“The world’s most valuable company will today drop its latest quarterly earnings report,” Chris O’Brien writes for VentureBeat. “The reality is that none of this really matters as far as Apple is concerned. Apple’s stock has been hitting record highs of late. Basically, investors are giving the company enormous credit because it managed to stop revenue from falling last quarter. And they are betting that the report today will deliver modest, but not spectacular, growth.”
“Any other company would be getting slaughtered by the markets for such a performance. But two things have allowed Apple to escape the gravity of its current revenue stagnation,” O’Brien writes. “The first is its growing cash hoard. Estimates are that the company will disclose today that it has $250 billion in cash just sitting around, mostly overseas. It is an amount unprecedented in U.S. corporate history.”
“For all the navel gazing about how CEO Tim Cook has and has not changed Apple since he took over in 2011, the most truly radical change he made came in 2012, when the company announced it would start paying dividends for the first time since 1995 and would start using its cash to buy back shares of its stock,” O’Brien writes. “This has made Apple’s stock a winner in an old-fashioned sense of investing.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As Jim Cramer says of Apple, “Own it, don’t trade it.”
As usual, we plan to bring you Apple’s Q217 results as soon as they’re released, right around 4:30pm today – just check our home page. Following that, we also plan to cover Apple’s Q217 conference call with live notes starting at 5pm.
SEE ALSO:
Analyst: Apple may boost dividend and buyback program to reward shareholders – May 1, 2017
Get ready for up to 10.5% hike in Apple’s dividend – April 21, 2017
Analyst: Apple could double dividend, buy Netflix with repatriated cash under President Trump’s U.S. corporate tax changes – March 17, 2017
Apple’s real dividend yield is much higher than you might think – March 10, 2017
Apple preps to distribute dividends totaling $3.1 billion to shareholders – February 8, 2017
Cramer: Apple won the Samsung war; don’t trade Apple stock, own it – January 13, 2015
Yes, AAPL is essentially a government bond now, just like AMZN, GOOG, etc. Too big and systemically-critical to allow any significant declines.
“Any other company would be getting slaughtered by the markets for such a performance.”
Utter bullshit. For example:
http://www.macworld.com/article/3193102/macs/headline-trauma-making-excuses-for-microsoft.html
“Last quarter the fact that Surface revenues were down ‘only 2 percent’ was a sign of the Surface’s ‘resilience’. Now it’s down a whopping 26 percent but it’s a good thing!”
“Revenue stagnation”. <– Abuse of the English language and profit data. *yawn*