Industry

 

Why is an expert on disruptive technology “worried” about financial innovation?

 

Excerpt from "Chaos Is Hard to Predict”

Does technical innovation always end in displacement/ replacement?
The professions being challenged include physicians, lawyers, consultants, and analysts. Algorithms and sensors could conceivably displace some subset. However, it’s not a certainty. One way to fend off automation displacement is to redefine and change the scope of the profession.

The classic example is from the birth of the Industrial Revolution. As machines replaced certain tasks, new jobs were created which required higher skills and hence edu- cation, leading to universal matriculation and eventually the popularity of higher education. Professionals need to “invent” new jobs for themselves as a means to keep disruption at bay.

Read more: CFA Institute Magazine.

 

Since writing Peak Cable six months ago, surveys, research and analysis have contributed to the themes of unbundling the TV package. The data under scrutiny is, as usual, the data that can be gathered. Unfortunately the data that can't be gathered is where the insight into what is happening may lie. For instance, what matters for an entertainer is not how much you're watched but how much you're loved. Measuring love is done poorly with data on payment for subscriptions.

A better proxy might be time. Liam Boluk makes the point in his post that "focusing on cord cutting or even cord shaving largely misses the point." Don't follow the dollars, he says, follow the time or engagement. "Relevance" is what matters.

His data shows how linear TV has fallen by roughly 30% among the young (12-34) in the last five years. The trouble for the TV bundle (and advertisers) is that this is the most culturally influential group. They are also the group which will grow into the highest income group over the next decade. And this group does not love TV.

We have to remember that it was the youth who drove early radio, TV and consumer electronics markets. Those young are now the old which still cling to the old media, served by companies that grew old with them. They are the "high-end" customers with which Nielsen itself has grown. They have the most money to spend and they are the targets for the ads ((no longer the Pepsi generation, they are the Depend and Viagra and pharmaceuticals generation))

Paying $150/month to watch incontinence and erectile dysfunction ads—at a time not of your choosing—is preposterous for the young. They may like the programs but not the way they are packaged, delivered or interrupted. They are not smarter than their parents. They, like their parents, took to new technology more quickly. What makes the technology new is also what lets its makers separate the content from its delivery. These new technologies allow "modularizing" or unbundling that which was was integrated/bundled and thus allow their developers to focus on the customer's real jobs-to-be-done.

Unsurprisingly, incumbents have responded by throttling access to original programming–an asset over which they still exert influence as distributors. Netflix and Amazon are taking the path of responding with their own blockbuster productions. Although Silicon Valley has more capital to deploy than Hollywood  this battle of attrition is by no means one that incumbents will win, and generally, it's not going to be pretty.

Tweaking the nose of the incumbent might not be the way to establish asymmetry. The better tactic may be to help the system survive but offer a "short-term alternative". This is how iTunes took on and won Music. When Napster and file sharing created a clear and present danger to the industry, Apple's approach of a controlled alternative allowed the industry to finally move to a digital download model.

An observer in 2004 would have said that Apple was bowing to the industry and providing it sustenance against "disruptive" free music. However, as behavior shifted to an overwhelming preference of iTunes downloads over physical media, the music labels found themselves in an untenable negotiating position. They had to concede on DRM, pricing and bundling itself. The music disruption occurred with a tacit acceptance and collaboration by the incumbents.

Is history repeating? Looking at the situation around TV today, the strategies of the challengers can be summarized in a similar way:

1. The content low-end: Now, YouTube, Twitch. Then, Napster, Gnutella
2. The distribution low-end: Now, Netflix, Amazon. Then, incumbent music download sites.
3. The nominally sustaining: Now Apple TV. Then, iTunes

Apple cannot play an "ignore me" strategy because as much as investors think the company is irrelevant, everything it does is closely watched by anybody who might be even remotely touched by it. Especially in entertainment.

In addition, due to brand considerations, the company cannot ship low-quality or no-quality product, including material that sits on its platform.

They have to do something different. Something more complicated and something that takes much longer.

What Apple best contributes asymmetrically is a new experience. The experience allows new behavior, new usage models and hence new loyalties to emerge. The loyalties create affinity which shifts the "love interest" for the user. The new Apple TV attempts to provide such a contribution. Not only in terms of the experience but also for becoming, finally, a platform for developers, who will try to make the product itself better in collaboration with Apple. Thus the "new experience" flips when bits which are streamed cohabit a device with bits which expect a consumer response.

This "appification" becomes an interesting experiment in behavior alteration. Will "couch time" change from pure passivity to partial interaction?

To the orthodox adherents to the religion of linearity of immersive programming this sounds impossible. But why else should a product deserve to exist? A great product is one which changes the user and for Apple TV to become great it needs to engage us to do something different than we do today. It needs to make us feel we are better for using it.

Is this new Apple TV up to it? We'll have to wait and see. But then again, if not this one, then another one will. TV will not remain unchanged forever.

What if Apple did make a car? How significant could their products be? What would it take to influence the industry's architecture?

The global market is forecast to reach 88.6 million vehicles in 2015 and there are many ways to segment it. One could look at geography or at product configurations or the emergence of new powertrain technologies.

One could also look at the participants.

In 2014 Toyota was the top selling automaker with a total sales volume of 10.23 million vehicles. The following graph shows the leading 15 producers and the percent of total production.

 

One thing to note is the relative balance in market share. The top five vendors have volumes in a very similar range (9 to 12 million). Two vendors are at around 5%. Three are at 3%. To preserve this equilibrium the industry undergoes periodic merging and consolidation. Over the last half-century, there has been room for new entrants. Japanese brands entered between the 1960s and 1970s. Korean entries occurred in the 1990s and Chinese in the 2000s.

 

Regardless of the entries, the industry has a high degree of centralization. Ownership is often more narrowly controlled through cross-ownership and licensing. French/Japanese, US/Italian/German, Indian/German/UK cross-over ownerships indicate a globalization of financing. Indeed, only a dozen countries account for over 80% of the production (less than 10% of nations produce significant numbers of vehicles).

This structure is driven by the cost structure of volume production. The production system dictates financing and location and time constraints which underpin all deals. None of the entries (Japan, Korea, China) did much to redefine the core industry architecture (resources, processes or priorities).

So how could Apple think different?

First, the model of production could be substituted with a modular approach. This would separate the engine/body/paint/assembly plant into a deeper supplier network where components would be sourced and tooling dependence would be reduced.This speeds up ramps, reduces capital expenditure, increases flexibility, and accelerates the cadence of product evolution. Essentially, the focus would shift away from manufacturing toward design, iteration, customization and experience engineering.

Second, Apple could change the distribution model. Controlling the relationship with the end user could allow a conversation which will reveal new jobs to be done.

Third, Apple could affect the vehicle's lifespan and hence the financing/resale and inherent brand promise of car ownership.

These are fairly obvious business innovations and they are easily foreseen.But are they enough? Would they even "move the needle"?

To break into the top 10 brands would imply a production volume of at least 2.5 million units (about the same as Daimler ships today.) At 2.65 million and a price of $55k/vehicle Apple's revenues from cars would total about $145 billion. This is roughly the sales value of the iPhone business today. Not bad. Maybe that would satisfy a financial analyst. ((Yeah, right.))

Even so, would a top 10 rank in shipments change the industry's structure?

When I first saw the iPhone I knew that nothing would be the same after it and that Apple was poised to dominate the phone business. For the Apple car to do a similar trick in transportation the product itself has to change the perception of what a car is. Today a phone is barely something one speaks into.

Approaching the operations side of the business with a clean sheet of paper allows a fresh and rational attack on the problem. But to really make a dent in the universe Apple also needs to change the product in ways that re-define what it's good for. And this is supposedly why Apple gets into markets. To make a meaningful contribution.

Apple is categorized as a vendor of consumer electronics. More specifically, a member of the "Electronic Equipment" industry in the "Consumer Goods" sector. If indeed this is what it's thought to be selling, there is a problem because it isn't  what its customers are buying.

Apple's customers buy a mix of hardware, software and services under a brand that assures a certain quality of experience. This bundling and integration of otherwise disparate things is why the brand is such a success.

This anomaly between what Apple is thought to sell and what buyers actually buy can leave the casual observer confused. As a result the company's categorization as vendor of hardware deeply discounts its shares. It is, in other words a less valuable business. This is because a seller of consumer electronics does not benefit from "system valuation" since there is minimal loyalty to the product after the sale.

The consumer electronics vendor has no network to leverage, no ecosystem adding value after the sale, no platform and works through multiple levels of distribution to reach the customer. In contrast, a system vendor can expect benefits from network effects, ecosystems, and a coveted relationship with the end user.

The result is that the valuation of a consumer electronics vendor is based on the momentum of individual products. Apple has always been valued this way. Each hit product is considered to be a stroke of luck/genius and the chances of recurring are discounted to about zero. Regardless of the fact that it has a track record of "home runs", Apple's hit rate is not considered sustainable. ((The P/E ratio is the primary indicator in this analysis)). Certainly Apple is not valued as being able to generate reliably recurring revenues.

But what if we were to value Apple on the basis of what people are buying rather than what it's thought to be selling?

The model is simple enough: determine the number of users, estimate the lifespan of the products, and figure out the services attached to the products; then, given the price, obtain a price per product per day. You then can get a recurring revenue figure.

I did just that and the results are in the following table:

The first column is the product, the second is the Average Selling Price (ASP), the third is the expected lifespan of the product, and the fourth column is a calculation of the end user’s “spending per year” on the product.

The fifth column is an estimate of the revenues from Apple's Services and "Other" groups from post-sale revenues attached to the product. This Services revenue includes AppleCare, iCloud, Music, App Store, other stores, Beats, accessories, iAd, and Made for i (MFI) licensing. It also includes Google traffic acquisition revenues and other licensing.

The sixth column is an estimate of the consumer "spend per day" on Apple's product lines taking into consideration Services.

The seventh column is an estimate of the number of active devices in the hands of users. Note that these are expected to change over time.

The eighth column is a calculation of Services/Other income on a per-product allocation. This is a test of the Services+Other estimate and is meant to sum to nearly what Apple currently reports as Services+Other revenues.

The ninth column is a test of overall revenues on a per-product allocation. This should add up to total revenues (estimated for next year.) ((Naturally, the active devices estimate is the most sensitive but it should be tweaked to create a reasonable forecast for next year.))

The bottom line is the following graph which shows the revenue per device per day inclusive of Services and Other income (The sixth column).

This is, in my opinion, a reasonable way to approach valuation of Apple as a business. It's also a way to inspect its strategy.

As a valuation we can easily obtain the net present value. The model gives us sales and by estimating a net margin (which is remarkably steady around 22%) we can get the free cash flow.Iterate into perpetuity with a discount rate, and you can get the net present value of the company. With a modest growth rate leading to a billion active devices in use and a normalized revenue per device of $0.92 you can easily see cash flows equivalent to $1 trillion in present value.

But much more interesting than this value is the notion that Apple is in business to deliver a product/service mix to loyal customers and to preserve their loyalty through constant improvement and innovation. You can see strategic intent in increasing the attach rate of services per device. You can see a strategic intent in building loyalty and the right customer base which is likely to be loyal. You can see strategic intent in the iteration of the product in a way that extends loyalty and expands the solid base but also increases the $/day rate. This analysis correctly informs almost all decisions the company makes.

What we just saw in the launch of a new Apple TV and a new iPad is consistent with this strategy. Apple TV will have a higher service attach rate with apps while keeping pricing well below consoles thus expanding the user base. The iPad is increasing in price and getting more accessories. The developers are encouraged to build richer and more valuable apps that are uniquely enabled by the new device.

The fact that Apple has just launched a subscription service for the iPhone  makes what was clearly their strategy all along plain to see however it has been a strategy in effect for decades.

It isn't a difficult idea to embrace. It always surprises me that it's not more commonly held. The reason may be that Apple is mis-categorized.

Or perhaps the entire categorization of industries and sectors is obsolete in what is a new post-industrial age. Some have figured this out already. Others will take longer.

 

When exactly did enterprises become late adopters of technology? We know that they were some of the first buyers of computers. IBM sold tabulating and later computing machines to businesses starting in the 1910s. During the 1980s it was businesses which bought PCs in significant numbers to augment, and later replace, their centralized computing resources. Networking was in use in government and in business long before consumers saw any value in it.

In my talks I often point out that if you wanted to create a near-monopoly in computing in the 1990s all you needed was to convince 500 people to adopt your technology: the IT managers of the Fortune 500. If the largest companies used your product then they would impose the standard on all their suppliers and distributors and pretty soon there would be no alternatives.

So what happened during the last decade or so?

Today IT departments are known as the Information Denial department.  I recall that when the DVD first became an option on desktop or laptop computers, IT departments were first to decline the option (presumably because it would be used for entertainment rather than work.) When instant messaging first became available, it was IT departments who blocked the ports. When mobile devices with cameras became available signs went up that no cameras would be allowed on company premises. When USB sticks became available, USB ports started getting glued shut. When iOS became available, no devices running it were allowed on the network. Then came Facebook, Instagram and dozens of social media.

This pattern of not only a refusal to adopt but an outright ban on new technologies by enterprises made them fall off the radar of technology developers. Quite simply everyone outside the supply chain into enterprises stopped developing new markets around them. From venture funds to developers, enterprises fell out of the business plans.

The enterprise stood as a place of "legacy" and "security" which prevented mobile or other forms of computing. Paradoxes emerged wherein an administrative assistant had more computing power in his pocket than the CEO had in her data center; where the same assistant would know what was happening faster than any of the bosses. Homes had better connectivity than offices and productivity at small firms increased faster than at big firms. Incidentally, even the slowest enterprises were faster then the government. The bigger the firm, the slower and stupider it seemed. Were large firms employing dumb managers or did being a manager in a large firm make you dumb?

One resolution to this paradox might be that mobility and the movement of processing onto consumer devices increased the cadence of product development to such a degree that the purchase cycle and dollar amounts involved ran out of the range which companies could absorb.

A simple way to explain it is this: A company takes longer to decide to purchase a device than the device's shelf life. In other words, by the time all the salespeople and committees and standards setting and golf playing and dining and site visits would be completed, the object whose purchase was being discussed would be discontinued.

A more onerous issue is that companies have procedures for accepting technologies (capital expenditures) which require high degrees of interaction and decision making. In order to step though these procedures, the vendors need to have sales people who need to invest lots of their time and therefore need to be compensated with large commissions. If those commissions are a percent of sale then the total sales price needs to be large enough "to make it worth while to all parties". As a result, paradoxically, an enterprise technology must be sufficiently slow and expensive to be adopted.

Mobility was disruptive to enterprise because the new computing paradigm was both too fast and too cheap to be implementable.

This implies that the problem with enterprises is not the stupidity of its buyers. They are no less smart than the average person--in fact, they are as smart with their personal choices for computing as anybody.  The problem is that enterprises have a capital use and allocation model which is obsolete. This capital decision process assumes that capital goods are expensive, needing depreciation, and therefore should be regulated, governed and carefully chosen. The processes built for capital goods are extended to ephemera like devices, software and networking.

It does not help that these new capital goods are used to manage what became the most important asset of the company: information. We thus have a perfect storm of increasingly inappropriate allocation of resources to resolving firms' increasingly important processes. The result is loss of productivity, increasingly bizarre regulation and prohibition of the most desirable tools.

Which brings us to the latest announcement of collaboration between the new disruptor of computing Apple and the vendors supplying Enterprises like IBM and Cisco.

Apple was the loser in the standardization of computing during the 1990s but is the winner in the mobilization of computing during the 2010s. The company positioned itself in both cases on consumer computing but it never gave up on enterprises.

The approach of Apple seems to be to enable the larger suppliers of technology to enterprises to bundle iOS as part of the acceptable set of services and products. In essence, Apple is complying with the requirement to be slow and expensive in order to be adopted. It can maintain the cadence of product development while attaching itself to the purchase cycle of the enterprise.

In a way it's like an automatic transmission in a car. Operating through gears, the engine can rev at a different rate than the wheels turn. Occasionally, shifting happens but the fluid coupling keeps both the engine and the wheels from absorbing any damaging shocks.

Eddy Cue seems like a nice guy. I can't say that for sure as I've never met him, but he seems to be amiable enough. Maybe it's because he has a seat on Ferrari's board of directors. Maybe it's because he enjoys dancing.

Or maybe it's because he's in charge of the only real "division" at Apple. All the other senior managers have functional roles. Eddy has a bona-fide business unit called Services.

Services is Apple's division of many things. It has the iTunes stores (Music, Video, Apps and iBooks). It has Software with consumer bundles like iWork and iLife and Pro tools like Aperture, Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro. It still has OS X as a product, though revenues are pretty low as updates are now free. It also includes Services with iCloud, Apple Music and Applecare.

These things are not iPhones or iPads but they are many and all together they form a modest little unit. I say modest because not much is said about it. When seen in contrast to the other Apple product lines, it's hard to be impressed. In the graph below it's the purple area.

Apple does not help much. Occasionally  Apple offers updates on iTunes/Services using various (rarely the same) metrics. For example, in early August, Eddy Cue offered an update during an interview with USA Today on Apple Music relating how many users there were one month after the service started (11 million).  It was worth a few headlines.

However he also noted in passing that the App store did $1.7 billion in transactions during July. If you convert that to a yearly run-rate it comes out to about $20 billion/yr. Digging through previous announcements, the equivalent figure for 2014 was about $13.7 billion. Nice growth.

But is $20 billion of "transactions" of any significance? It's not even a figure that Apple reports as revenue. For apps, Apple reports only the 30% fee as revenues so 70% of that transaction value passes through to developers and is therefore not part of its statement of accounts. ((From SEC filings: For third-party applications sold through the App Store and Mac App Store and certain digital content sold through the iTunes Store, the Company does not determine the selling price of the products and is not the primary obligor to the customer. Therefore, the Company accounts for such sales on a net basis by recognizing in net sales only the commission it retains from each sale. The portion of the gross amount billed to customers that is remitted by the Company to third-party app developers and certain digital content owners is not reflected in the Company’s Consolidated Statements of Operations.))

However perhaps we should consider the figure in some way. It represents transactions in an economic sense--the amount people spend on apps. It's therefore comparable with what people spend on other forms of entertainment. Movies for example.

The following graph shows the spending on apps within the iTunes App Store ((note that this does not include Google's Play Store whose transaction values are not public and is therefore not a gauge of all apps.)) as well as spending on other forms of iTunes stores as well as Services. It also shows how all the services compare with box office revenues from movies. Both the US and World-wide. And how these figures changed over the few years that the App Store has been in existence. The individual service line items are shown in the graph on the left and the stacked totals are on the right.

Note that already last year App Store Billings overtook US Box Office gross revenues and that Services a whole overtook Global Box Office gross revenues. It's not likely to happen this year but next year Apple's Apps will almost certainly overtake global Box Office in revenues.

This contrast with movies gives some perspective on the creation of a new market. Apps did not exist as a medium in 2007. But, together with Android apps, apps are likely to have already overtaken revenues from an industry that is a century old. And not just any industry. Hollywood represents more than an economic power, it has a cultural power affecting perceptions and political opinion. And although universally envied, it has not been successfully replicated.

So having created this market and becoming bigger than Hollywood, and grossing more than what 90 countries produce, Apple's Services not something that is interesting to many who think about technology or even to many who think about Apple.

Which is why I think Eddy's such a nice guy. No matter how little attention is paid to his economic empire, he always seems to be in a good mood. Maybe he knows something we don't.

For the last few years, I've been proposing that the way to conceptualize Google is as two separate entities: Google A and Google B.

Roughly speaking Google A was the R&D ((Research and Development)) organization and Google B was SG&A ((Sales, General and Administrative)). You can find the operating expenses of running each of these organizations in the company's income statement.  In the last quarter R&D was about $2.8 billion and SG&A was about $3.5 billion ((Sales and marketing was $2.1 billion and General and Administrative was $1.5 billion)). The two entities are further distinguished as follows:

• Google A was led by Eric Schmidt and Larry Page and Google B was led by persons unknown, but mostly represented by the "Chief Business Officer" Omid Kordestani.
• Google A spends money. Google B collects money.
• Google B sends a check to Google A while Google A sends data to Google B (which then sells it on to advertisers and collects money).
• Google A communicates frequently with optimism and enthusiasm about the future. Google B remains quiet.
• Google A solves problems of humanity, Google B solves problems for advertisers.
• Google A has users, Google B has customers (to whom it sells users.)

In summary, Google A is altruistic, Google B is pragmatic. Google A engages in research, Google B engages in commerce. Google A operates in a structure similar to a Bell Labs for the good of humanity ((Using a definition of Good as established by the founder)),  Google B operates in a structure similar to AT&T and collects monopoly rents but without any government oversight.

This was an effective construct for analysis which explained to me much of how Google operated and how it made decisions. So what do we make of Google's new Alphabet? Is this a dissolution of the Google B/Google A dichotomy?

My initial answer is no. We don't have a change in this core structure. What we have instead is a split of Google A into Google A and Google A+.

A+ is the crème de la crème of the altruistic Google A. It's the stuff that really does not make money. It's the laboratory of Bell laboratories. It's the moonshot manufacturer. It's the incubator where hobbies are hatched. It's the funder of ventures.

After A+ is carved out, Google A and Google B remain exactly as they were, now under a new CEO. The previous CEO no longer has any day-to-day input in the running of Google A and is no longer soiled by association with Google B.

Alphabet is therefore the "holding company" of Google A+, Google A and Google B. I can only suppose that the separation of A+ from A (and the previous A from B) allows the founders to distance themselves even further from the purchase decisions which, through pricing signals, determine where value lies and how resources should be allocated. That must be a great relief.

Will there come a time when Samsung will earn more profits from the iPhone franchise than from its own Galaxy product line?

The problem for Samsung is that although it still sells the most phones ((over 80 million but we don't have a precise figure)), and the most smartphones, the price and margins for these products are collapsing. The pattern is shown in the graphs below:

Phone operating margins peaked in Q1 2014 at 20% but are half that level today. These margins have dropped to levels Samsung had in 2009, before the Galaxy launched and before they had any substantial revenues from smartphones.

In contrast, the semiconductor group is growing both revenues and margins. Margins and operating profits are both 50% higher than those of devices.

We also know that Apple is Samsung Semiconductor's single biggest customer. We can't be sure how much of the total revenue/profit comes from Apple but if the pattern continues then Apple could be the greatest contributor to Samsung's profitability in the near future.

How could this be? Wasn't Samsung supposed to "disrupt" Apple?

The reality is that Samsung's own smartphones are being disrupted by good-enough Android devices, typically made by Chinese brands. This low-end disruption is also affecting LG, another phone maker and Apple supplier.

Unlike Samsung and LG, Apple is less susceptible to low-end disruption. What Apple offers is a brand promise, an ecosystem, associated products and services and what amounts to a new market. It's this parallel value network that competes with Android/Google, rather than with Samsung.

Samsung is a supplier in the Apple network and a licensee in the Google network. As a result, it has a near monopoly position with a platform controller (Apple) and a commodity position with a platform licensor.

Neither position is one of control, but the current market stage benefits Samsung within the Apple ecosystem more than  in Google's ecosystem. It's a situation analogous to one where Intel made both x86 chips and PCs that ran Windows. Long term it's likely that the sole-source chip business does a lot better than the multi-source systems business.

That should be a warning to others who hoped to survive as Android OEMs. They don't have semiconductors to sell to Apple.

 

The fact that the iPhone is contributing over 90% of the operating profits in mobile phone sales has penetrated even as far as the Wall Street Journal. However, it's not yet commonly known that the Mac captures a majority of personal computer operating profits, at least when considering the sale of hardware.

My calculations suggest at least 60% of operating margin in personal computing hardware is captured by Apple. This is mainly due to the fact that the average Mac sells for more than $1200 while the average PC sells for less than $450.That is equivalent to $1.5 billion per quarter for Apple vs. $930 million for all the other PC makers combined.

If we are to consider the iPad as a "PC equivalent" computer ((for a substantial minority of tasks)) then another $billion/quarter is contributed to the profit pool. It increases Apple's share of profits to 73%. As a result, Apple absolutely dominates computing profits.

But, as we know, computing, even on handheld devices, is enabled by a multitude of business models. Selling hardware is one thing, but Microsoft showed that one could sweep up profits in the industry by selling enabling software. It's much harder to assign a share of profits if we try to consider all the business models associated with computing and all the form factors that computing has taken shape in.

The problem can be acutely observed with the iPad alone. It's sold with a decent margin ((my estimate is a gross margin of around 27%)), though not one which approaches that of the iPhone ((my estimate of the iPhone gross margin is near to 48%)). It also enables an ecosystem with thousands of collaborating firms and users.

Consider the uses of the iPad in education. 15 million iPads were sold to educational institutions. An unknown number of millions have been hired for education uses by end-users or teachers. The result is over 100,000 education apps are available in the App Store.

The education sector's "jobs-to-be-done" has led to the product being associated with entire new processes for education. Education is not a product but a process and therefore any technologies must be hired as part of the process. In the App Store you can see the “Apps in the Classroom” guides along with impressively powerful apps being used in education. These are educator-created guides designed for other educators.

There is no way to measure the "profit" in this endeavor.

Nor is there a way to capture the "profit" in people engaging in exercise because they wear an Apple Watch.

Nor is there a way to track the operating profit of HealthKit which has enabled 1000 apps to help people manage their health.

These education and health efforts are not designed to be profitable. And yet Apple is very profitable. That is because creating valuable things generally leads to value being accrued by their creator. How that happens is not very important. Indeed, focusing of the how is actually often self-defeating. What matters is the why and the what is done.

Understanding this leads us to understand the foundation of any great organization, not just Apple.

 

Katy Huberty (Analyst - Morgan Stanley): You've said in the past that the watch may take longer to ramp given the new category and new interface to customers. Is that, in fact, playing out? Is the watch ramping slower than past product categories?

Tim Cook (CEO): Katy, when you use the word ramp, do you mean from a -- I assume you're talking about supply?

Katy Huberty (Analyst - Morgan Stanley): Yes. Pre-orders and first week in sales and any other data points that you track in terms of interest versus, say, when the iPad launched in 2010?

Tim Cook (CEO): Let me talk about supply and demand and sort of separate those two. Right now demand is greater than supply. And so we are working hard to remedy that. ((This is still true today, three months later))

We've made progress over the last week or so and we're able to deliver more customers an Apple Watch over the weekend than we had initially anticipated. We're going to keep doing that. […] So I'm generally happy that the -- that we're moving on with the ramp.

It is a new product for us, and with any kind of new product, you wind up taking some time to fully ramp.

Having said that, I think we're in a good position. And by some time in late June, we currently anticipate being in a position that we could begin to sell the Apple Watch in additional countries. And so that's our current plan. ((This has been achieved according to plan.))

From a demand point of view, it's hard to gauge when you don't have product in stores and so forth. And so we're filling orders completely online at the moment.

The customer response from people that have gotten theirs over the weekend have been overwhelmingly positive. And we're far ahead of where we expected to be from an application point of view.

To give you a comparison, when we launched the iPhone we had about 500 apps that were ready. When we launched iPad, we had about 1,000. And so our internal goal was to be able to beat the 1,000 level and we felt -- we thought it would be great if we were able to do that by a little bit.

And as I've mentioned before, we now have over 3,500 apps in the App Store for the Watch. And so we couldn't be happier about how things are going from that point of view.

We are learning quickly about customer preferences between the different configurations. There's a much larger breadth of possibilities here for customers than in our other products. And in some cases, we called that well and some cases we're making adjustments to get in line with demand.

But I'm really confident that this is something we really understand how to do and will do. And so I'm really happy where we are currently and happy enough that we're looking forward to expanding into more countries in late June.

[…]

Gene Munster (Analyst - Piper Jaffray and Co.):  …question for Luca, in terms of any thoughts on what the margin impact from the Watch as that ramps over the next couple of years?

Luca Maestri (CFO): Apple Watch is, not only a new product, but it's a brand new category with a lot of new features, a lot of new innovative technologies. And Apple Watch margins will be lower than the Company average.

[…]

Toni Sacconaghi (Analyst - Bernstein): I just wanted to revisit the watch.

Tim, I think you said when you were talking about your new products, you said we're, quote, very happy with the reception. And in response to a previous answer you said, relative to demand, it's hard to gauge with no product in the stores.

I would say relative to other product launches where your commentary around demand was characterized by superlative after superlative, that assessment feels very modest. And part of the reason that I ask is, A, are we reading you right in terms of that? But if we look at consensus, consensus is expecting that Apple will ship more watches in its first two quarters than it did iPads, despite, as you said, very limited distribution in terms of only selling through your stores.

So I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about putting those demand comments in context, given that they do seem different from how you've characterized product demand for other products. And how, if at all, we should think about the modeling demand in the context perhaps of the iPad, which was your most recent significant new category? And then I have a follow-up, please.

Tim Cook (CEO): I'm thrilled with it, Toni. So I don't want you to read anything I'm saying any way other than that. So I'm not sure how to say that any clearer than that.

And in any situation, whether it's the watch or in the past on iPad or on iPhone, when demand is much greater than supply, it's difficult to gauge exactly what it is. And so, as you know, we don't make long term forecasts on here. We maybe forecasts for the current quarter. And so I don't want to make any comment about the consensus numbers.

Honestly, I haven't even studied those. We've got enough to think about here.

I feel really great about it. The customer response, literally from what I've seen, is close to 100% positive. And so it's hard to imagine it being better.

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Excerpts from Apple Earnings Report: Q2 2015 Conference Call Transcript, April 27, 2015.

There is no reliable information on Apple Watch sales. None of the analysts which follow Apple or the phone, computer or watch markets have any insight into this. The only source of information is Apple itself and they have made it clear that they don’t intend to provide watch sales data for competitive reasons. I did not and do not expect any information from Apple on watch sales. They have placed the product within the “Other” category specifically to make unit data hard to discern and have explained why they do so.

The only estimate we have heard of is from a company that has no track record in market research and relies entirely on sampling of email receipts. I urge extreme caution when dealing with this type of data. We don’t know how representative these receipts are and how they are sourced or sampled. The methodology is not only unclear but it’s one not practiced by any other analyst. You would think that receipt sampling would be a phenomenal source of information about a lot of other products and yet we hear nothing about how predictive it is for anything except this particular new product as claimed by a company which never made any such prior claims.

It’s also a sampling of (presumably) US-only customers at a time when the product is undergoing a gradual roll-out through multiple countries and multiple channels. Consider that if sales were constrained internationally then buyers would be trying to arbitrage through the US market, meaning there would be many e.g. Chinese buyers/brokers booking sales through US online stores inflating that channel’s initial volumes. Furthermore as physical retail stores begin to receive stock, online sales (which are what is sampled) should decline as buyers opt for the instant gratification (and the option to see the product in real life.) To see US-only online purchases drop after a period of pent-up demand and as store inventory becomes available is not interesting and says almost nothing about the product’s performance.

The only way to be thoughtful about this new category is to understand the broad transitions underway in mobile computing. We are witnessing a pivot in human-computer interaction as significant as the initial iPhone launch.

[As a rule, be very careful with the premise of data salesmanship. All data is false, some is useful. Data you have to pay for is less useful than data that has been peer reviewed.]