By the end of the April-May-June fiscal quarter, Apple is expected to report cash reserves of over $70 billion, enough to buy every major mobile phone maker with the exception of Samsung, for cash alone.
Of course, it won’t. Why buy companies you’re outcompeting? But the fact that it could is still pretty damn amazing.
Buy the end … Ok, but days will cost more, unless you get the Time Lord discount.
I wonder how shareholders feel about that (turn that cash into dividends, bitchez)
@1, It’s Friday, it’s fucking sunny out, I’m inside writing… and folks are complaining about my typos.
@3. I’m telling you guys. Please install a will in Seattle filter.
Eh, it’s only Will. Just ignore him, Goldy. All the rest of us do.
Don’t forget to hold Apple’s balls, Goldy
If you have 70 billion dollars you should pay your employees more. Or give your shareholders a damn dividend. Or maybe you just need to have your taxes increased.
And to think that Republicans want to cut corporate taxes. When corporations are sitting on huge piles of cash that they are not investing or doing anything whatsoever productive with, cutting their taxes is ludicrous.
Maybe they should sink it into wireless infrastructure, so that someone will be able to meet the network demand all that silly streaming-from-the-cloud boowah will create.
At least this religion pays it’s taxes (probably shouldn’t speak so soon, I am assuming here). That’s all I care about.
Goldy:
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. ha ha ha!
No. Apple is not winning the mobile wars. What Apple is doing is pissing away a head start that was once worth billions and billions of dollars.
In the last 18 months, Android has gone from 5% market share to 35%. Meanwhile Apple has remained flat, and MS and RIM are both down.
I could give you the long analysis, but the short one is this: it’s the desktop PC wars of the 1990’s all over again, except this time Google is playing Microsoft’s part. Apple’s got a monolithic solution that costs more and revs every year or so. Meanwhile Google has a (relatively) open platform a legion of hardware manufacturers competing to ship hot new units with improved price/performance every couple of months.
The smartphone market is still growing, but at some point in the next year, all the customers still using old-fashioned dumb phones will have converted to either iPhone or Android, and at that point the only way to grow will be for oe side to take market share from the other. When the dust settle’s it’s gonna look just like the desktop market did in 1999: Apple’s gonna be earning admittedly nice margins on 10% of the market, while the other 90% belongs to the competition.
All that being said: Apple will still be awash in cash thanks the iTunes franchise, and maybe iCloud, but it won’t be because they’re “outcompeting” the rest of the smart phone industry.
Why would they hang onto that much cash?
@12, to keep from getting scarfed up by some private equity fund.
What @7 said.
Except Samsung? Isn’t that a bit like saying that AT&T could buy the entire wireless industry for cash–except Verizon.
why bother buying an industry when you’ve already purchased 10% of the world populations’ soul?
It must be a special kind of hell to work for Apple. God, think of all the yelling and throwing of things in the call center alone.