“Apple, under its new boss Tim Cook, overtook Exxon Mobil this week to become the most valuable company in the world following the publication of an impressive set of quarterly results,” The Irish Independent reports. “When Apple’s charismatic founder Steve Jobs died in October there were many who wondered if the iconic electronics and consumer products company would be able to survive without its presiding genius.”
“Apple’s first-quarter results published this week provided the first indication of how the company was performing in the post-Jobs era,” The Irish Independent reports. “Wall Street loved the better-than-expected numbers and pushed the Apple share price up by 7pc to $448, which valued the entire company at $418bn. It has now overtaken oil and gas giant Exxon Mobile to become America’s and the world’s most valuable company.”
“When [Steve Jobs] regained control of Apple in 1997 the company’s supply chain was a complete shambles, with two months of inventory piling up in warehouses,” The Irish Independent reports. “In his first year in charge, Mr Jobs managed to cut inventory to one month. Then, when Mr Cook joined Apple in March 1998 the process intensified. By September 1998, Mr Cook had cut Apple’s inventory to just six days and to just two days by September 1999. It was a bloody, brutal process. In order to reduce Apple’s inventory, Mr Cook slashed the number of Apple’s key suppliers from over 100 to just 24 and closed 10 of the company’s 19 warehouses. Apple also outsourced most of its manufacturing, mainly to China, around this time.”
“Despite having been a long-time protege of Mr Jobs, the two men are very different. In contrast to Mr Jobs’s often abrasive manner, Mr Cook is famously soft spoken. He prefers calm reason to the often abusive tirades that were a prominent feature of the Jobs management style,” The Irish Independent reports. “That doesn’t mean he is a pushover. Far from it. In fact, he is a workaholic who usually rises at 4.30am. He uses these early starts to work out at the gym — he has been a director of sportswear manufacturer Nike since 2005 — and bombard his colleagues with emails. Mr Cook is also notorious for his Sunday night conference calls during which he maps out Apple’s plans for the week ahead.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: How long ago could Jobs have accurately been described as “often abrasive” and prone to “often abusive tirades?” Five years? A decade? Even longer?
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Brawndo Drinker” for the heads up.]