“Bernstein’s Toni Sacconaghi this morning weighs in on Apple CEO Tim Cook’s appearance a week ago on Jim Cramer’s ‘Mad Money’ program, arguing that investors should ignore it and instead focus on the history of the stock in the wake of buybacks, which has been positive according to his data,” Tiernan Ray reports for Barron’s.
“‘Interestingly, and perhaps not surprisingly, we find that during Tim Cook’s tenure as CEO, it has made more sense to follow the company’s buyback trends than the CEO’s media appearances (and accompanying assurances),’ writes Sacconaghi,” Ray reports, “who has an Outperform rating, and a $135 price target.”
Ray reports, “Sacconaghi looks back over public appearances by Cook and finds they have ‘not been a good leading indicator for the stock.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: See the rather interesting table in the full article. $14 billion seems to be the magic number, at least historically.
SEE ALSO:
Apple resumes share buybacks, to benefit from beaten down price – April 29, 2016
How Apple’s massive debt-powered buybacks actually save the company money – December 28, 2015
Why would it be any surprise to anyone that just about everything matters more than Tim Cook’s media appearances. They have never helped anything. Only confirmed his lack of leadership and absence of any sort of innovative awareness. Such has become even more obvious since he decided to use his powerful position for the purpose of pushing his social agenda – something that shareholders care about only if it impacts the price of their shares. And, of course, it does.
You will be personally attacked on MDN for telling it like it is, Jay, but you are absolutely correct.
While Wall Street is certainly the den of slimy stock manipulators, Cook’s weak leadership in software and hardware, with clumsy product rollouts market by shortages or confusion rather than consumers camping overnight to get the next great thing, has resulted in a great loss of confidence in significant numbers of Apple investors.
Cook seems to be chasing other companies towards services rather than offering consistently great user-focused products. Problem is, Apple sucks at online services, always has. And its iOS gadgets are all saturating the market while the Mac platform, what should be a professional-grade product which has enormous untapped potential to grow, is basically ignored by Apple. No real OS X upgrades since 2009, and multiple years of stagnation and overpriced hardware while competing Linux/Windows box makers keep improving hardware quality and value. Thus the Hackintosh community now puts many Apple factory Mac products to shame.
I do not cheer as Cook drives Apple to become the next ICM (International Consumer Machines) with a big-brother-like iCloud / hacker target and software that is as buggy as Microsoft, has half the features, but is just as unintuitive to use.
I would honestly say the best things Cook could do to unlock Apple’s full potential is to resign and put a product development leader in place who has much greater vision. Almost anyone working in new product development, from any industry, would do better than Cook has done in keeping Apple products fresh and competitive.
And in which recent year did either of you $200,000,000,000.00 in revenue?
If Tim Cook were to leave Apple the stock would take a big downturn. Tim is a great CEO. You cannot compare him to Steve Jobs, no more than you can compare Disney CEO Bob Iger to Walt Disney. There will never be another Steve Jobs. Get over it. But just like Disney has done fine under Iger, Apple has done very well under Cook.
There will be other great, new innovators, who start their own companies, but they are not going to work for another company. And one day those companies will have to undertake the same transition that Apple is making, where they learn to live without their visionary founder.
Apple has great talent, and Tim is the perfect guy right now to lead this transition, to preserve the legacy of Steve Jobs but at the same time continue to make Apple an even stronger and more viable company.
Well said.
The Trojan war was fought over the kidnapping of Helen of Troy. The face that launched a thousand ships.
Tim Cook is the face that launched a thousand phones.