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• How much cash does Apple have?

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.

Predicting Apple's yearly revenues has been fairly easy. The following graph shows the relationship between budgeted spending on Machinery, Equipment, Internal-use software, Land & Buildings and the shipment of iOS device revenues.

The company conveniently publishes a full-year forecast of these expenditures every fiscal year so by October we know roughly how sales will be during the following year. This pattern has held for 10 years so there is little uncertainty about the 11th year of iOS devices.

Although the two are not very tightly coupled, there is a causal link between them: spending on machinery and equipment for production leads to more production which leads to more sales (assuming prices are stable--which they are).

We are, as of the time of writing, half-way through a fiscal year and the quarterly spending can be inspected for any surprises. None are evident as the second fiscal year (first calendar quarter of 2017) shows a new high in capital spending at nearly $3 billion, placing us on track for the surge into the production of the new iPhone (and iPads.)

The quarterly relationship between sales and spending is less precise as equipment buying is "front-loaded" into a production cycle but there is a strong correlation nonetheless.

When looking through the data, quarter after quarter, year after year, there is a consistency and reliability to the spending/revenue relationship which implies, to me at least, a high degree of certainty.

This predictability, however, has not detracted from the volatility in Apple's share price--an instrument designed to embody precisely this prediction.

Apple's share price continues to see swings of more than 70% in any given 52 week period. In the latest 52 week period the shares traded between $89.47 and $154.88, a 73% swing.100% is not unheard of. Incidentally, S&P 500 volatility ranges around 45%. Apple is by far the largest company in the world and fairly old by large company standards. It should attract a certain premium of stability.

And yet it doesn't. Skepticism around the company is continuously evident. It's in the headlines written every day which concoct convoluted reasons to doubt future performance. It's in the conversations I have with investors who question the tiniest of details in the design of a product (like headphone jack or home butto) in order to gauge their impact on the survival of the firm. It's in the continuous parade of "disruptive entrants" or "established giants" ready to knock the company off its perch by virtue of simply existing.

Perhaps the panic it induces in investors with its reliable profits is Apple's most predictable attribute.

The last quarter of 2016 was Apple's biggest ever. $78.4 billion in revenues. 78.3 million iPhones. Both records. Earnings of $3.36 ((On shares priced at the time around $105 or 3.2% yield quarterly earnings)) and cash reached new highs. The growth was modest but Services is now not just the second largest revenue but also the fastest growing, on track to doubling in four years.

The reason for this is the vastness of Apple's user base coupled with the loyalty the brand engenders. The company reached one billion active devices more than a year ago and is quite likely to have nearly a billion users. Not just any billion either--the best billion most probably.

The realization that Apple benefits from extreme quantity and quality of customers has led some observers to defer the imminence of Apple's demise. Share prices have risen lately to new highs and the ratios between these prices and earnings have started to come closer to the average of other large companies.

But enough with the reductio ad absurdum. Let's look at the next quarter. The company has been very precise with its own offered predictions (guidance) so it's a simple task to make an accurate forecast. The history of guidance vs. outcomes for revenues is shown below:

Placing the pipper on the upper edge of the guidance range was a safe targeting method for 11 of the last 17 quarters. We have never seen a drop below the bottom of the range but had a few overshoots, some huge. Doing this for the latest quarter and working backwards to the individual product contributions to revenue and using historical margin and cost patterns we can get the following core financial performance metrics:

Fiscal Q2 2017:
Rev ($B) 53.4
EPS ($/share) 1.96
iPhone (thousand units) 53100
iPad (thousand units) 9900
Mac (thousand units) 4100
Watch (thousand units) 2300
Services ($ million) 7129
Other products ($ million) 2300
Gross margin (%) 37.8

I sent these estimates to Philip-Elmer DeWitt and I recommend looking at his survey of the other analyst estimates on his excellent Apple 3.0 blog.

Overall, the quarter is shaping up to offer slight growth y/y and indicating a plateau formed after the surge from the iPhone 6 surge in '15. All eyes are on the "super cycle" for the next iPhone.

The reason it's "super" is that the iPhone has a 2+ year cadence for form factor changes and the user base updates on a similar cycle. The demand is vast due to the user base and accumulated age of devices in use. Expectations are that supply will be offered to meet this demand.

If history is a guide then the next iPhone will be the best iPhone ever.

 

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.

Managing the Mac product line must be one of the most challenging problems at Apple. That may not be obvious given the product's success. Consider what it has achieved:

• The product is in its 32nd year of market presence. A longevity that in unmatched by any other PC maker.
• Apple reached a top five position in the ranking of PC vendors. This was achieved for the first time only this year, far along in the evolution of the market.
• With about $23 billion in revenues per year, Apple places among the top four PC vendors in terms of revenue.
• With an estimated $5.5 billion in operating margin Apple is the most profitable PC vendor, capturing over 60% of the available PC hardware profits.
• The product has retained an average selling price of over $1200 for at least a decade. At the same time the average pricing of Personal Computers has more than halved.
• Although volumes have fallen for three quarters, the product grew volumes and sales for 22 out of 29 quarters. As a result, volumes almost doubled in eight years. ((The unit volumes in third quarter 2008 were 2.6 million. Eight years later they are 4.9 million and could easily be over 5 million in the holiday quarter.))

The contribution of the Mac to Apple's revenues is shown in the following graph.

It's attractive and convenient to contrast the Mac with the rest of the PC industry. A David vs. Goliath tale of redemption. The classic comeback story. But the split between the two old rivals (Windows/MacOS) focuses the mind into a limited view of the computing market. The big change in computing has not been a growing Mac vs. declining PC. It has been a huge surge in mobile device use vs. a decline in PC use overall.

This data is visible in many ways. Browsing data shows mobile overtook PC use this year. Shopping data around Black Friday points in the same direction. Data on user interaction captured by comScore is shown below ((Although US only, the global picture is likely to be even more skewed toward mobile as PC didn't saturated global markets before the smartphone swept to power.))

PC use went from half to a third of time while mobile went the other way: from a third to half of time within only four years. All the data is consistent: mobile use has swept PC use aside.

We can see the contrast simply by placing iPhone, Mac and all Windows PC on the same shipment graph.

This contrast is spectacular.

I bring this contrast up because I believe it is what focuses the minds at Apple. For them it's pretty clear where the puck is going. And not just now. Mobile has been foreseeable as a disruption to computing a decade ago–at least to some of us.

And so what do you with the Mac?

To answer this we have to ask what exactly is the purpose of the Mac in the age of the Mobile device?

Note that this is not the same as asking what is the PC in this world. The PC is not having to share a resource pool with an iPad/iPhone. It does not have to answer for its existence to a phone. PC makers and Microsoft are not fighting with an usurper in their midst. They may see the outsider challenger but it's not an inside challenger. This makes all the difference.

Indeed, because no usurper was allowed to emerge, PC/Windows never moved to a mobile evolution of computing. Microsoft's platform future was lost because the antibodies which eat disruptions were left unchecked.

But Apple's immune system was suppressed. It allowed a disruptor to emerge from within. Apple gave birth to its future by suppressing the reaction to that new seemingly parasitic organism. It took an immense willpower to allow this to happen.

But it takes us back to the question of what to do with the incumbent, the donor of DNA and resources. The parent that sacrificed for the child.

The Mac is thus not treated disparagingly. It deserves and gets respect. It is preserved but with limited responsibilities.

Which brings me to the question of what it is allowed to be and hence what it is. It cannot take on the role of being the future. That belongs to the touch screen devices. It will not morph into a touch device any more than a teen's parent will become cool by putting on skinny jeans. What it will do is become better at what it is hired to do.

The key to the Mac therefore becomes that which the iPad/iPhone isn't: an indirect input device. The keyboard and mouse/trackpad are what define the Mac. The operating system, the apps, the UX, are all oriented around the indirect input method. The iPhone's capacitive touch brought about the direct input method, a third pivot in input methods (first was mouse, second trackpad/scroll wheel). Each pivot launched a new set of platforms and the Mac is the legacy of the second.

It's not obsolete but it is a decreasing share of engagement. Alternate ways of doing the jobs it does well with direct input are emerging on the third pivot but they are not yet good enough. The children are still adolescent and making lots of stupid mistakes. There's still life in the parents.

The management thus has to focus on how to make the keyboard/trackpad interface better while still saying and believing that the future is touch.

In this context the newest MacBooks Pro are a logical extension of the second wave of computing while avoiding cramming them into the third wave. They are defined by their constraints. Seen thusly, the move from keyboard/trackpad to keyboard/touchbar/trackpad is pure genius.

The touchbar coupled to the other two inputs is a totally new way to interact with computing products. It's not an "easy" interface as it's not direct manipulation. It remains indirect, a defining characteristic of the second wave. Indirect inputs are powerful and lend themselves to muscle memory with practice. This is the way professional users become productive. The same way keyboard shortcuts are hard to learn but pay off with productivity, touchbar interactions are fiddly but will pay off with a two-handed interaction model. They are not something you "get" right away. They require practice and persistence for a delayed payoff. But, again, that effort is what professionals are accustomed to investing.

This is a leap forward and a big deal. For 32 years the UX model of the Mac has been two-handed typing with one handed gesturing. Now we have the option of two-handed indirect manipulation: one hand on the touchbar and one hand on the touchpad ((the iPad pro already encourages two handed direct manipulation)). Imagine you've been playing guitar with one hand for years and then someone lets you use your left hand. Holy cow.

Even so, it may seem that Apple is pulling punches. The product could have evolved into the full-touch, dual screens, pen input, hybrid model of Windows. But that only makes sense if you don't have a mobile product that is promising the same and tearing up the world at the same time.

You've unleashed a disruptive force and now you're supposed to retrofit the incumbent with the tools to compete. Why not just let the disruptor grow up unhindered.

The Mac is what it is because it's not alone. It's part of a family. It is a parent. It strives to be better but will not take the future from its child.

In my quoting of the "Cook Doctrine" I cited the primary criteria for Apple to enter a new market:

We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make, and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution.

These criteria, often repeated, were certainly in force when Apple chose to enter the watch market. Apple has sought and achieved a significant market share and did so while owning and controlling the primary technologies behind the product.

I now turn to the significant contribution criterion to study the possibility of Apple's entry into the car industry. ((Control of the primary technologies behind the product is a topic for another post.))

The significance test shifts the speculation from whether Apple would build a car, to how many cars is could build. Making a few cars is easy (see first commandment of The Entrant's Guide to the Automotive Industry). Making lots of cars is hard and hence significance in the automotive market (as in watches and phones) means achieving some degree of adoption, a higher degree of usage and a very high degree of profitability.

So what does being significant in the car business mean? Does it mean becoming the next Tesla? The next BYD or the next VW? How quickly?

Fortunately, we have something to compare an Apple entry to. Apple has made a "significant" market entry in phones and others have made entries in cars. If we contrast the rate of growth of Tesla, EVs, and Hybrids ((Of which Toyota has 70% to 80% share)) to the rate of growth of iPhones in their respective US markets, we obtain a test of significance:

The graph shows the percent of sales for the alternative car technologies (and Tesla) vs. the percent of US phone users using iPhones (comScore). Here are the conclusions:

• Hybrid cars were introduced in 2000 in the US. They managed to gain 2.5% within 8 years but have not increased to a consistently higher level since.
• Electric vehicle sales re-sarted in earnest in 2008 and have gained 0.4% share in eight years. They are still growing, partly helped by significant federal and state subsidies.
• Between sales start in 2008 and 2015 Tesla achieved 0.15% share.
• The iPhone ushered in a new paradigm within the phone market ((Incidentally the number of phones in use and cars in use in the US is comparable.)) in mid 2007. In the time since, Apple achieved the equivalent of about 35% share of unit sales. ((Significantly more in terms of sales value and over 90% of profitability.))
• Between 2002 and 2015 the share of smartphones as a percent of all phones reached over 80%.

To summarize, the range for entrant technology share capture spans between 0.4% (EVs between 2008 and 2015), 2.4% (Hybrids between 2000 and 2015) and 80% (Smartphones between 2002 and 2015).

Within a similar time frame, the range for entrant company share capture spanned between 0.15% (Tesla as percent of US car market) and 35% (Apple iPhone percent of US phone market). ((Toyota's capture of 2% of the market with hybrids may or may not be considered entrant--I chose to consider Toyota an incumbent which took share from others with the Prius))

The differences thus span two orders of magnitude (>100x). Put another way, if Tesla's car entry was equivalent to Apple's iPhone entry they would have delivered about 5.5 million cars rather than the 50.5k they delivered in 2015.

This wide gap in the impact of entry in the two markets has much to do with how modular are the systems being engaged by the entrants. An electric automotive system requires new infrastructure, new user behavior, and, in the case of Tesla, new distribution network and new post-sales support network. Offsetting this partially is a government subsidy.

In contrast, the smartphone communications and computing system leveraged existing infrastructure ((And vice-versa)), consistent behavior, at least initially, and the same distribution and support network. In addition, smartphones benefited from significant hardware and software and services ecosystems which encouraged third parties to add value to the system.

The difference in collaborative development and conforming user experiences (i.e. modularity) between the two innovations allowed the speed of change to be two orders of magnitude faster. The result is what I would consider significance for the iPhone vs. insignificance for electric vehicles to date.

Which leads us back to the question of why Apple would enter this market. If the absence of modularity prevents rapid change, that implies Apple cannot achieve any significant impact from entry.

We could ask the question differently: If they do enter, they could achieve significance only if they change the degree of modularity in the system. Think of it as allowing infrastructure leverage, consistent user behavior, wide distribution, wide support network, ecosystems, and component architecture; allowing rapid scale production and lower costs, etc.

Therefore the only way that Apple could justify entry would be if they "rationalized" the system into a sufficiently modular alternative. Only if we assume that change is possible could we then target share above the 0.1% insignificant change that has been demonstrated. They might even perhaps aim at 1% impact within a few years of entry. 1% was the iPhone target within the first full year of sales.

If system-wide change could be brought about and made uniquely (through some form of sustainable asymmetry) then the foreseeable share possibility quickly reaches the 10% range.

The last time that happened was when Toyota changed the way cars are designed and built. ((VW before Toyota and GM before VW. Incidentally Toyota, GM and VW are now nearly tied as the top three automakers globally.))

Executives at car companies have suddenly had to answer questions about potential entrants into their business. This is a big change. I don't recall a time when this was necessary for over 30 years. For decades the questions have been about labor relations, health care costs, regulation, recalls and competition from other car makers. To ask questions about facing challengers posing existential questions must seem terribly impertinent.

For this reason, Bob Lutz, in his dismissal of Apple's entry, is not alone. The industry has a century of history and has seen little disruption in the classic sense. I wrote a long piece on the fundamentals of the industry titled “The Entrant’s Guide to the Automobile Industry” which explained why this industry has been so resistant to disruptive change. At best a massive effort over multiple decades usually leads in a small shift in market share.

However, one should read that post as a thinly veiled threat. Just because disruption seems hard does not mean it isn't possible. Indeed, the better you understand the industry the more easily you can observe its vulnerability and the more rigid the industry seems the more vulnerable it may be to dramatic change.

The formula for successful entry is the same for all industries: compete asymmetrically. This means introduce products which change the basis of competition and deter competitive responses by making your goals dissimilar from those of the incumbents. This is classic “ju-jitsu” of disruptive competition.

Here’s how it would work.

Bob Lutz suggests that there is no profit to be gained from selling cars on the premise that costs are very high while pricing will be held down by competition. That may be true but entrants could deploy new processes that lower the costs of production. Traditional car making is capital intensive due to the processes and materials used. There are however alternatives on the shelf. iStream from Gordon Murray Design proposed switching to tubular frames and low cost composites.  BMW has an approach using carbon fiber and other composites. 3D printing is waiting in the wings. All offer a departure from sheet metal stamping.

With new materials, costs for new plants can be reduced by as much as 80% and since amortizing the tooling is as much as 40% of the cost of a new car, the margins on new production methods could result in significant boosts in margin.

There is a downside however. What is usually compromised when using these new methods is volume and scale of production. So that becomes the real question: how many cars can Apple target? 10k, 50k, 100k per year? Could they target 500k? That would be 10 times Tesla's current volumes but only a bit more than the output of the Mini brand.

Now consider that the total market is 85 million vehicles per year. For Apple to get 10% share would imply 8.5 million cars a year, a feat that is hard to contemplate right now with any of the new production systems. On the other hand selling 80 million iPhones and iPads in a single quarter has become routine for Apple and that was considered orders of magnitude beyond what they could deliver. Amazing what 8 years of production ramping can offer.

So the answer to the operating margin might be in a combination of new processes and new ramp strategies.

But there are more levers of change. Car making can be revolutionized through modularity: divide the car into subsystems and act as integrator. Electric cars have the benefit of few moving parts, smaller motors, fewer points of failure and wear, lower heat signatures and more interchangeable systems architecture. This allows companies to enter without needing to design their own engines or many other parts.

The fact is that engineering cars is actually fairly easy. Building them is the hard part and the costs of engineering new models that are cited as so extraordinary are because most of the effort is in engineering for production (The maxim is that it’s far harder to make a Ford than a Ferrari). You can see this in the proliferation of “boutique” supercars which have hyper performance but low volumes. McLaren, Bugatti, Pagani and dozens of others are all recent hypercars which show the power of engineering and design without worrying about volumes.

Apple could combine new production methods with modularity in engineering to bring design, integration of experience and iteration to the industry. Not to mention what software could add to that. Couple that with the brand value and Apple’s entry will very likely be hugely successful. I just don’t know if they can manage production at the level of demand that I expect them to create.

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.

 

For the first time in many years I feel that there is some potential uncertainty in the results Apple will announce. After a period of excellent accuracy (shown in graph below), the company's guidance has begun to diverge dramatically from reality and the trend might continue this quarter. The cause might be unanticipated demand for the iPhone 6/6 Plus. The growth rate for the product was 46% in Q4 and 40% in Q1. This is unanticipated because growth rates have been below 20% for five quarters and below 50% for eight.

This slowing of growth was explainable given the rate of diffusion of smartphones in the global population. Within the US and some other early adopting economies the market is reaching late stages where most people have switched to smartphones. Globally we are at a more modest 30% or so but in many of the late adopting economies Apple does not have wide distribution.

Of course this thesis is thinly supported. There are many reasons to think that late adopters would still start with iPhone and that earlier adopters of Android would upgrade to iPhone after a few purchase cycles. Thus, the iPhone could prosper in later-adoption or even in post-saturation states of the market.

Indeed, in the post-saturation PC market, Apple is doing very well with the Mac and in the late to post-saturation MP3 player market the iPod did extremely well. This suggests that when it comes to value capture brand, experience and satisfaction trump function, price and share considerations in almost all consumer markets ((Enabled by design for jobs to be done. See non-technology markets for abundant evidence of this. ))

With so many assumptions put asunder the iPhone business suddenly looks downright lively. I adjusted my own growth assumptions and the resulting figures are shown below.

 

F3Q15		Daniel Tello	Horace Dediu
iPhone	Units	51.0	52.8
	Price	626	645
	Revenues	31925	34059
iPad	Units	10.0	10.6
	Price	428	430
	Revenues	4280	4567
Mac	Units	4.95	4.94
	Price	1240	1240
	Revenues	6136	6129
Services	Revenues	5006	5196
Other	Revenues	3902	3092
Total	Revenues	51249	53043
	COGS	30577	31766
	GM	40.3%	40.1%
	OpEx	5733	5789
	OpInc	14939	15488
	OI&E	357	350
	Pre-tax	15296	15838
	Tax	4023	4165
	NetInc	11273	11673
	Shares	5779	5780
	EPS	1.95	2.02

 

I include for comparison Daniel Tello's forecast as his work carries quite a bit of thoughtful analysis.

The upshot of this is that the company is poised to grow earnings per share at a rate of at least 50%!

That growth rate is astronomical, especially for what is already, by far, the world's biggest company by market capitalization.

This was not supposed to happen because of a so-called "law of large numbers." The "law" is actually a probability theorem which states that the average of experimental results should be close to the expected value given sufficiently large number of experiments. The way it's applied in market analysis (I assume) is that "no company can perform above market average performance for a sufficiently long time".

It implies that there can be no outliers and that all companies "revert to the mean because ..."

Actually, I don't have any idea why they might. The premise that all companies are the same must play into this but companies can only be alike if they have the same processes, priorities and resources. As long as I've been able to observe and as much as I've ever read on the subject I have never encountered any two which had anything in common.

And so the law of large numbers, as applied to market performance is a myth. It is easily disproved with a simple deconstruction into the causes of firm performance, but the empirical data from Apple alone shows how foolish it is to believe it.

At the 2015 WWDC Apple stated that it receives 5 billion requests per week for its maps service. It also said that Apple maps is used 3.5 times more frequently than "the next leading maps app."

These two data points are the total number of data points we have about the global maps market. Neither Google nor Nokia provide usage or share or performance data. Regardless, commentary on the usage, share and performance of Apple Maps has been abundant for the three years since its inception.

The data presented allows us to make a few estimates for the first time and we can hope that additional data can allow a picture to emerge of where maps are going.

With these first two data points we can finally make some estimates. But some assumptions are still needed: We need to assume that the "next leading maps app" is Google Maps. Although there are other maps apps on the iOS platform they are probably insignificant and it's a two-horse race between Google and Apple on iOS.

This means that the 3.5:1 split in usage results in a 78% share for Apple Maps and a 22% share for Google. If we assume that there are about 400 million iOS users of maps ((Note that not all iOS users are maps users. Maps are not used by all users)), it leads to about 90 million Google Maps users on iOS and about 310 million Apple Maps users on iOS.  This includes iPad. ((We are excluding OS X use of Maps.))

Given that Google also reported 1 billion downloads in 2014 ((though not necessarily all of these downloads lead to active use, obviously)) we can assume between 25% to 33% Apple Maps "market share" of usage.

At the minimum, 25% share is not insignificant and it's easily sustainable. To understand why, we should note that there is one more data point. In December 2012 I posted an analysis on the the cost of maps. It showed that maintaining maps requires an investment of between $1 billion and $2 billion/yr. With the addition of new features such as 3-D mapping, transit maps and thousands of new cities, the cost is likely to have increased. $2 billion/yr is probably the norm today.

Apple then could be seen as spending about $6.5/user/yr on maps and Google could be spending about $2/user/yr. To be profitable Google would need to find ad revenues of $2/user/yr and Apple would need to find $6 of profit on each phone/yr. Clearly, each of these targets is achievable.

In contrast we can see why Nokia's HERE Maps business is now worth a lot less than it was in 2007. The asset has been for sale for some time and the latest bid  has been for $3 billion, making the $5 billion lost in market value and $7 billion of investment since seem like a catastrophe. Without a business model the data is worthless--with only 30 million users the cost per user reaches $66/yr. A buyer needs to find an appropriate model for sustaining a $2 billion/yr burn rate.

So the question of where maps are going depends on the business model for maps. In a world where maps are sustained by device value, 300 million users makes it sustainable. In a world where maps are sustained by advertising, 1 billion users makes it sustainable. What else is there?

How about a world where maps are sustained by transportation services?

Uber's and other auto makers' interest in HERE shows a third business model. Accurate maps are a key to making vehicles autonomous. More so even than the value of the algorithms, precise imaging of roadways enables vehicle autonomy and the value of location gathering systems should grow to meet that future.

It's highly likely that Google's maps efforts are going to continue because they are fueled by a business model. That is also true for Apple's maps efforts, though they are fueled by an entirely different business model. Each of these business models fuels the improvement of the maps product but also of the maps gathering process. As these processes are expensive and licensing options are few there is little incentive to share the data. As a result the processes remain integral to the businesses.

This integrated-while-fueled nature means that maps makers will find it compelling to pursue adjacent business models, i.e. transportation services. It's not a matter of whether they will or won't. It's only a matter of when and where.

To the analyst, the car industry is a wonderful study. Unlike some other "high technologies," whose market births and deaths are separated by a few changes of the seasons the automobile industry has been around for well over a century. It has been sustained through dozens, perhaps hundreds of innovations. Almost everything about the car of a century ago has been improved.

Not only improvements to the product itself but improvements to the infrastructure that supports it: roads, gas stations, services, insurance, regulation. At the same time, its numbers have increased steadily as the car has spread to all corners of the world through waves of increased production and distribution. Although invented in Europe, the production system that allowed it to reach the mass market took hold in the US. That production system was then exported to Europe then to Japan and then to Korea and now to China.  

Figures 3.3.9 and 3.3.10 from Arnulf Grubler's The Rise and Fall of Infrastructures

However, throughout this century of improvement, the business structure—the way money is made—has not changed. Even with the arrival of Volkswagen in the 1960s and Japanese automakers in the 80s, the network of incumbents has not been displaced. Newcomers have taken share, but there have been few exits suggesting that classical disruption has not taken place.

When we look at the reasons for the share displacement that did take place, we see innovation in production systems and distribution as the core causes. We see new manufacturing processes and competition against non-consumption. What we don’t see is new technologies. We don’t see diesel engines or anti-lock braking or crumple zones or fuel injection or radial tires or airbags or automatic transmission or air conditioning or electronic ignition or safety glass, or any of the other hundreds of technologies that have been adopted as causing any change in market share.

Every innovation tends to diffuse rapidly throughout the industry, being widely adopted by all manufacturers. Production systems such as the ones from Ford and Toyota have been much slower to be adopted which has offered those innovators an advantage for a few decades, but they too have eventually been widely copied and created normative behavior. The opening of new markets like Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa and China have created opportunities for local manufacturers but eventually those advantages too have or will be diminished with time.

So, given this, we have to ask if the the availability of new power storage technologies would allow an early mover to displace and move aside these established makers. To answer in the positive would imply that the challenger has an asymmetric business model—one which causes the incumbents to flee in the opposite direction. But Tesla is manufacturing cars using the same JIT processes and ramping quite slowly. Toyota-style process-driven innovation does not seem to be even in the works. There is no shortage of manufacturing capacity, indeed there is too much.

Furthermore, Tesla is selling cars in established markets competing against existing consumption. Volkswagen Beetle or Model T style competition against non-consumption does not appear to be on offer.

Tesla's product introduction rate is relatively sedate, so a higher rate of product development which might let them “turn inside” the incumbents, does not seem likely.

Finally Tesla is introducing products priced well above average appealing to the wealthiest of customers, again causing us to ask how this might cause a luxury company to look at their solution and exclaim “Not for us!”.

Looking from every angle I am unable to find the way that Tesla is asymmetric. Disruption theory suggests that whatever causes it to survive or prosper will be embraced and extended by competitors precisely because it will also cause those competitors to survive and prosper.

The auto industry may be a lot slower than the computer industry to respond. But once the industry embraces battery-based power, it will convert a world-wide production and distribution system to sustain itself.

That does not mean Tesla is a bad business. They may carry on with Porsche-like or even BMW volumes for a long time. But that’s not a disruptive outcome, it's a niche strategy.

There is one more point. As Tesla has chosen to share its intellectual property and as Elon Musk has stated publicly, they welcome others to build the same cars they do. So by their own admission the company does not seek to disrupt. Disruption is a competitive stance.