooks, too.
Prediction: Desktop Macs last update: 2018. Laptops: 2020.