“What’s often left out in this discussion on Apple’s supposedly idle cash hoard is the fact that Apple actually has been spending a lot of money — just not in the areas that people have been paying attention to,” Sterling Wong reports for Minyanville.
“Apple has actually spent some $21.1 billion on capital investment — or the purchase of manufacturing machinery and equipment — since the introduction of the iPhone, including some $8 billion in 2012,” Wong reports. “At a January earnings call, UBS Securities analyst Steven Mulunovich even noted that Apple ‘spent almost as much as Intel does.’ Asymco’s Horace Dediu quipped that though Apple doesn’t do high-profile acquisitions, it in effect ‘buys the equivalent of one Yahoo every three years.'”
Wong reports, “For the current fiscal year, Apple has even upped its capital expenditure spending to $10 billion. But where exactly is the money going? … As Dediu noted, Apple’s sky-high level of capital spending is ‘unusual for Apple’s competitors in phones, PCs or tablets [like Amazon, Google or Microsoft. It’s on a level matched only by semiconductor heavyweights’ like Intel and TSMC… Is the company spending on a planned transition from aluminum to Liquidmetal? Or is it new fuel cell technology?
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Jersey-Trader” for the heads up.]
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Adam Lashinsky: What Apple’s earnings really mean, and what’s that $9 billion in ‘equipment’ for? – January 24, 2013