“For decades the lists of the largest companies in the world were dominated by oil and gas giants – BP, ExxonMobil, Shell and Total had the commodity that everyone needed,” Matt Warman writes for The Telegraph. “But the advent of the digital age increasingly means technology is the new resource. Touchscreens and software from Apple… are frequently deemed as essential by businesses and consumers as power itself, and their results show it.”
“In Tuesday’s latest quarterly numbers, Apple revealed that it had made as much money as ever at $37.43bn (£21.9), with vast cash reserves – $165bn – largely held outside its US base,” Warman writes. “Improving margins and sales mean it sold more iPhones and made more money than it ever has for a comparable period in its history.”
“In fact, Apple’s position is increasingly analogous to those giant oil companies. The huge profits made hardly a difference to its share price because that is now what investors expect,” Warman writes. “They come from Apple exploring new territories, finding new markets where it can sell its existing products, and from the company continuing to mine its vast, existing fields of users in Europe, America and increasingly China.”
Much more in the full article here.
What a silly article ! As if apple can be compared with oil/gas companies.
Pure click bait crap, don’t go there.
I’m not too particular about Apple being considered as an oil company if they’re going to give it an oil company P/E. It’s bad enough as it is that Apple’s P/E is lower than the tech industry average by quite a bit. I still can’t quite understand why Microsoft’s P/E is over a full point higher than Apple’s P/E. Surely that doesn’t indicate that Microsoft will have a brighter future than Apple? It does seem to indicate that Microsoft investors are willing to pay more in a relative sense for the privilege of owning Microsoft stock. I don’t know what Tim Cook is going to have to do to get Apple’s P/E higher. It seems as though he’s already tried everything short of introducing a new product.
It’s amusing how one pundit compares Apple to an oil/gas company and another pundit is claiming Apple could be gone in three years. These people need to get their shizzle together.
Investors like stability and sustainability. Microsoft is considered to be a stable investment even though they’ve had nothing but failures for the past decade. They do have the enterprise desktop locked up though and that has allowed them to coast during that time and continue to for a whole longer.
Apple is still seen as a product company. They make products and in the history of that market, companies die by the dozens even after sitting at the top. What they don’t understand is that Apple is actually a solutions company. They make products that solve problems that many didn’t realize were there.
Take the first decade of this century…
2001. It wasn’t until after the iPod that the MP3 player really started to take off. There were many MP3 players before the iPod, but it was a geek’s market.
2003. It wasn’t until after iTunes Music Store that consumers were shown an easy way to purchase digital music. The record industry was finally shown that there could be a market for digital music… 4 years after Napster started.
2007. It wasn’t until after the iPhone was introduced, that the smartphone broke out into the consumer space. Before then, it was a professional’s device.
2010. It wasn’t until the iPad that the long, long trip the tablet took, finally started to gain traction and broke out of its niche areas of use.
There are many more examples going all the way back to the Apple I that have done the same for any particular segment of the market.
The industry already knows the necessity of Apple and just how valuable they are. Sooner or later, the investors will too.
Zuckerberg was named “Richest Man In The World” last week…quite an accomplishment considering he has no tangible product and his customers do all the work (and surrender all copyrights). Helluva deal.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-07-24/facebook-gain-makes-zuckerberg-wealthier-than-google-guys.html
That little gnome sitting on Apple’s Offshore multi billion cash trove has more money that The Zuck.
I def agree about the mining part, something that could be much more efficiently accomplished with their own search engine. They’d be able to immediately harness the power that comes from millions of Apple users’ search queries rather than surrendering that capability to other companies, quite a few of whom are enemies.
I completely agree. Not only that, an Apple-centric search engine would provide Apple users much more relevant results.
It’s getting there with Spotlight. It’s good to see Apple expanding Siri’s tech and back-end into other areas of the OS, including their context-aware QuickType keyboard and Spotlight’s use of Siri’s information outlets.
If Apple were an oil company, Barack Obama wouldn’t be caught dead a hundred miles from dining with Steve Jobs or mentioning Apple in a favorite light in his rally speeches. Instead, he would berate him and Apple for all the evils in the world. Now time for Obama to go to a fundraiser and catch the back nine… fuel up the limo and air force one! Let’s go…
Exactly. If Apple were an oil company, Obama would be looking for ways to shut it down and stick the tentacles of government into it to gum it up.