“Before Tim Cook was Apple’s CEO, he served as the chief of operations. Saying he was an excellent chief operating officer is an understatement. He was almost certainly one of the world’s best,” Daniel Sparks writes for The Motley Fool. “Even after taking over as CEO, however, Apple hasn’t lost its operational touch.”
“When Cook took over at Apple in March of 1998, he quickly reduced the number of Apple’s key suppliers from 100 to 24, negotiated better deals with them, and convinced many to relocate near Apple’s locations,” Sparks writes. “Further, by September of 1998, he also reduced inventory from one month to six days.”
“By personally financing GT Advanced to build out the capacity for sapphire crystal displays to be used in future devices, Apple has arguably created (and somewhat isolated) an entirely new supply chain for displays,” Sparks writes. “Apple still manages to somehow carry less than a week of inventory, despite its $176 billion in trailing-12-month revenue. How does Samsung compare? The company has nearly eight weeks of inventory.”
Read more in the full article here.