“When Apple Inc. became the first U.S. company to be publicly valued at $1 trillion, Chief Executive Tim Cook sought to minimize the milestone,” Therese Poletti writes for MarketWatch. “‘It’s not the most important measure of our success,’ Cook told Apple employees in an email last week. ‘Financial returns are simply the result of Apple’s innovation.'”
“Apple’s market cap is the most important measure of Cook’s success, though, because it is a reflection of the growing sales and profit he has managed to coax from a company that should have hit a wall two years ago,” Poletti writes. “Cook is not a visionary CEO like his predecessor, Steve Jobs. It was Cook’s skills in manufacturing and operations that interested Jobs, who hired him from Compaq a year after his triumphant return to Apple in 1997… Since Jobs passed the torch, Cook has nearly quadrupled Apple’s share price by taking Jobs’s innovation and making it a permanent, perpetual and profitable ecosystem. Apple’s revenue and market cap should have paused along with iPhone unit sales two years ago, but higher-priced phones, expensive accessories and more money coming in from software and services have kept the enormous Apple train running on time, and stuffed with cash.”
“In the June quarter, services soared 31% to $9.5 billion, and it is on pace to collect more than $37 billion this year, a business roughly three-quarters the size of Facebook,” Poletti writes. “Sales of wearables like the Apple Watch and AirPods headphones soared 37% to $3.7 billion… Over the six-and-a-half years of his tenure, Cook has turned Apple into a rare breed: A growth value company.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Scintillating he may not be, but very adept at wringing profits from what Steve left him, he certainly is (not counting the Macintosh which has suffered under Cook and ironically, too, since Jobs originally hired him as Apple’s Senior Vice President for Worldwide Operations to basically oversee the Macintosh and, in relation to the role, Cook once said, “You kind of want to manage it like you’re in the dairy business. If it gets past its freshness date, you have a problem.”
We’d like to see Cook double down on correcting these weaknesses: The timely delivery of sufficient product when promised (or don’t promise) and keeping all of Apple’s product lines up-to-date and state-of-the-art. Again, both are ironic situations given Cook’s “Operations Genius” moniker. Too many delayed and/or incomplete launches and too many products left to grow long in the tooth are our main points when critiquing Cook’s performance. With virtually unlimited cash and talent at his disposal for his entire CEOship, neither of those issues should exist today. There’s no excuse.
The Mac, in particular, properly updated and marketed should be a significantly larger business than it is currently. That it’s done as well as it has – despite Cook et al.’s blatantly obvious indifference (sporadic and forced protestations aside) – is a testament to the Mac’s sheer indomitability (last quarter, the chickens finally came home to roost).
Again, besides those two major issues, Cook has run Apple as well as anyone could and in several cases better (for just two examples: privacy, Apple Watch).
SEE ALSO:
Apple sold fewest Macs in any quarter since 2010 as nearly the entire lineup was outdated – August 1, 2018
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Arline M.” for the heads up.]
Sure, and if Apple were making the updates needed, and introducing more great obvious products, AAPL would be worth even more!
Why in the world isn’t Apple in the Search and otherwise YouTube style content world?
So they desperately need search, as Siri sucks, and depends on information, and second, Apple wants to be a content provider, right? I mean, thats what the Itunes store was supposed to be,
So if they perfected search, and then had their own version of YouTube,, (and whats that, a server?) then they’d be in direct competition with Google, whose stock is second behind AAPL, and would crumble if Apple announced competing in these obvious, needed markets.
I’d rather give my personal info and content to trusted Apple, than Google, Wouldn’t You?
Go back to the posts around last Christmas time. Everyone wanted his head and none of those issues we were talking about have been addressed.
MDN is so arrogant and petty towards Tim Cook, don’t even consider the integral job Cook did the 14 years before Jobs died, and has successfully managed and grown a company nearly twenty times bigger to the greatest in history. Nevertheless haters remain haters.
No one today could do as good a job as Tim Cook. When he retires is when Apple will face its gravest challenge.
Congratulations! You get a 1 Star award for dumbest comment of the day…
and thanks to Tim my iphone does not predict typing accurately anymore.
Thanks to Tim Apple’s TV youtube application is the worse of all stream media players.
Thanks to Tim the maps application was a big fiasco when it came out.
Thanks to Tim, apple waits almost a year to release a product already announced.
Thanks to Tim, now people are hired by color or religion or gender and not because they are good at what they do.
Thank you Tim for destroying Steve Job’s legacy about focus on the customer.
Apparently macdailynews didn’t like my post? If the gayblade wasn’t running the show, well Apple would be a 2 trillion dollar corporation. They suck (products) not boyfriend, since the gayblade took over.
No, they would have 4 trillion. No wait, 8 trillion! No, wait, 183 trillion! In other words, until Apple is worth 1 trillion trillion, color me UNIMPRESSED!!! >:(
If only Tim ran Apple as well as I can make up numbers based on nothing!
obviously homophobic, Mr Clark, you couldn’t run a dollar store much less a tech company
Here is an idea for the next big thing for Apple. The world is in desperate need of cyber security thanks to the grossly insecure, dark ages of computing with which MicroSoft has globally infected our lives. Microsoft’s legacy of inexcusable insecurity will plague the world for decades to come.
Apple has emerged as the premier vender of secure devices. They have the chops and are constantly striving to harden an already strong platform. Maybe Apple could focus their security talents to innovate and produce new infrastructure and enterprise products that would begin to mitigate the vulnerabilities that are regularly exploited to the world’s detriment.
Apple already has the the trust and reputation needed to make big, profitable sales to a world desperate for solutions in this area.
I don’t think its the efforts of Tim Cook alone, he’s made a slew of mediocre decisions and has been lucky IMHO… if he would stop the SJW crap and just focused on quality hardware and software, I think Apple would have been past 1T a long time ago..
Cook makes political remarks far, far, far less often than you lot whine about him doing so.
dopey comment
If that’s the only metric that matters, than that is pretty ******. I’d much rather they had a smaller market cap and were still an interesting company making exciting and useful products. Alas, that is not to be.
with Macs it isnot Tim Cook nor Apple that has failed miserably. It is Intel that simply cannot keep up the road map that themselves told couple of years ago. Intel is horrible mess at the moment and Apple has to ditct Intel soon. Apple processors in the iPhones are faster than the stuff that Intel has for laptops.
Yup he is for sure.
He was the reason for Apple profitiblity at Steves times… and he still is.
That’s an amazing result from a phone & emoji company.
I just came here to read comments from the alt right trolls and I was not disappointed. That’s right kids SJW and Business Visionary Tim Cook led Apple to the promised land. Bwah ha ha ha ha.
There is a reason that conservatives are called “The Right” and liberals are called libtards
@D: So like most conservatards you have no f$cking clue what you’re talking about. Education thyself before casting stones:
https://www.history.com/news/election-101-how-did-the-political-labels-left-wing-and-right-wing-originate
Educate, not education
Thanks mdn for inability to edit and thanks to Apple for increasingly horrible iOS autocorrect.
Like I said, libtard.
Libtard, conservitard. Can’t tell the difference anymore. Both are idiots, especially with public finances
USA is accelerating its decline in to financial debt, endorsed by the current administration. Debt that nobody will ever pay off. So what does the populace do? Both sides whine. the goddamn political nitwits just spend their energy infighting.
USA will never be great again until everyone works together for the common good.
Pipeline is beside himself that MacPro is doing embarrassingly well even after he took it off of life support.
Cook: “Die MacPro, die, die now.”
Apple is a $1 trillion dollar company IN SPITE of Tim Cook.
At some point Pipeline Timmy will run out Steve Jobs coat tails to ride.