“Apple Inc.’s departing chief financial officer Peter Oppenheimer presided over a sales boom that filled company coffers with a record cash pile,” Adam Satariano reports for Bloomberg. “His successor, Luca Maestri, inherits a company stung by slowing growth and increasing scrutiny of how it handles that hoard.”
“The Italian-born executive is becoming Apple’s main money man and liaison to Wall Street in June, at a time when the world’s most valuable company is under pressure to reverse a stock slide, ward off activist investors and defend a cash strategy that critics say shields it from paying taxes,” Satariano reports. “‘When you’re the CFO of the number one company in the world, you have a pretty big magnifying glass on you,’ said Laurence Balter, an analyst at Oracle Investment Research, which advises shareholders.”
“Apart from dealing with shareholders, Maestri will manage Apple’s spending as it invests in research and development, and buys billions of dollars of equipment and components to manufacture its products,” Satariano reports. “The Cupertino, California-based company, which has $159 billion in cash, also is in the midst of a buyback and dividend plan that will return $100 billion to shareholders.”
Read more in the full article here.
I hope Maestri allocates a few bucks to fix IMAP functionality in the core email program, which has messed up so many enterprise users since Mavericks was released five months ago and has persisted through three fix attempts.
My sense is, Apple is having to deal with skeezy third-parties to bring you the relief you seek, so I don’t see a fix forthcoming until June.
Dollars to donuts, IMAP won’t even be a featured bullet point, but it will be fixed. For how long is anybody’s guess.
All the forces of evil will never get their greedy hands on Apple’s cash.
Lontime core Apple investors have voted confidence in Apple Board over and over again.
Those scrutinizing just want to get their greedy hands on so done else’s money.
Auto-correct “someone else’s”. Geez!
Why don’t we have iTunes payments yet? How hard can that be? And even if it’s CRAZY HARD, they’ve had at least 5 years to work on it. Obviously that’s 50% of the reason for the cash hoard, the other 50% being potential for large purchases and insulation against the product cycle.
That $160B is not all located in the US. Only about $40B is in the US. Therefore there isn’t so much case available for dividend or stock buyback.
Apple instead having been spending the money in foreign countries on acquiring assets or component supply wherever they can.
I don’t see Luca Maestri having a difficult time with shareholders, especially those at my station in the food chain; those who don’t have to flip the stock, to siphon off money to live on.
I don’t blame Apple for sitting on their money. There’s no place to spend it!
Apple’s in a great position, sitting on money in their lofty perch.
Apple can be choosy with their acquisitions, spending far much less than their competitors who are spending tens-of-BILLIONS of dollars to acquire a comparable experience.
Apple’s competitors are exhausting their wealth, in the markets and the courts, while Apple cherry picks products to further enhance our experience.
Given Apple’s values reflect many of my own, I say more power to them.