Apple's Cash and Marketable Securities has been the focus of attention for many year now. It has now reached $81.6 billion equivalent to a value of $86.8 per diluted share. Currently each share is worth about $393 making the enterprise value $306/share or 11 times last twelve month's earnings.
The division of liquid cash and cash equivalent asset types is shown in the following chart.
The company added $5.4 billion to its cash reserves during the quarter and now keeps two thirds of that outside the US. Long-term securities (bonds mainly) are now also about two thirds of total. Both of these ratios have increased this year. Some of this shift may be explained by changes in the strategy employed by the CFO/treasurer, but there is another set of assets that has changed dramatically and may explain the change in cash allocation.
I've written about the PP&E assets and their dramatic increase, but the "Acquired intangible assets" have also had a huge increase in the last quarter ($2.3 billion). Much of that is attributed to the acquisition of Nortel's patents.
Unlike cash, these assets can be considered an "investment" by the company. They are expected to (but may not) return value to shareholders in excess of the average cost of capital. Therefore, they demonstrate that some of Apple's capital is being "put to work" rather than resting idle as many suggest. Apple is buying patents and companies and intellectual property. $12 billion worth so far.
Whether they will be a good investment, we cannot tell, but the allocation of capital to non-cash assets is already significant and has grown more quickly than cash. They have, in fact, more than doubled in a year and quadrupled in two.
On October 4th, Tim Cook will take the stage at Apple’s fall event. With Steve Jobs’ transition to head the Board of Directors of Apple and after serving as CEO for fourteen years, it is time to take a look at his reign.
Looking at his performance vs. peer companies from a capital market performance, I have composed the following two charts:
Market capitalization of selected peer companies by calendar quarter in USD million sorted by most recent market capitalization (1997-2011)
Market capitalization as share of combined market capitalization by calendar quarter sorted by most recent market capitalization (1997-2011)
You will note that I included more companies than in previous analysis. The new additions are:
Compaq (acquired by HP in 2002)
Palm (acquired by HP in 2010)
Amazon (a popular request by readers)
I divided this era into three distinct periods:
Restructuring of Apple 1997-2000
In the beginning of 1997, Apple’s market capitalization was lower than almost all of its peers. In absolute terms the market capitalization moved only slightly upwards towards 1999 and the dent in 2000 is significantly lower compared to the market capitalization increase of other companies, first and foremost Microsoft's. Especially in the early part of this period restructuring and streamlining efforts took precedence. The introduction of iMac in 1998 and the iBook in 1999 set the tone in terms of design, quality and "thinking different" for many years to come.
iTunes era 2001-2006
With a stable core business and healthy profitability, Apple introduced the first iPod in October 2001 complementing the earlier introduced iTunes music player. Two years later, Apple introduced the iTunes Store offering downloadable music for the Mac and Windows operating systems. The venturing into the music and portable music player business and the halo effect for the Mac business is reflected in the market capitalization increasing significantly during the following years surpassing HP and Nokia.
Mobile iOS devices 2007-2011
Market capitalization further increased with the entry into the smart-phone market in 2007. Note that market capitalization of all selected companies combined at that time was as high as in the dot.com era of 2000. But this time Apple accounted for more than 10% of it. From 2008 to 2009 market capitalization of all companies declined severely due to the financial crisis. Rapid recovery followed during 2009 and early 2010. Apple introduced the iPad in March 2010 further fueling its rise to the top, surpassing Microsoft’s capitalization and topping Exxon Mobil as the world's most valuable listed company.
During the time of Steve Jobs as CEO, Apple's market capitalization increased on average by 42% every year--an unprecedented track record. According to his own admission, Steve Jobs became CEO when Apple was 90 days away from bankruptcy. He resigned 14 years later after leading Apple to becoming the most valuable listed company in the world. From a value creation point of view, it's hard to think of a better performance from anyone, ever.
Google's acquisition of Motorola is clearly designed to be an acquisition of Intellectual Property rather than an entry of Google into the phone business, but the impact on the business will be felt in many ways.
It is surely going to send some Android vendors scrambling. The situation is not without precedent however. The history of governance and ownership of Symbian shows how the licensing of platforms by licensor competitors leads to unintended consequences.
Symbian was formed to be governed in a way very similar to the original Android via the Open Handset Alliance. The company was owned by a consortium of phone vendors.[1] The shares were not equally distributed however with Nokia holding a larger share (though not a majority).
Although nominally involved in decision making, the smaller shareholders never felt entirely comfortable with the arrangement and over time some sold their shares and left the group even though they continued to license the OS.
Eventually Nokia ended up acquiring the company outright and open sourced the code. However, by then the product was obsolete and the only licensee was Nokia itself.
The lesson (and warning) was that a licensor that is also a licensee makes other licensees uncomfortable. The supplier is also a competitor. This is classic channel conflict and never ends well.
Open or not, with or without equity, these arrangements are always unworkable.
So Google's promise that
"This acquisition will not change our commitment to run Android as an open platform. Motorola will remain a licensee of Android and Android will remain open. We will run Motorola as a separate business. Many hardware partners have contributed to Android’s success and we look forward to continuing to work with all of them to deliver outstanding user experiences."
seems naive at best.
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Notes:
Before its outright purchase by Nokia in December 2008, Symbian Ltd. was owned by Nokia (56.3%), Ericsson (15.6%), Sony Ericsson (13.1%), Matsushita (10.5%), and Samsung (4.5%). The company's founder shareholders were Psion, Nokia, Ericsson, Panasonic/ Matsushita and Motorola. Motorola sold its stake in the company to Psion and Nokia in September 2003. Psion's stake was bought by Nokia, Matsushita, Siemens AG and Sony Ericsson in July 2004.
When a company is acquired, the price paid is usually higher than what the company is worth. This is because there is a "control premium" that needs to be paid so that the acquiring company can control the destiny of the acquired company (while the seller loses that right). So the question has to be what does the premium (or excess cost) buy? What is the value of that control? What will be the new destiny? Whose destiny is changed?
Clayton Christensen succinctly defined the value in any company as the sum of three constituent parts: resources, processes and business models. Market value can be nothing more and nothing less than these three things.
An acquisition has to be positioned on one of these targets just like a product is positioned on a specific market. The problem with being deliberate about where the value lies is that once positioned a certain way, the integration team will begin to execute on that plan. This means that the thing you decided was worth most (e.g. resources) gets all the attention and the other potential sources of value (processes or profit models) are discarded.
This argument reduces to there being three separate companies being available. The buyer pays for all but gets to keep only one.
When you look at it this way you realize that the reason most acquisitions fail is that the buyer throws away most of the real value in the company.
For example, when looking at Skype through Microsoft's eyes, they could be valuing it for its resources (employees, management team, customers, or intellectual property.) Or they could be valuing its processes (how it makes software and how it recruits customers) or it could be its business model (viral distribution, very low prices with wide distribution, plan to disrupt telecommunications). Each of these is a separate, mutually exclusive deal with separate integration plan and separate strategic justification. Each is targeting a separate Skype.
If Microsoft were to pay a premium for Skype's resources then they will probably not make use of the processes or business models. There is some value in this Skype. Microsoft could use the customer base to sustain their existing businesses and to up-sell services.
But what if the real value is not in resources but in the business model? A model which would allow for Microsoft to disrupt its core business. Perhaps Microsoft could use the Skype approach to creating new customers, eliminating its partner network and expensive direct sales force. This would be a different Skype. It would have the potential to transform Microsoft. Microsoft could become what Skype is now: a communications network or carrier that disrupts the way people use network operators.
This type of value exists in Skype but its asymmetry with Microsoft's core would make it a very tough sell internally. A recent article pointed out that when Skype was up for sale last time, Google's acquisition was sabotaged internally by people who realized that peer-to-peer would be "incompatible" with the centralized architecture of Google's services. If not for the effort of certain individuals, Google might have ended up with Skype and destroyed it with internal antibodies.
Chances are that Microsoft paid for Skype's customers and engineers but will not apply the innovations of viral peer-to-peer distribution or disruptive voice pricing. If that happens then perhaps Microsoft will pay $8.5 billion for the wrong Skype and telecom disruption will find another home.
Notes:
Adapted from an answer published in Capital.bg. My thanks to Adrian Georgiev for asking the right questions.
Yesterday I attended the first meeting of the Forum for Growth and Innovation. It's an initiative where practitioners of Clayton's Christensen's theory of innovation can review new academic research before it's published.
The Forum has another goal: to disseminate and propagate key learnings and ideas. As a keen student of the theory and a blogger, I am eager to provide a gateway for you, my audience, to this management theory.
My modus operandi has been to discuss an industry or a set of competitors in great detail while occasionally stepping back and suggesting a cause for the patterns of behavior we are witnessing. More often than not, the causes are described very well by the theories in Christensen's writings.
There are cases where the theory does not seem to match. That's actually the most exciting part of this process. Exception (or anomaly) handling is what allows the theory to evolve and improve.
Yesterday's event focused on M&A. It's a cliché to say that M&A is a recipe for failure but there are recipes to follow that minimize the chance of failure. The forum debated these recipes and we were treated to the wisdom from those who learned the hard way what works and what doesn't. (For example, the ex-CEOs of Best Buy, Arrow Electronics and a senior executive who worked under Jack Welch at GE.)
What I came away with was a new respect for the counter-intuitive and contradictory nature of acquisition integration. What often makes sense on paper like synergies or new growth can quickly turn to a loss of the core business. Recipes for deciding what to integrate and what to keep autonomous are an active area of research.
For this and many other reasons, it's easy to understand why Apple is reluctant to make large acquisitions. The market discounts Apple's cash because it is expected to evaporate in a mis-guided acquisition (since that's what management has shown a propensity to do in most other large US companies.)
I've written about why I think Apple's cash is worth more than other companies' cash (e.g. Microsoft.) Apple's reluctance to make large acquisitions and no record of such should provide some hope.
However, I don't think that reluctance is simply a coincidence or a lack of suitable candidates for acquisition. I think it's more a result of the company's processes and priorities. As long as the team in charge is focused on the details of execution and integration, and as long as acquisitions are complex and fraught with unknowable risk and lack of control, I see no acquisition in Apple's future.
TOKYO (Reuters) - Shares of Sony Corp rose nearly 3 percent on Tuesday as traders cited media reports speculating that the Japanese electronics maker could be a potential acquisition target of Apple Inc.
Although Steve Jobs once admired Sony, the company today contains nothing of value to Apple. A disruptor is unlikely to buy the company he just disrupted. Would Sony have bought Westinghouse? Would WalMart have bought Sears? Would Microsoft have bought IBM in the 1990's?
When considering an acquisition the chances are that the asset being purchased is going to ask a premium price. So the buyer has to answer this question: what is it about the asset that makes it worth more than the market price?
There are three (and only three) sources of value that a buyer can buy:
The resources (intellectual, physical, contracts, channels or employees)
The processes (the algorithm of how those resources are put to use)
The business model (the way the assets and processes and applied to create profits).
A company like Sony has some resources but its processes and business model are obsolete. Should Apple pay a premium for Sony's assets? I don't see a reason why.
As previously described in an earlier piece on the transistor, there is a theory that underlies much of what this web diary is about. Telecommunications is undergoing wrenching change. And not for the first time. The history of the industry is filled with disruption and thus with drama that leads to fine storytelling.
One such great story is that of Western Union and the telegraph.
Western Union was formed as a company in 1851 and ten years later had completed the first transcontinental telegraph line. Following on that breakthrough, it introduced the first digital real-time data service, the stock ticker, in 1866. Business boomed and by 1870 it was the world's most powerful telecommunications company.
By any standards it was innovative: it offered remarkable and revolutionary telecom data services, a century before the Internet. But in the century that followed why didn't Western Union become the leader in voice communications, ceding that position to the Bell companies?
Alexader Graham Bell did not invent the voice telephone with the intention of toppling Western Union. In the language of today's technology entrepreneurship he hoped Western Union would be his "exit". He pitched the phone to them as an improvement to their core telegraphy business. Bell offered the patents for the telephone to Western Union for a mere $100,000, roughly $2 million in today's dollars. In other words, today the deal would be: two million dollars to own all voice IP.
Western Union passed
Now why would they do that? Imagine you are an analyst at Western Union advising management on technology acquisition and M&A. What process would you use to evaluate it? First, most obviously, you would try to get feedback from marketing and sales. They should go out and survey their customer base to find out who would be interested and how much they would be willing to pay.
The sales force would naturally seek out their best customers and ask them first. Those customers were the stock ticker users. They were extremely voracious users of the ticker tape system. It should be no surprise why we have "ticker tape parades"--there was enough of the stuff lying around offices in New York to shower down and flood Broadway end-to-end". Ticker tape was a boon to merchants and traders. Chicago would know what's happening in the New York stock exchange instantaneously. Price data was traveling at the speed of light. The sender and receiver were in lock-step sync. To suggest to these customers a voice product would sound like a step backward. Why would they want to talk to the other party? The data was coming on tape and it was also recorded for posterity. Speaking with the other person meant confusion and delay and a mess of record keeping.
The word from the customers would be a resounding negative.
Second would be the business model. How would you charge for voice? Data was subscription based, and the fees were huge. Voice would be metered and the price low. If targeting consumers, telegrams were priced by the word, but you couldn't price voice by the word. Marketing would stare back at you as if you had committed a judgement error.
Thirdly you would look at the cost side. Operations would give you more bad news. Voice technology was different enough that it needed new infrastructure. Switchboards, operators, handsets and new power and insulator requirements were all expensive and had no clear return. Voice was a loser all around.
So the decision was perfectly reasonable, smart even.
This is not to suggest that Western Union did not accept any new technology or invest in it. For decades after the phone, Western Union continued to invest in innovation: It introduced an electronic payment system (called money transfer) in 1871. In 1914 it offered the first charge card and in 1923 it introduced teletypewriters. Singing telegrams followed in 1933 and fax service in 1935. Intercity wireless microwave communications were introduced in 1943. Telex came in 1958 and the product of marketing genius, the 'Candygram' in the 1960s. By 1964 its network was all wireless using a transcontinental microwave system. Western Union became the first American telecommunications corporation to maintain its own fleet of geosynchronous communication satellites, starting in 1974. The fleet of satellites, called Westar, carried communications within the Western Union company for telegram and mailgram message data to Western Union bureaus nationwide.
And it wasn't lacking in talent either. Western Union had the best telecom managers in the business and was raking in profits to fund expansion. It attracted the best and brightest engineers for generations. Western Union probably passed on hundreds of other inventions and ideas, and rightly so.
So what happened to WU?
It's still around. However, due to declining profits and mounting debts, Western Union slowly began to divest itself of telecommunications-based assets starting in the early 1980s. Due to deregulation in the US, Western Union began sending money outside the country, re-inventing itself as "The fastest way to send money worldwide". In 1987, an individual investor acquired control of Western Union through an outside of chapter 11 process that was a complex leveraged recapitalization. After several other changes in ownerships and moves through bankruptcy, WU is now a public company with an enterprise value of about $12 billion based entirely on international money transfer business.
3G as a disruptive technology
Today we've come around full circle. Whereas voice was disruptive to a data network provider in the 20th century, data is disruptive to a voice network provider in the 21st. The mis-application of 3G network technology to sustain voice-oriented business models gives one a strong sense of déjà vu.
The telecom world moved swiftly to 1G and 2G cellular voice. Each new generation of mobile telecom was sustaining the core business model of subscriptions feeding centrally managed networks and symbiotic device vendors benefiting from handset and switching system upgrades. Standardization, international expansion, lower price points and network effects made this industry the most ubiquitous technology distributor the world had ever seen.
3G however was different. It was effectively mobile broadband data. It enabled data services to be de-coupled from the network operators. IP protocols did not require the servers to be located on operator premises or even to be managed or monitored by them. Devices could be general purpose computers not specific purpose communicators. Incumbents did not adapt to this well. They continued to build business plans according to a central-switch blueprint.
So although incumbents did not reject the smartphone as a technology, they tried to make it sustaining when plainly it isn't. They essentially tried to cram it into their business models.
The struggle to keep the service structure of telecom centered around the network operator will continue, but short of pulling the plug on 3G and LTE, there is little that the incumbents can do to stop it.
So what's the lesson?
Some technologies are embraced and some are rejected. You can't fault every rejection and you can't praise every acceptance. The most likely reason for embracing something is that it helps grow your existing business. The most likely reason for rejection is that it may harm your business. Even acceptance sometimes leads to mis-application in sustaining the core rather than planning for its demise.
The decision on how to handle something new and potentially disruptive requires a different sense of what's right and wrong about it.
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Photo: Former headquarters of WU, located at 60 Hudson, New York.
Under Kallasvuo Nokia embarked on the most dramatic shift in its business since entering the mobile phone business in the early 90s.
The shift was not into mobile software which began in 2001 under his predecessor. It was not into enterprise solutions which also preceded his tenure. OPK's main contribution was the move into mobile services.
The concept of mobile services may be an unfamiliar one for casual observers because it has not become a visible business for operators and certainly not for handset vendors. It's also a complicated business model that requires some deeper understanding of the way the telecom industry is structured.
What Nokia had in mind was to offer various value-added, billable services to operators which would be enabled by Nokia handsets. The types of services included music subscriptions (Comes With Music), email (several acquisitions), photo sharing, and navigation.
The idea was that since many operators would not be capable of rolling out own brand services and could not do the heavy back-end lifting or the integration with handsets, someone could step in and roll out white labeled solutions world-wide. Third parties would also find it impossible to integrate and would lack the relationships Nokia had with operators world-wide.
For example, Nokia could enable a South American operator to offer email services to all their customers (with or without smartphones) and that service could be offered at a certain incremental price over the basic voice plan. The client implementation could be device independent but Nokia devices would probably work better. This would lead to higher ARPU which could be shared with Nokia.
Anyone can see that this is a complicated business plan and is therefore unlikely to be successful. But what makes it a complete failure is the realization that most buyers will resist the idea of paying for individual services separately. $1/mo for email, $2/mo for music, $3/mo for maps, etc. is repulsive. Users stampeded instead to unlimited data plans and smartphones which offered all these services and hundreds more for free or at prices negotiated with third party providers, rather than the untrusted network operators.
And therein lies the entire cause of Nokia's strategic failure: an operator centric point of view. It led to poisoned devices and irrational business plans.
Which leads to the question in the headline. Is this mistake recognized and is it big enough to cause such a disruptive CEO dismissal?
I argue yes. Strategic errors are forgivable, but the they become a capital offense when they turn into a derailment of the core business. Instead of being enhanced with value-added services, the core business collapsed under the disruptive attack of unlimited data.
But it gets worse. Like the capital offense that Robbie Bach was guilty of at Microsoft, there has to be some direct accountability. To add insult to injury, OPK single-handedly pushed through the biggest and stupidest acquisition in Nokia's history. To support this flawed vision of mobile services OPK bought Navteq for $8.1 billion in October 2007.
Intended as a service that could be rolled out on all phones and monetized through operator billing, Nokia maps is a free service that will never return anything to shareholders.
Missing where the puck was going is one thing but burning precious capital is another. This, in my humble opinion, is why OPK was fired.
Speaking of pucks, here's hoping fresh Canadian eyes will see where it's going.
My recent exposé of Apple's cash (and cash equivalents and long-term securities and short-term securities) drew quite a bit of attention, which is good. Because it needs to be demystified. However, the story does not end there. Part of the problem of cash is that the liquid stuff can often itself change in perceived value due to mis-management.
Cash has to be valued on the basis of what's to become of it. So what can become of it?
The value in liquid assets can be returned to shareholders in the form of a dividend, which means double taxation on profits; not the best idea usually. Or it can be returned in the form of share re-purchase which tends to have only a temporary effect on share prices, again not a great return. The value can also be increased by means of investment in projects that return higher than what investors expect their cost of capital to be. This is the best option but investment is difficult when the amount involved is so big that no project or set of projects could possibly cost enough to employ the capital. Finally, the value can be completely destroyed through large acquisitions.
I say destroyed because the history of large acquisitions is almost universally known to be value destructive (1). The urge to M&A is why cash on the balance sheet for large companies is usually discounted and share prices "get no credit for it." This is plaguing Apple with a P/E ex-cash in the teens.
Is this fair?
Companies faced with low growth are more likely to blow their cash on desperate acquisitions than those with high growth, but the best way to judge the probabiliy of cash evaporation is by looking at management track records.
Which leads us to Microsoft. Their pursuit of Yahoo shows how desperate they had been in trying to catch Google and how poorly that would have turned out. Having failed only because Yang refused to sell, Microsoft would have gone through a large part of its cash and even raised debt to finance a dud. With this propensity, it's no wonder that Microsoft's cash is considered an endangered quantity.
Microsoft used to have the largest cash position in tech. They still have $44.5 billion--a mere billion or so less than Apple. Some of the value already evaporated on dividends and medium sized acquisitions ($500 million for Danger that ended up as Kin(dling)). The chances that they'll blow billions again on desperate means to chase competitiveness are high. I would say it's a certainty.
On the other hand we have a high growth company like Apple that has not traditionally spent money on business acquisition. (They do spend on asset acquisitions--IP, code, developers but not on new business models.) Thus, on reputation alone, Apple's cash can be considered "safer" and hence worth more than Microsoft's.
Whether Apple can expose that cash to risk that enhances its value is another matter, but their CEO is on the record stating that "it's not burning a hole in their pocket" and the CFO repeats every quarter he is intent on its preservation.
This, in my opinion, makes the difference between Apple's $45 billion and Microsoft's $44 billion a lot more than $1 billion.
(1) Various studies have shown that at least 50% of acquisitions have been rated as failures. See failure rates by various studies charted below. Source: Prof. Dr. Thomas Straub (2007) "Reasons for frequent failure in Mergers and Acquisitions"
"During a conference call about HP's acquisition of Palm Wednesday, Todd Bradley, executive VP of HP's Personal Systems Group, said that there are "a lot of opportunities" with the purchase. Namely, he said, HP could use the WebOS mobile operating system as a touchscreen interface for new hardware such as a tablet or netbook.
Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein and Brian Humphries, HP's senior VP of Strategy and Corporate Development revealed that HP plans to "double down on WebOS," which is considered the "prized asset" of the acquisition. The two reportedly mentioned the scalability of WebOS, implying that HP plans to bring the platform to multiple hardware form factors. HP even said it has already tested WebOS for its scalability."
Oh, and someone from HP also said they will still do business with Microsoft.
Let's see...HP is adding its own mobile OS, HTC was hunting for its own mobile OS but is living on skinning, Palm made its own mobile OS and managed to escape oblivion, Samsung launched its own mobile OS, Apple has its own mobile OS, RIM has its own mobile OS and bought the kernel of another, Microsoft has its own mobile OS--really more than one, Nokia has its own mobile OS(s), and Google has its own mobile OS (plus Chrome). Chances are that Amazon is building its own OS as well.
Only Microsoft and Google are still betting that licensing is going to be the way forward but each is hedging its bets: Microsoft with Kin and Google with Nexus One.
Can anyone seriously suggest that the mobile computing industry is rapidly moving toward horizontal modularity or even consolidating like the Operators are hoping?
Before you answer, consider also other horizontal players that are no longer with us: PalmSource, Symbian (and, give it a year, Windows Mobile).
