In Apple’s fiscal third quarter conference call with analysts yesterday, Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer stated that Apple’s cash on hand grew by 16% during the quarter to $76.2 billion.
That’s $12,192,000,000.00 added in one 90-day period.
The quarter ended nearly a month ago on June 25, 2011. So Apple most certainly has over $80 billion in cash on hand today.
If Steve Jobs felt like writing out a check, what could Apple buy with $80 billion?
What Apple could buy with their $80 billion:
• Disney‘s market value is $74.49 billion. (Jobs personally is already Disney’s largest individual shareholder.)
• Dell ($32.97B) and Sony ($26.78B) total $59.75B, so, oh what the heck, throw Yahoo! ($17.71B) in basket, too. ($77.46B total)
• HTC ($26.05B), Nokia ($21.59B), RIM ($13.81B), Motorola Mobility ($6.62B), and, whatever, Sirius XM Radio ($8.66B) and -giggle – AMD ($4.46B), too ($81.19B total. So, maybe Steve throws in some of his personal couch cushion change to cover Apple for a week or so on this haul.)
• At an average of a dollar each, roughly 1 out of every 3 hamburgers sold by McDonald’s – ever. (Or, just wait until the end of this quarter and get free burgers for life by purchasing McDonald’s itself ($89.52B).
Yes, we’re talking serious cash here.
As of this post, right now, Apple’s market value is $358.9 billion or nearly 11X that of Dell whose CEO, Michael Dell, was once asked what he’d do if he was in charge of Apple. Dell stood before a crowd of several thousand IT executives and answered flippantly, “What would I do? I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.”
That’s not just a foot, that’s like two whole legs! How do they taste, Mikey?
With a market value of $358.9 billion, Apple is worth $8.66 billion more than “Wintel’ combined (Microsoft at $228.53B and Intel at $121.71B) which reminds us of a quote:
What I can’t figure out is why he [Steve Jobs] is even trying [to be the CEO of Apple]? He knows he can’t win. – Bill Gates, June 1998
Smirk.