The Telegraph (October 16)
“Instead of changing a structure of employment that clearly does not work for women, Apple and Facebook are offering employees the chance to freeze their eggs and have children later.” Egg freezing and storage is the latest Silicon Valley perk designed “to attract more female employees” and “tackle the Gender Pay Gap.” But to some, this sounds surreal. “Women freeze the source of life itself? That’s not a perk, it’s an outrage.”
Tags: Apple, Children, Eggs, Employment, Facebook, Freezing, Gender, Outrage, Pay gap, Perk, Silicon Valley, Women
The Economist (September 21)
“Nine of the world’s ten most valuable firms are American.” A rising stock market and the euro crisis are partly responsible, but the reasons go deeper. “First, America’s mix of resilience and renewal. Three of its nine biggest firms have their roots in a 16-year period in the late 19th century—Exxon, General Electric and Johnson & Johnson. Their durability reflects their powerful corporate cultures. But the country still does creative destruction, too. IBM and Intel have slid down the rankings to be replaced by Apple and Google. Chevron, an energy firm, has gone from a laggard to a world-beater. Success has been anything but parochial. Six of the nine biggest firms sell more abroad than at home.”
Tags: Apple, Chevron, Corporate culture, Creative destruction, Durability, Euro crisis, Exxon, General electric, Google, IBM, Intel, Johnson & Johnson, Rankings, Stock market, Success, U.S., Value
The Economist (March 9)
“The annual shareholder proxy season now getting under way in America could be the liveliest ever. The bosses of Apple and Disney have drawn flak not only for their strategies but also for their pay. Activist shareholders are on the march. About time, too…. Trying to improve the way a firm is run is more constructive than the traditional ‘Wall Street walk’, whereby disgruntled shareholders simply sell their shares.”
Tags: Activists, Apple, Disney, Pay, Proxy season, Shareholders, Strategies, U.S.
Barrons (January 30)
“Fracking is creating a new source of cheap energy. By 2020, the U.S. is expected to become the world’s largest energy producer. And the falling cost of natural gas (now about a third of Europe’s and less than a quarter of Japan’s) is attracting corporate attention. “After decades of outsourcing… companies like Apple, Caterpillar, Ford Motor, General Electric, and Whirlpool are making more of their goods on American soil again. It isn’t just U.S. companies that are drawn to our cheap energy, weak dollar, and stagnant wages. Samsung Electronics plans a $4 billion semiconductor plant in Texas, Airbus SAS is building a factory in Alabama, and Toyota wants to export minivans made in Indiana to Asia.”
Tags: Airbus, Apple, Caterpillar, Energy, Ford Motor, Fracking, General electric, Samsung, Toyota, U.S., Whirlpool
New York Times (December 30)
Negative press coverage of companies like Apple and Foxconn has caused them “to make changes, like raising wages, limiting work hours and providing chairs with backs instead of stools at workstations.” This should be a major catalyst for change. “For companies operating in China and earning billions in profits, corporate responsibility demands that workers be treated and paid fairly.”
Tags: Apple, China, Corporate responsibility, Foxconn, Press coverage, Workers
Bloomberg (October 10)
“Sony, Sharp and Panasonic now have a combined market capitalization of about $29 billion, compared with Sony’s peak valuation of about $120 billion in 1999. Apple Inc. (AAPL)’s market capitalization is $596 billion and Samsung’s is $175 billion.” Japan’s electronics makers seem to be following in the footsteps of Detroit’s automakers. They haven’t kept up with changing markets and are being left behind with higher costs and shrinking market share. “Having the most-advanced technology—once a key strength of Japanese manufacturers—matters less as consumers increasingly pay attention to content, apps and user-friendliness rather than hardware specifications.”
The Economist (September 1)
The Economist (September 1)
“The much bigger questions raised by this case [Apple versus Samsung] are whether all Apple’s innovations should have been granted a patent in the first place…. To award a monopoly right to finger gestures and rounded rectangles is to stretch the definition of ‘novel’ and ‘non-obvious’ to breaking-point.”
Forbes (August 21)
NASDAQ listed Apple “became the most valuable company in history on Monday in terms of market capitalization” when its market cap rose to more than $620 billion. In inflation-adjusted terms, however, Microsoft retains the crown. On December 30, 1999 Microsoft peaked around $618 billion, approximately $850 billion adjusted for inflation. With a current market-cap of about $257 billion, Microsoft is now valued at less than half of Apple.
Tags: Apple, Market-cap, Microsoft, Nasdaq
Barrons (March 31)
An apple a day may keep the doctor away. It certainly improves the S&P’s performance. “Without Apple, first-quarter profits for the Standard & Poor’s 500 would have been up only 10%, not the 13% reported.”
An apple a day may keep the doctor away. It certainly improves the S&P’s performance. “Without Apple, first-quarter profits for the Standard & Poor’s 500 would have been up only 10%, not the 13% reported.”
Boston Globe (October 7)
“Personal computers, smartphones, and digital music players might well exist if Steve Jobs had never begun tinkering in his parents’ California garage in the 1970s, but they wouldn’t have developed so rapidly, so beautifully, and with so much thought to their users. Without Jobs, who died of cancer at 56 Wednesday, the technologies we love would lack almost everything we love about them.”
Tags: Apple, Death, PCs, Smartphones, Steve Jobs
