Apple has so far returned $761.5 billion to shareholders. 143.3 billion in accumulated dividends and $618.2 billion in share buybacks. These are the gray areas in the graph above. The question that often comes up is: isn't this capital return program a misallocation? In particular isn't buying back shares and retiring them a waste of money?
By definition, it cannot be. The mechanism of buying shares and retiring them is a process of returning retained capital to shareholders. The other ways this can be done are through dividends (periodic or one-time) or the sale of the company (liquidation). Ignoring the liquidation option which does not make sense for viable companies, the decision between dividends and buybacks comes down to a tax efficiency question.
The result is, however, roughly the same: retained earnings, which are stored by the company as cash typically (net value for Apple today is $57.2 billion), are an asset balanced by a liability to the shareholder called Total Shareholder Equity (valued today as $60.3 billion.) As such, the retained earnings belong to the shareholders. It's why they own the company. It's what their cash share of the value in the company is.
It's also surplus to the company's needs. Had the company needed this cash, it would have spent it on building the products and services it sells or operations that maintain or grow the business. Those expenses appear in cost of sales (COS) or cost of goods sold (COGS) or in operating expenses Sales, General and Administrative (SG&A) or Research and Development (R&D). If it's not spent this way then it drops to the net income line and, crucially, is subject to taxation (about 12% to 15% for Apple). After taxation, once returned, it's taxed again as either capital gains (in the case of buybacks) or dividend income. These rates vary on the jurisdiction of the owner and the current tax policy.
Note that the spending on R&D includes development of future projects which are not directly related to current products. Engineering of current products is expensed against COGS. R&D for Apple ($29.4 billion in last 12 months) is significant, having grown to 9% of sales, as the graph below shows.
For the company to decide to return capital it really does mean that it has no good ideas on how to spend it given what the company knows it can and cannot do. It's a judicious decision and one which honors the relationship between owner and manager with fiduciary responsibility to the owner.
Still, doesn't that mean it's wasted?
No. Giving it to the shareholder means that the company says "It belongs to you, I don't know what to do with it on your behalf, so here, you figure out what to do with it." The shareholder can then make an allocation decision that suits their sense of what is valuable or useful. The return is a deferral of decision to the owner rather than their agent.
To the extent that once returned, the capital is misspent, that is on the spender, not on Apple.
Consider the alternatives. Instead of returning capital, what some managers decide to do is to re-allocate those retained earnings to acquire other companies with the promise of value creation through synergies. However these are often huge wastes of money. The new asset is recorded as "goodwill" on the balance sheet, offsetting the retained shareholder equity. As the synergies fail to materialize, the asset (goodwill) is written off, and shareholder equity decreases accordingly, and so, value evaporates or is transferred to the owners of the acquired company who cash out above market value.
Acquisitions are a process of picking the pocket of shareholders.
The alternative might be to spend heavily on R&D. That is more admirable but the amount involved is enormous and it's very difficult to find enough people and projects worth pursuing without turning R&D into an academic organization. Remember that with R&D at $7.4 billion per quarter, the company is spending 41 times more than it did in 2006.
And doubling or tripling R&D, even if possible, would impact margins to such an extent that Apple's profitability would show very poorly indeed. That would collapse share prices and decrease share-based compensation, limiting the possibility of recruiting talented engineers. It would bring quite a lot of negative consequences.
Another exercise to undertake would be to ask what would happen if the mechanism of share buybacks were made illegal. It was not always legal anyway. That is left as an exercise to the reader.
The last quarter of 2020 was a remarkable quarter for Apple. Every line in the income statement increased by double digits. Net sales up 21%, iPhone sales up 17%, Mac sales up 21%, iPad up 41%, Services up 24% and Earnings Per Share up 30%. This had not happened in over 10 years. The last time being the first quarter of 2010.
Take a look at the table below which color-codes each line based on the rate of growth. The darker the green the faster the growth (blue being above 100%).
A shockingly good performance is made all the more remarkable by its happening in a time of uncertainty. The company has refused (rightly) to issue guidance as long as a pandemic is raging world-wide. The disruptions in supply chains, demand and changes in behaviors due to new limitations on mobility and interactions between people are unprecedented and consequences are still to be estimated.
The growth surely, you say, is precisely because of this disruption. The "work and study from home" and lockdowns have forced people to buy more technology. Phones, Laptops, tablets are not just tools but lifelines for a society denied other forms of contact.
But this was not at all obvious at the beginning of the crisis. The months leading to pandemic caused the share prices of most equities to fall, and tech was not immune. Apple's shares fell in March 2020 to $57/share. I heard comments suggesting that Apple would collapse as a business with unemployment reaching 25% and nobody willing to pay for luxuries like iPhones.
The crisis has proven that technology is not a luxury but a necessity, and technology that works better is far more valuable than technology that works barely. Spending on better machines has increased.
Some of that is of course helped by stimulus programs but growth was not only in countries which gave out cash. The growth for Apple was in all regions of the world, breaking new records even in poorer countries.
Far more likely, the economic fuel for Apple's growth came from disposable income being unspent on other high-ticket items like dining, vacations and entertainment. Much cash sloshing around the economy surely ended up in an Apple cash register.
But this is all old news. The question into 2021 is what will this year look like. The first quarter already ended and the data is dribbling in: Apple has 1 billion customers, 88% of US teens have an iPhone, 70% have AirPods, China is growing at crazy rates, Foxconn reporting 40% growth, production of next generation iPhone chips starting early (May), etc.
There does not seem to be a let-up in growth, despite some component shortages postponing some non-iPhone product introductions. Apple's cautious comments 3 months ago are probably moot now.
We are providing some directional insights assuming that COVID-related impacts of our business do not worsen from our current assumptions for the quarter. For total company revenue, we believe growth will accelerate on a year-over-year basis and in aggregate, follow typical seasonality on a sequential basis.
At the product category level, keep in mind two items: First, during the March quarter last year, we saw elevated activity in our digital services as lockdowns occurred around the world, so our services business faces a tougher year-over-year comparison; second, we believe the year-over-year growth in the Wearables, Home and Accessories category will decelerate compared to Q1.
As you know, we were chasing demand on AirPods last year as we expanded channel inventory from Q1 to Q2. This year, we plan to decrease AirPods channel inventory as is typical after the holiday quarter. We expect gross margin to be similar to the December quarter.
We expect opex to be between $10.7 billion and $10.9 billion. We expect OI&E to be up around $50 million and our tax rate to be around 17%.
Luca Maestri
Given this, I am tentatively projecting top line growth of 15% (vs. 1% a year ago and 21% last quarter) and EPS growth of 11% (vs. 3.8% year ago and 25.6% last quarter.) A goldilocks quarter.
The Apple product line-up for 2023 is almost completely decided. This is not conjecture but simply an observation of the lead times for developing the types of products that Apple offers. The integration of hardware, software and services, often cited as the key to Apple's sustainable competitive advantage, has a great cost: the time required to develop in an integrated fashion is far longer than the time required to develop in a modular fashion.
2.5 years is not a long time. The development process on truly new products could take 4 to 5 years. Apple Silicon, new Operating Systems and new services could all take longer than 2.5 years. The products we just saw launch this year were planned and engineered at least 2 years ago. The more integrated, the more time is needed. Wearables, AI/ML and process engineering are additional examples of long arcs of development needed to reach products.
This does not mean we can predict what these products will be. We don't have visibility to the process but Apple management does and they will make decisions now on adjacent dependencies in the business. For example, visible efforts in planning the use of cash, the carbon offsetting, capital expenditures and R&D are all synchronized to the roadmap and hints may be read into this data.
The biggest hints are the R&D spending and the company's capital return program. Combined they show a confidence in the roadmap that is hard to overestimate. First, R&D is reaching new highs of about 7% of sales (on a trailing 12 months' basis, see graph below). This is almost the same as the spending on SG&A which has declined as a percent of sales from above 12% pre-iPhone.
Of course sales have increased significantly over the time shown in the graph below and the absolute spending is shown the following graph. R&D spending is over $5 billion/quarter or about $20 billion/yr. Some of the results of this will be seen in 2023 or beyond.
Next, capital returns. The company is returning almost all the cash it generates and is reducing its cash balance. It has returned about half a trillion dollars to date. Dividends paid has reached $100 billion and share buybacks about $400 billion. This is the largest capital return in US history.
The company has declared its intention to reduce net cash to zero. This means it will still have substantial cash due to loans in the form of bonds but no "excess" cash will be held by the company. This is in contrast to the strategy under Steve Jobs where he sought to keep as much cash on hand as possible due to the need to weather potential storms, Tim Cook's Apple is being very "casual" about cash.
Steve Jobs had his reasons for hoarding cash. The company had been through periods of existential crisis. The absence of cash jeopardized its independence and it was something he vowed never to happen again.
However if that strategy would be maintained to this day, as the graph shows, the company would have cash of nearly $700 billion today. It would make Apple the world's largest hedge fund, by far. Second only to a very few sovereign funds. Given a conservative cash preservation mandate it also means that that capital would largely go unrewarded because the return on it would have been minimal, negligible. Not to mention also the target it would paint on the company's balance sheet.
So given the trajectory in net cash being so consistent, it's probable that the goal of net zero will be reached mid 2023.
That leaves the question of what will happen at that time?
The answer is nothing. Nothing will happen. The capital return programs will probably be ended and additional cash generation will be paid as dividends going forward. That's it.
Rather than suggesting a change, the capital return program (and the R&D program) suggest a lack of change, consistency. The company management is anticipating a steady capital generation rate, a steady product roadmap (with predictable growth) and a steady customer base (with predictable loyalty).
This future for Apple in 2023 may seem boring. But that's exactly the plan. This is a plan that the company management has been making for a long time and has been executing for a long time. The plan is to be boring on the business side but exciting on the customer product side.
Consistency has been the characteristic trait of the Tim Cook era. It is a smoothing of seasonality with services. It is the clockwork delivery of product updates, regardless of macro and externalities. It is a growth in user base consistent for a decade.
It is perhaps because more people believe that consistency is the future that we have Apple's P/E ratio now in-line with its peers. Paradoxically, being boring is what makes Apple shares so exciting today.
Three months ago Apple provided the following guidance:
As we move ahead into the June quarter,[…] We expect revenue to be between $51.5 billion and $53.5 billion. We expect gross margin to be between 38% and 38.5%. We expect OpEx to be between $7.7 billion and $7.8 billion. We expect OI&E to be about $400 million. And we expect our tax rate to be about 14.5%.
If we aim for a revenue figure close to the upper end of the range ($53.2 billion) and insert all the other figures (split the difference for OpEx) then then the company's fiscal third quarter looks as follows:
Revenues: $53.2b iPhone (units): 43.2 million iPad (units): 11.6 million Mac (units): 4.3 million Services ($): 9.5 billion Other products ($): 3.5 billion Gross margin (%): 38.6%
EPS ($): $2.26
This last figure, the earnings per share, is the most speculative because it depends on another guidance that Apple gave: a new $100 billion share repurchase authorization and the fact that it has no time frame. For context, as of end of March the company had completed over $275 billion of its previous $300 billion capital return program and $10 billion remained for share re-purchases in the June quarter. It's unclear how much of the new authorization will be spent in the quarter.
That spending could indicate the share count but there are issues with this calculation as well. The $2.26 EPS I forecast is based on the assumption that the the same number of shares will be retired as in the previous quarter (about 89 million shares.) However the company spent $23.5 billion on repurchases of 137 million Apple shares through open market transactions (for an average price or $171.53, in-line with the quarter's trading average).
So why is the number of shares purchased (137 million) so different from the change in shares used to compute earnings per share (89 million)? I actually don't know.
The question of how many shares are available to calculating EPS is perhaps the last mystery in what is otherwise a very predictable business. The revenue growth and implied iPhone growth are pretty transparent. Incidentally, the EPS I'm forecasting is equivalent to growth of 35.8% y/y. The share price is trading at multiples about half of this growth rate so it's no wonder the company is spending most of the cash on re-purchases.
How quickly the $100 billion re-purchasing authorization will be used is another question. The effect in concentration of value per share could be profound as shown in the graph above which will have further implications on the "cash zero" direction for the company.
The following is a transcript of the comments from Tim Cook (CEO) and Luca Maestri (CFO) at Apple's Q1 2018 Earnings Conference Call February 1, 2018. I color coded my interpretation of the comments into four categories:
Grey: Background and promotional commentary
Red: Strategy and signals of what management considers important and may include data beyond the regularly reported numbers.
Green: Financial data
Black: Commentary.
Blue: My commentary, in brackets.
For a quick read of Apple's strategy, read the Red text. These comments are not repeated in financial reports. Highly recommended.
For a quick read of Apple's financial performance, read the green text (which are replicated in financial reports). Read this if you don't want to wade through the financial reports.
For marketing or product material, read the grey text.This is sometimes unique but also repeats product launch information.
---- Tim Cook: Thanks, Nancy and thanks everyone on the call, and welcome to everyone today. Before we dive into the quarter, I'd like to take a moment to talk about a significant milestone we recently crossed.
Apple's active installed base reached 1.3 billion devices in January and is at an all-time high for all of our major products. 1.3 billion devices represents an astonishing 30% growth in just two years. It speaks to the strength and reliability of our products and our ecosystem, as well as the loyalty, satisfaction and engagement of our customers. It's also fueling tremendous growth in our services business, which I’ll talk about a little later in the call. [This is probably Apple's most important number. For at least the next 20 years this is the key performance metric and it can be used to derive company's valuation. A summary of the history of active devices vs. units sold is shown in the graph below:]
Turning to the December quarter. We're thrilled to report Apple's biggest quarter ever, which set new all-time records in both revenue and earnings. We generated revenue of $88.3 billion, which is above the high-end of our guidance range, and it is up almost $10 billion or 13% over the previous all-time record we set a year ago.
It's also our fifth consecutive quarter of accelerating revenue growth with double digit growth in each of our geographic segments around the world. What makes us even more remarkable is that the quarter we're reporting today was 13-weeks long, while the year ago quarter was 14-weeks. When we look at the average revenue per week in the December quarter this year compared to last year, our growth was a stunning 21%. [The 13-week vs. 14-week year-on-year comparison is repeated several times. The summary differences are shown in the table below:]
Our growth was broad-based and a key driver was iPhone, which generated its highest revenue ever. iPhone X was the best-selling smartphone in the world in the December quarter according to Canalys, and it has been our top selling phone every week since it launched. iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus rounded out the top three iPhones in the quarter. In fact, revenue for our newly launched iPhones was the highest of any lineup in our history, driving total Apple revenue above our guidance range. [The iPhone X is a huge hit. It drove the average selling price $100 higher y/y. This is not only unprecedented for Apple but for the entire Industry. The average smartphone sells for less than $300 while iPhones sold for $800. The gap is widening. The following graph shows the product mix and the average resulting price.]
I want to take a moment to recognize the tremendous amount of work that went into creating iPhone 10. Our teams carried out an extremely complex launch from both an engineering and operations perspective, executing an outstanding product ramp that required years of research and development; one that introduced innovative features like an edge-to-edge Super Retina Display and the TrueDepth Camera, which enables face ID. Our customers love these new features and the new gestures like simply swiping up from the bottom, which make using iPhone even more intuitive and enjoyable.
Our team has put the technology of tomorrow in our customers’ hands today, set a standard for the next decade of smartphones and we are very proud of their achievements.
It was another very strong quarter for services with revenue of $8.5 billion, up 18% over last year, and we’re on pace to achieve our goal of doubling our 2016 services revenue by 2020. The number of paid subscriptions across our services offerings passed 240 million by the end of the December quarter, that’s an increase of 30 million in the last 90 days alone, which is the largest quarterly growth ever. [Services has been growing relentlessly for over a decade. This steadiness of growth makes is a juggernaut. Apple is increasingly speaking about subscriptions as the key metric and 240 million is reaching record territory. The rise of Services is shown below (both revenues and consumer spending.)]
We had an all-time record quarter for the App Store with our best holiday season ever. We’re seeing great excitement around augmented reality with customers now enjoying over 2,000 ARKit enabled app, spanning every category in the App Store. In December, when Pokémon GO released its new augmented reality features built with ARKit, it jumped the top of the App Store charts. Last week, on a stop in Toronto, I met developers who are hard at work on creative applications using ARKit from art appreciation to ecommerce, and I was very impressed with what I saw.
Just for months after ARKit launched to the public, we’ve already released ARKit 1.5 in beta to developers around the world, and the response has been tremendous. Augmented reality is going to revolutionize many of the experiences we have with mobile devices. And with ARKit, we’re giving developers the most advanced tools on the market to create apps for the most advanced operating system running on the most advanced hardware. This is something only Apple can do.
In addition to the App Store, several other services had their biggest quarter ever, including Apple Music, iCloud and Apple Pay, all of which saw growth in both active users and revenue.
Apple Pay has reached an important milestone in the U.S. As a result of 50% year-over-year growth in merchant adoption, it’s now accepted at more than half of all American retail locations, which includes more than two-thirds of the country’s top 100 retailers. Now available in 20 markets, global Apple Pay purchase volume more than tripled year-over-year and we’re delighted to be expanding to Brazil in the coming months. [There are no absolute data points on Apple Pay but we do have some scattered growth data. The US data is cited here but in my experience it's more popular in select countries like UK where users are using it habitually]
Today, you can use Apple Pay to take the subway in Guangzhou, China, see a concert at London’s Wembley Stadium or buy a souvenir in Yosemite National Park. In the U.S., we launched Apple Pay Cash in December, and it’s off to a terrific start. Millions of people are already using it to send and receive money with friends and family quickly, easily and securely; to split a bill, pay someone back, or send last minute gift right from the messages app.
It was our best quarter ever for the Apple Watch with over 50% growth in revenue and units for the fourth quarter in a row and strong double-digit growth in every geographic segment. Sales of Apple Watch Series 3 models were also more than twice the volume of Series 2 a year ago. Apple Watch is the most popular, smart watch in the world and gained market share during the quarter based on the latest estimates from IDC. [Apple Watch is growing consistently. The following graph shows my estimates of volume (total 42 million to date) and revenues (total $15 billion) based on all available data and commentary from management.]
It was the third consecutive quarter of growth for iPad revenue, thanks to the strength of both iPad and iPad Pro. Based on the latest data from IDC, we gained share in nearly every market we track with strong outperformance in emerging markets.
Worldwide, almost half of our iPad sales were the first-time tablet buyers are those switching to Apple, and that’s true in some of our most developed markets, including Japan and France. In China, new and switching users made up over 70% of all iPad sales.
For Mac, we launched the all new, iMac Pro in mid-December. It’s an entirely new product line designed for our Pro users who love the all-in-one design of iMac and require workstation class performance. It's the fastest, most powerful Mac ever, delivering incredible computational power, for simulation and real time 3D rendering, immersive VR and complex photography audio and video projects. Worldwide, 60% of our Mac sales were the first time buyers and switchers and in China, that number was almost 90%.
We're looking forward to getting HomePod in customers’ hands beginning next week. HomePod is an innovative wireless speaker, which delivers stunning audio quality wherever its placed in the home, thanks to the advanced Apple engineered hardware and software.
Together with Apple Music, HomePod gives you instant access to one of the world's largest music catalogs. And with the intelligence of Siri, it’s a powerful assistant you control through natural voice interaction. We're very happy with the initial response from reviewers who've experienced HomePod ahead of its launch, and we think our customers are going to love this new product.
We believe one of the key issues of the 21st century is education. And because of that, we've strengthened our commitment and investment into initiatives like everyone can code. To find the innovators of the future, we need to nurture the students of today. Our App Development with Swift curriculum, which is available free on iBooks, has been downloaded more than 1.2 million times worldwide with almost half of those coming from here in the United States. It’s also being taught in dozens of community colleges across the country, putting practical skills in the hands of today’s jobs seekers.
I was in London two weeks ago as we announced that the program was expanding to more than 70 colleges and universities in Europe. Millions of students around the world will have the opportunity to add Swift to their coding vocabulary and gain skills that are essential for today’s economy.
This is an exciting time at Apple and with the best lineup of products and services we've ever had and a set of initiatives that show how business can be a force for good in the world. We could not be more excited about our future.
Now, for more details on the December quarter results, I'd like to turn over the call to Luca.
Luca Maestri: Thank you, Tim. Good afternoon, everyone. Our business and financial performance in the December quarter were exceptional, as we set new all-time records for revenue, operating income, net income and earnings per share.
Starting with revenue, we’re reporting an all-time record, $88.3 billion, up nearly $10 billion or 13% over the prior record set last year. It is our fifth consecutive quarter of accelerating revenue growth. As you know, the December quarter a year ago spanned 14-weeks compared to 13-weeks this year, which is important to consider as we have set the underlying performance of our business this year. When we look at average revenue per week, our growth rate was even higher at 21% with growth across all product categories for the third consecutive quarter.
Our results were terrific all around the world with double digit revenue growth in all our geographic segments, an all-time quarterly record in the vast majority of markets we track, including the U.S., Western Europe, Japan, Canada, Australia and Korea, as well as Mainland China, Latin America, The Middle East, Central and Eastern Europe, and India.
In Greater China, we were very happy to generate double digit revenue growth for the second quarter in a row and in emerging markets outside of Greater China, we saw 25% year-over-year growth.
Gross margin was 38.4% at the high end of our guidance range. Operating margin was 29.8% of revenue. Our net income was $20.1 billion an all-time record, and up $2.2 billion over the last year. Diluted earnings per share were $3.89 also an all-time record and cash flow from operations was very strong at $28.3 billion.
During the quarter, we sold 77.3 million iPhones, the highest number ever for a 13-week quarter. Average weekly iPhone sales were up 6% compared to December quarter last year with growth in every region of the world despite the staggered launch of iPhone 10. We established all-time iPhone revenue record in nearly every market we track with double-digit growth in all of our geographic segments. iPhone ASP increased to $796 from $695 a year ago, driven primarily by the launch of iPhone 10 and the success of iPhone 8 and 8 Plus.
We exited the December quarter towards the lower end of our target range of five to seven weeks of iPhone channel inventory with less than 1 million more iPhones in the channel compared to the December quarter a year ago, in line with our growth in average weekly unit sales. Customer interest and satisfaction with iPhone are very, very strong for both consumers and business users.
The latest data from 451 Research indicates U.S. customer satisfaction ratings of 96% or higher across iPhone models. In fact, combining iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus and iPhone 10, consumers reported an amazing 99% satisfaction rating. And among business customers planning to purchase smartphones in the next quarter, 77% planned to purchase iPhone. Our customers are also incredibly loyal with Kantar's latest U.S. research, reflecting a 96% iPhone loyalty rate, the highest ever measured. [Customer satisfaction is the second most important figure after active user base. Combining these two figures yields the recurring revenue value of the company. Remember what Deming said: the most important measurements for a company's value are the multipliers of a satisfied customer and a dissatisfied customer--these numbers never appear on any financial report but they are applied to all the numbers on every report].
Turning to services. We had a terrific quarter with revenue of $8.5 billion, up 18% year-over-year and up 27% in terms of average revenue per week; that is an acceleration to the 24% services growth run rate that we experienced in the September quarter.
The App Store set a new all-time revenue record. The Store’s all-new design is off to a fantastic start with quarterly store visitors, transacting accounts and paying accounts, reaching new all-time highs. During the week beginning December 24th, a record number of customers made purchases or downloaded Apps from the App Store, spending over $890 million in that seven-day period, followed by $300 million in purchases on New Year’s day alone.
And according to App Annie’s latest report, the App Store continues to be the preferred destination for customer purchases by a very wide margin, generating nearly twice the revenue of Google Play. Across all our services offerings, paid subscriptions reached $240 million with growth of 58% over last year and they were a major contributor to the overall strong growth in services revenue. [Apple has half the user base of Google Android. This is based on Google's May 2017 report of 2 billion active devices vs. the 1.3 billion that we just got from Apple. And yet these users collectively spend twice as much on apps. This ratio of "half the users, twice the spending" has been cropping up in individual developer anecdotes and can also be seen in other metrics of engagement and consumption. This should not be surprising as it conforms to the Pareto distribution of economic value.]
As Tim mentioned, it was our best quarter ever for Apple Watch. And when we add to this us from Beats and AirPods, our total revenue from wearables was up almost 70% year-over-year. In fact, wearables were the second largest contributor to revenue growth after iPhone, which is impressive for a business that started only three years ago. In total, our other products category set a new all-time record with quarterly revenue exceeding $5 billion for the first time. [Wearables now includes more than watches but watches are likely still the dominant product.]
Next, I’d like to talk about the Mac. We sold 5.1 million Macs during the December quarter, which translates to a 2% year-over-year increase in average sales per week. Mac performance was particularly strong in emerging markets with unit sales up 13% year-over-year and with all-time records in Latin America, in India, Turkey and Central and Eastern Europe. On a worldwide basis, the active install base of Macs was up double-digits year-over-year to a new record.
It was also another growth quarter for iPad. We sold 13.2 million units with average iPad sales per week up 8% over last year’s December quarter. iPad sales grew strong double-digits in many emerging markets, including Latin America, the Middle East, Central and Eastern Europe and India, as well as developed markets, including Japan, Australia and Korea. The active install base of iPad has grown every quarter since its launch in 2010, and it reached a new all-time high in December, thanks to extremely high customer loyalty and large numbers of first-time iPad users. [iPad is clearly recovering from a long decline. ASPs are rising as it's being positioned as a PC alternative. Its low end functions are being absorbed by large screen iPhones.]
NPD indicates that iPad had 46% share of the U.S. tablet market in the December quarter, up from 36% share a year ago. And the most recent surveys from 451 Research found that among customers planning to purchase tablets within 90 days, 72% of consumers and 68% of business users planned to purchase iPads. Customer satisfaction is also very high with businesses reporting a 99% satisfaction rating for iPad.
We are seeing great traction in enterprise as businesses across industries and around the world standardize on iOS. For example, Intesa Sanpaolo, one of Europe’s leading banks, has chosen iOS as the mobile standard for its entire 70,000 employee base in Italy; choosing iOS for its security, user interface, accessibility and reliability, Intesa Sanpaolo will deploy native apps to improve employee productivity in customer support, human resources, and marketing across the company.
And LensCrafters, one of the largest optical retail brands in North America, will be using over 7,000 iPad Pros to enable digital eye exams and digital optical measurements in a personalized and interactive experience. We’re also rolling out a new initiative, called Apple AtWork to help businesses implement employee choice programs more easily and offer Apple products company-wide.
Resources from both Apple and our channel partners will enable enterprise IT and procurement teams to buy or lease Apple products more efficiently, streamline the setup of iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and deliver a seamless onboarding experience for employees. We launched the program with CDW in the U.S. last week, and we would be expanding to more channels and regions later this year.
The December quarter was extremely busy for our retail and online stores, which welcomed 538 million visitors. Traffic was particularly strong during the four-weeks following the launch of iPhone 10, up 46% over last year. And across the quarter, our stores conducted over 200,000 today at Apple sessions, covering topics including photography, music, gaming, and app development, and art and design. Just last weekend, we opened our first store in Seoul, Korea and we’re looking forward to opening our first store in Austria in a few weeks. These newest openings will mark the expansion of our retail store presence to 21 countries.
Let me now turn to our cash position. We ended the quarter with $285.1 billion in cash plus marketable securities, a sequential increase of $16.2 billion. $269 billion of this cash, or 94% of the total, was outside the United States. We issued $7 billion in debt during the quarter, bringing us to $110 billion in term-debt and $12 billion in commercial paper outstanding, for a total net cash position of $163 billion at the end of the quarter. We also returned $14.5 billion to investors during the quarter. We paid $3.3 billion in dividends and equivalents, and spent $5.1 billion on repurchases of 30.2 million Apple shares through open market transactions.
We launched a new $5 billion ASR program, resulting in initial delivery and retirement of 23.6 million shares and we retired 3.8 million shares upon the completion of our 12th ASR during the quarter. We’ve now completed over $248 billion of our $300 billion capital return program, including $176 billion in share repurchases against our announced $210 billion buyback program with $34 billion remaining under our current authorization. [An updated look at Apple's cash is shown below]
Turning to taxes. Due to the recently enacted legislation in the U.S., we estimate making a corporate income tax payment of approximately $38 billion to the U.S. government on our cumulative past foreign earnings. This amount is very similar to what we had been accruing on those earnings in our financial results through fiscal year 2017, including the $38 billion payment. We will have paid over $110 billion of corporate income tax on our total domestic and foreign earnings during the last 10 years for a cash tax rate of about 26%. [Apple has paid more tax than any company in history, and is about the make the largest single payment to the US Treasury.]
Our tax rate of 25.8% for the December quarter was close to our guidance of 25.5% as the lower U.S. statutory rate from the new legislation was effective offset by the remeasurement of deferred tax balances.
As we move ahead into the March quarter, I'd like to review our outlook, which includes the types of forward looking information that Nancy referred to at the beginning of the call; we expect revenue to be between $60 billion and $62 billion; we expect gross margin to be between 38% and 38.5%; we expect OpEx to be between $7.6 billion and $7.7 billion; we expect OI&E to be about $300 million; and we expect the tax rate to be about 15%.
Tax reform will allow us to pursue a more optimal capital structure for our company. Our current net cash position is $163 billion. And given the increased financial and operational flexibility from the access to our foreign cash, we are targeting to become approximately net cash neutral overtime. We will provide an update to our specific capital allocation plans when we report results for our second fiscal quarter, consistent with the timing of updates that we have provided in the past.
Finally, today our Board of Directors has declared a cash dividend of $0.63 per share of common stock, payable on February 15, 2018, to shareholders of record as of February 12, 2018.
To the nearest million, as of the end of September 2017, Apple's cash and investments totaled $268,895,000,000. Note that this includes investments in the form of short- and long-term marketable securities. Long-term marketable securities are not always accounted as "cash" because strictly cash is considered a liquid asset and some securities may not be sufficiently so. Nevertheless, most analysts would agree that Apple's securities are sufficiently liquid to qualify as cash. Note that for archaic reasons this cash is separated into US and non-US holdings with $17 billion located in the US.
Most businesses keep very little cash on their books. Why does Apple have so much cash?
Indeed Apple's cash is extraordinary. It amounts to about 30% of its market capitalization. One reason is that Apple has taken many loans, totaling about $100 billion.
Whoa! Why would Apple need to take out loans? Does it have problems with cash flow? ((Companies often borrow because they need to plug gaps in profitability, best measured as "free cash flow".))
Quite the contrary, Apple's operating cash flow is eye-watering. In the 2017 fiscal year (ending September) Apple generated $63,598,000,000 from operations. The loans are not needed to operate. They are used to pay shareholders.
Why does Apple need to pay shareholders?
Because it's their money.
Wait, I thought you said this was Apple's cash.
Apple is holding it for them but if it has more than it needs it's obligated to return it. You see, If you were to look for "cash" in financial statements you find it on the balance sheet as an asset. Since it is growing and since a balance sheet has to balance, there has to be a liability that grows in proportion to offset the cash asset. That liability is called Shareholder's Equity. This is a "debt" the company has to shareholders. If it pays out cash to shareholders then it zeros out an asset and a corresponding liability. The net is zero as far as Apple is concerned but shareholders get something in return for giving Apple money in the first place.
So hold on, it takes out loans to pay shareholders because it "owes them money" while it has too much money? This makes no sense.
Yes, welcome to tax laws. Although it generates more money than it can use, and that money should thus be returned to shareholders, some of the money is collected outside the US. US (and US only as far as I know) tax laws have a "repatriation tax" that is levied on money coming into the country. This has nothing to do with corporate taxes which are levied on earnings. So after paying shareholders with the cash it had in the US, Apple had to borrow money to pay shareholders money they had outside the US.
Why not just pay the repatriation tax?
Because then shareholders would get less than 70% of their money. They would probably complain and blame the managers for being incompetent. Such blame usually comes with a lawsuit attached.
What about the new tax law that lowered the repatriation tax rate?
Now Apple has no option but to pay the tax and repatriate the cash. It's still a tax. The amount will be about $38 billion or about 15%. Previous repatriation "holiday" levies were around 10%.
How exactly does the company give money to shareholders?
The payments are called "dividends" and shareholders must treat them as income--a form of double taxation because these funds are after the company paid earnings tax and possibly repatriation tax. Apple does pay dividends regularly but because of tax inefficiency (i.e. because government policy discourages dividends) the company mainly buys its own shares and retires them.
Huh?
Yes, it makes little sense but the math is simple. If the company buys its own shares and makes them disappear then existing shareholders will end up owning more of the company, making their shares more valuable. They can realize the gain if/when they sell the shares (and pay capital gains tax instead of dividend income tax on the already (double) taxed profits.)
Does that mean that it is going private?
No. The owners of the company remain the same: whoever owns shares owns the company and they can be traded in public exchanges. In theory they could reduce the share count to a single share and there would presumably be a single shareholder who would own the company, making it "closely held" but the company's managers are still required to report and act as if it was public. Going private usually means a set of shareholders agree not to allow the shares to float on the open market and thus to also keep the affairs of the company out of public eye. It reduces liquidity and is generally harder for shareholders to exit their investment. This has nothing to do with reducing the number of shares in circulation--which is what Apple is doing.
But buying shares does not seem to affect the share price so the shareholders are not benefiting from the repurchasing. Isn't this a waste of cash? Aren't the shareholders being robbed?
The share price is an argument between shareholders and potential shareholders on the value of the company. It should reflect reality but many times it doesn't. Over time however the math catches up with sentiment. In other words realization that there are fewer and fewer shares available compels people to not sell them, increasing the price. Short term investors tend not to pay attention to this but they are not the shareholders who Apple wishes to pay back anyway.
Why doesn't the company spend the money on other things? You said they return what they can't use. Why can't they use it?
Simply, because it's more than can be spent wisely. The company considers its mission to be very narrow: add value in specific areas where they can create tremendous value uniquely and under conditions (technologies and business models) they can control. Many such projects don't require capital. Manufacturing, data centers and Apple stores require capital but R&D and sales not so much. Creating products is very cash efficient. For example, the iPhone--the most successful product of all time--cost almost nothing to develop; certainly nothing that required Apple to dip into its cash. Funding for the type of product development Apple does comes from existing cash flows and mostly consists of salaries for their employees.
What about acquisitions? Why not buy other companies?
It buys companies but usually small ones which are essentially acquisitions of teams and their intellectual property. Apple does not buy "business models" or customers or cash flows which is what large companies are valued for. Operationally, it's also because Apple has a strong culture and it wishes to preserve it. Acquisitions dilute culture which is why integrations often fail. Statistically, large acquisitions are value destructive and the larger they are, the more likely they are to fail. Incidentally, when a company is acquired with cash that hole in the balance sheet is filled with something called "goodwill" which reflects some intangible value of the new asset. If and when the acquisition is deemed to have failed the goodwill is written off and so is shareholder equity. That's how shareholders are robbed.
What about keeping it? Doesn't having lots of cash make Apple more powerful?
As individuals we think that having lots of cash makes us rich. For companies it's the opposite. Cash is a liability. If you come across a company that is cash rich and has nothing else, its enterprise value will be zero. Companies are valued on their future cash flows, meaning their ability to generate cash, not how much they managed to keep. In other words, cash is a measure of past success and investors are interested only in future value. That future value comes from the intelligent allocation of resources toward a valuable goal. A company rich in cash but poor in vision is likely to be taken private or broken up and shut down. Cash is an IOU to shareholders with a thank-you note for the support through the years.
In September 2016 Apple Pay came to support the world's largest public transit system. It happened through the integration with Japan's FeliCa and gave Apple Pay access to 160 million daily transactions.
This, along with many other milestones don't get a lot of attention. Apple Pay is in what could be considered an attritional competition with non-consumption. There are no decisive battles won or lost, only the relentless pressure to make progress against a reluctance to change.
Before I go on, I should make the attrition/decisive type of conflict clear. The terms come from military science. A war of attrition is one where two sides essentially grind against each other and the winner is the one which lasts longest. A decisive battle is one where a conflict is won through a single, acute encounter where, due to either demoralizing or circumstance reasons, one side gives up. It's the knock-out punch vs. the fight to exhaustion.
When applying this dichotomy to competition, we need to be careful about who we define as competitors. Note that I said that Apple Pay is in a fight with non-consumption. It's tempting to say Apple Pay competes with some other payment system like Samsung Pay or Google Pay. But none of these alternatives are as powerful as the existing mix of contact payment systems: cash, credit card magnetic swiping and some other hybrid of codes and user experiences (especially online.)
When seen this way the challenger must compete through persistence. It's impossible for Apple Pay to decisively defeat non-consumption in one battle. It takes literally millions of decisions for adoption: each consumer, each merchant, each bank, each point of sale. It's a relentless grind of pitching, selling, demonstrating and shaming into action.
It's been three years of this type of competition and progress may seem hard to spot. That is because we don't see the big wins. We can only see small wins. The win in Japan, as significant as it might be (160 million daily transactions added to the addressable market) is still small compared to all transactions world-wide.
Merchants tell Apple that 90% of contactless transactions in the US were Apple Pay. Apple sees continuous growth and cited 500% grown y/y in payments last quarter. The total amounts to hundreds of millions of transactions worth billions of dollars.
Anecdotally, the points-of-sale supporting the system are growing. 76% of the top US merchants have agreed to deploy by end of this year. ((Note that that does not mean 76% of all points of sale will have it but rather the commitment at the top is there.))
But the total market is probably measured in billions of transactions and trillions of dollars. There is a lot to go.
On the bank side, the US wins came quickly and thoroughly. 3500 US banks support Apple Pay through their issued credit cards. Globally the figures are unstated with some countries absent completely and others engaging quickly. Australia lags while the UK is mostly on-board.
The point of sale terminals are also largely not an obstacle with the current generations almost all being able to process contactless transactions. The amazing thing about this business is just how many sides there are to this market: merchants, users, Apple, banks, POS terminals, credit card companies, online payment systems, etc.
To see progress at all is surprising. Changing payment systems is extremely complicated due to the breadth and depth of infrastructure. There are already 5 million contactless acceptors in the US. But there are many more points of sale ((How many exactly is actually hard to determine.)) There is a long tail distribution for these systems so saturation will take a very long time.
Apple Pay is however only the first battle. Beside credit cards and cash, inside your wallet are more items that need to move into your devices: access cards, passports, driver's licenses, IDs.
One unsung hero has been the device-based boarding pass. Security and gate agents don't touch your phone so when you are invited to place the phone on the scanner at security or boarding, there is a sense of tangible and visible progress. It was a rare sight a few years ago but I see it more and more each day I fly. The paper-less boarding pass has crossed the chasm into mainstream. Cash, plastic cards and IDs will also be deprecated. All it takes is persistence and time.
We all crave decisive battles and can't stay tuned for the attritional outcomes. Nonetheless that is how most conflicts end up. This is the sort of conflict where a superpower wins and an asymmetric challenger falters. It's resources and processes rather than enthusiasm that matter most.
Apple is doomed. So are you. As mortals we are used to the idea of death. We do not dwell on it even though it's inevitable. We do know that we'll die but what we don't know is when we'll die. That certainty/uncertainty makes us, more or less, do everything that we do. And so we carry on. But companies die too. And when they die is also a mystery but it's not at all clear that their inevitable demise determines what they do. If you think you're immortal you may live dangerously. Perhaps as a result they live shorter lives than we do.
Life expectancy for humans has been rising but for companies it has been declining. Even more curiously, the richer you are the more likely you are to live longer but the wealthier a company, the more likely it is to keel over at any time. The longest lived small businesses live over 1000 years but the longest-lived large business is probably the East India Company that made it to the ripe age of 274. But that was before 1800.
In the modern, industrial era there are very few corporations that survived over a century and the Fortune 500 shows a turnover in inhabitants that resembles that of a plague-infested medieval inner-city. In contrast to their conservative, geriatric organic owners, synthetic companies are more likely to behave like live-fast, die-young punk rockers.
So it's no surprise that Apple, at age 40, is seen as being well past its sell-by date. And yet it seems to be saying, somewhat faintly, "I'm not dead yet". By generating more cash than can be comprehended by human observers and by controlling assets that are well beyond the means of many countries, they (it?) is confusing us with its persistence.
The confusion is exhibited in the following graph which shows the crises in confidence by that wonderful reflector of human perception--the stock market. By voting millions of times a day, the market shows us with great precision the totality of human emotion with regard to an asset. That emotion turns rapidly negative on Apple with surprising frequency.
There have been over 8 bouts of collapsing confidence (exhibited by 40% drops in value) for Apple's shares. Consider the latest where we've seen a 40% drop followed by 57% increase in share price over the last 12 months. 57% might not seem extraordinary for a small company but for the world's largest market capitalization with the corresponding colossus of cash that it straddles, the robustness of brand and the loyalty of customers, the mind boggles.
The same thing happened in 2012 and 2008 and as far as I can tell the company has not changed one iota during that time. The same people, mostly, are in charge. With the same mission statement, and even the same product line. The resources, processes and priorities--the only determinants of the essential value of a firm--have not shifted.
One could try to suggest that even if Apple is unchanged, the world around it has changed. But if anything the world has come to match Apple's own view: more mobile vs. fixed, more design vs. generic, more integrated experiences vs. more modular DIY.
The ethos of Apple is rigid so why is perception about the company so fickle?
If the graph above reflects perception about a constant entity then perhaps it charts how the world has changed rather than how Apple has. Perhaps perception revolves around a center of gravity far heavier and permanent. Perhaps the tug-of-war between fear and greed reflects more upon us that it does upon the object being observed.
I tried to assess the opportunity of Apple Pay but found it to be mostly dependent on how quickly card payments will overtake cash. It seems that as payments move to a digital format they will move to a mobile device. The hurdle isn't going from a card to a phone but from cash to card.
Data published in The Growth and Diffusion of Credit Cards in Society shows that between 1970 and 2001 households with at least one credit card in the US grew from 17% to 70%. More recent data shows 82% of US consumers have at least one credit card and 77% have a debit card.
The Total Addressable Market for Apple Pay then is dependent on how quickly this pattern repeats over the markets where iOS devices are in widespread use. Once cards are in use they are used with higher frequency and quickly overtake cash for the user.
The only assumption that needs to be made is that the device then replaces the plastic card. This seems a safe assumption as the benefits of the device as payment authenticator are high and the costs are negligible given a penetrated market.
The following graph shows an extrapolation of transaction volumes where Visa and MasterCard and Amex are showing moderating growth with UnionPay showing 20% constant growth through 2019. ((Supporting these assumptions is a forecast from Nilsen showing total number of cards in circulation by issuer and a forecast of total transactions
))
Two more assumptions are needed: the share of transaction value captured by Apple Pay and the Apple Pay fee. I used 15 basis points ($15/$10000) as the assumed Apple fee and a share schedule as follows:
2015: 0.5%
2016: 1%
2017: 1.5%
2018: 2%
2019: 3%
These assumptions result in a cumulative revenue of over $1 billion by 2018 and a yearly run rate of $1 billion in revenue by 2020.
Although this is not a huge amount relative to Apple's overall revenues ((No more than half of one percent of 2015 revenues)), it's important to note that these revenues are likely to go directly to earnings ((About 2% of 2015 earnings)) as there are negligible costs associated with the transactions that Apple needs to bear.
These assumptions make the statement that Apple Pay can become "A Billion Dollar Business" plausible by 2020. Perhaps sooner.
Prior to implementing a dividend and share buyback plan, Apple had accumulated about $120 billion in cash and marketable securities. In the eight quarters since implementing the cash return plan, Apple has paid about $21.5 billion in dividends and spent another $53 billion of its shareholder's money buying its own shares and retiring them. That's $74.5 billion in cash that's been removed from its balance sheet.
To avoid some repatriation taxes it also borrowed about $29 billion.
Of course, in the meantime, it also generated cash from operations.
Before the plan's implementation, eyeing the cash allowed for easy tracking of the accumulation of retained earnings. After the plan it's become a bit more complicated. The following graph shows all the quantities involved:
The graph lets us answer the question "What would have happened if Apple had not paid any dividends, bought back shares and taken on debt?" ((The grey and black area of the last column is the total "cash returned to shareholders" and sums up to the $74.5 billion mentioned earlier. The grey area is only theoretically valuable as it depends on the outstanding (i.e. not retired) shares retaining their value. In this case, the value of the shares grew, making this an actual gain for shareholders))
The answer is in the blue line. It would be about $210 billion today. There are about a dozen companies other than Apple worth more than that amount.
As the company is not growing as quickly as it used to, the slope of the blue line is constant (i.e. it's nearly linear.) Though that might be seen as evidence of failure, it's more useful to treat this vast quantity as a recognition of past successes. The company's beleaguered status needs to be carefully preserved.
There are 80 million Mac users. The last 12 months saw sales of 18 million Macs.
As of the end of June there were 886,580,000 iOS devices sold. As of today the total is well over 900 million. One billion sold will happen well before this year is out. Estimates of current iOS users vary but they are probably at least 500 million and could be 600 million.
Apple claims 800 million iTunes accounts.
Therefore, in terms of revenues:
Mac User = $289/yr
iOS User = $262/yr
iTunes User = $25/yr (( Measured from billings ))
Adding iTunes usage to either Mac or iOS yields
One Mac owner = $323/yr or 89c/day
One iOS device owner = $287/yr or 79c/day (( This conforms well to the rule of thumb that, after taxes and accessories/services, one Apple device is worth about $1/day ))
This should make valuing Apple easy.
80 million Mac Users and 500 million iOS users add up to about $169.3 billion in sales per year. If we assume that the number of Mac users grows to 90 million and 600 million for iOS then next year Apple should get another $200 billion from its population of users.
So over the next 30 months Apple sales should easily be higher than its current enterprise value. (( Enterprise Value = Market Capitalization - Cash + Debt = $585 billion - $164.5 billion + $29 billion = $449.5 billion ))
This would be the forward price to sales ratio of about 2.5. Each sale yields a certain net profit, which for Apple is on average 21%. Multiplying 2.5 by (1/.21) gives 12 which is about the P/E ex cash.
This exercise summarizes Apple's valuation nicely: Apple is expected to keep its current customers for about a decade and then disappear.
