A confident Tim Cook led an Apple companywide virtual meeting on Thursday to address concerns about the impact of COVID-19 and discuss the company’s plan to return to work.
During the meeting, Cook called the pandemic an “uncertain and stressful moment,” but expressed confidence that the company will emerge strongly from the crisis, as it did after the 2008 recession and following a near-bankruptcy in the late 1990s.
He said Apple entered the coronavirus pandemic with a strong balance sheet and stressed that the company will keep investing in a “really significant way” in research and development and future products, according to Apple employees who attended the meeting.
Apple doesn’t yet know when employees will be able to return to offices, but Cook said that when workers do go back, temperature checks and social distancing will likely be implemented. He said coronavirus testing is a possibility, but that there aren’t plans in place at the moment.
Apple retail employees are starting online training and ramping up virtual meetings in anticipation of store re-openings, according to people familiar with the matter. That will require employees to clock in and out online.
MacDailyNews Take: Cook is right to be confident. In a crisis, cash is king – and the king of cash is Apple. The company will emerge stronger than ever, especially as they continue to diversify production instead of being almost entirely dependent on China.
I agree
The key, of course, will be how many people buy those $400 Mac Pro wheels.
Time to end these ridiculous stock buy backs and build out your own OLED/Micro-LED/whatever future display tech… Campus…
Majority of these large corporations executing buy backs… have no money to pay their employees… and many of them will get bailed out…
For all of Steve Job’s idea of having a ridiculous amount of cash as a rainy day fund… it now doesn’t seem ridiculous at all… time to fulfill Steve’s vision to “build the whole widget”