Apple projected to surpass Exxon, become world's largest market cap company - Page 2

This is more like it. The second computer revolution has barely just begun, and this time it's being led by the ones who should have led the first time around.

I'm not changing the question, there never was a question to begin with. MacRulez commented that if Apple was approaching Exxon that this was evidence of a bubble - I pointed out it was in fact merely evidence of retained earnings.

Then a bunch of people insisted that dividends were irrelevant - I was simply trying to get the point across that they are not.


If those payouts had not occurred then the firm would have retained the cash, and that would have an impact on the current share price. Saying that past dividends have no effect on current share price is as wrong as saying that past share splits have no effect on current share price. There is a reason why the historical equity price databases I worked on had a full set of corporate actions including dividends.


Either is entirely plausible, because the result would be entirely psychological based on whether investors viewed it as an indication of financial strength or an indication of few investment opportunities. It's completely irrelevant to your point though so why on earth did you ask?


I suggest you go and work for a decade or so in finance, and then come back to me. Actually in your case it might take longer.

There is no declining cash flow from ipods. If anything the growth of the ipod has increased 10 fold. The ipod is in every iphone and ipad sold today. Why would you buy a stand alone ipod when you can get it and a lot more for your money. Naysayers would like you to believe that Apple is loosing somewhere. They are not.

Exxon has a commodity that is used by every industry that I can think of. For Apple to even be at the verge of overtaking and being compared to a company as big as Exxon speaks volumes about how efficiently Apple runs its' business. You can complain about Apple all you want, but it is great to see an American company succeeding and doing it with quality products. I bought in at $24.00 a share and I have held on during the good and bad times. My patience is paying off.

There are too many whiner's in this forum, both Apple and non Apple fan's that don't get the big picture of what Apple is trying to accomplish. Its funny when people complain about Apple and then they turn around and try to copy everything they do. We live in a society of hypocrites, but Apple is laughing all the way to the bank.

PS. I wouldn't pay dividens to cry babies either!

I should have phrased that as a declining rate of growth in cash flow from iPods. My bad.

No, you were right the first time, iPod revenue is declining - it's not terribly relevant to the stock but it's true.

You are being dense, either intentionally or otherwise. Apple has a product category called iPod, they report numbers on it. That category has declining revenues. Apple does not include the iPhone in that product category, so neither should we when we're discussing Apple's finances.

It's not a problem that the iPod line is seeing decreased revenues, Apple doesn't much care and neither do investors because the rest of the business is doing so well - but there's no reason to pretend that it isn't the case.

Groan.


LOL. You really should read what you wrote. You're the one that said QUOTE: "...the correct question isn't 'which company.....' UNQUOTE. I was simply quoting you in my response.


You bet it would. I would depend on the investment decisions they made with their retained cash -- which could have added, retained, or subtracted value.


Don't exaggerate. A "bunch of people" didn't. One person -- melgross -- did.


Stock splits are irrelevant, whether in the past or the future. It's like my giving you two $5 bills for a $10 bill.


Of course they do. That's because dividends add to -- not subtract from -- measured returns. Total shareholder return is a function of both capital gains and dividend yields. It's possible you really did not understand the numbers you were crunching.


Yes, either is plausible, but only one is highly probable. A massive amount of empirical evidence (and academic literature) finds that increases in dividend payout rates have a solidly positive announcement effect, on average. (PM me if you'd like the references -- I don't want to bore the folks here).


It's not at all irrelevant. Your point -- an incorrect one -- has been that dividends lower value. So, according to you, higher dividends should lower value even more, no? Hence the question.


If you told me who you worked for, I would probably avoid doing business with them if that's what a "decade of finance" with them has wrought.

Actually, don't tell me. You don't want to embarrass them in public.

As I said, stop being a half-informed bombast.

But they do, because they diminish the retained earnings. They lower market cap, once paid, even you admit this, then you deny it again. I'm not quite sure why. The fact that an announcement of future dividends may or may not increase the current market cap has NO bearing on what past dividends has done to the current market cap.


Maybe this is your problem - an inability to read. I didn't say market cap, I said share price - stock splits don't affect that? Wow.


The reaction of the market to a declared future dividend is completely irrelevant to the effect on the market cap of a firm of a series of past dividends. The former is market psychology, the latter is stock fundamentals.

If Apple declared a special one time dividend of 50 billion tomorrow, do you really not think that once it went ex-dividend the market cap would be lower? Of course you don't - so why are you arguing? Because presumably you can't bear to admit that you're wrong.


Wow you really hate the fact that you keep losing these arguments eh? Hate leads to suffering you know.

Now, you're the Buddha too!

I see myself more as a really tall Yoda. For Buddha existence is suffering, no hate required.

That's exactly what the shoeshine boy said.

?? I doubt it. I'm pretty sure their growth in other areas will make the iPod practically irrelevant.

Pull your head out of the clouds.

It isn't in the clouds, it's currently in Apple and MS's last quarterly SEC filing. You should try reading one someday.

dude
what do you mean ?

Those are shipments, not sales. In Apple's case we know that the two are equivalent because we know how very little they have in the channel, but the Android tablets are a bigger problem.

In the last quarter Apple sold 9.25million iPads, so that would imply around 6 million android tablets sold last quarter alone.

But there are only 0.9% of Android devices running hummingbird, or around 1.17million in TOTAL

http://developer.android.com/resourc...-versions.html

So either there was a LOT of channel stuffing going on, or the 7inch android tablets are a huge success compared to the 10 inch.

In fact we can put an upper bound on the success of the 7inch tablets, they can't have sold more than 3.64 million in TOTAL - and that's assuming that absolutely none of the 4inch + android phones count as large screen devices.

deleted

Let's just hope that Apple isn't vilified once it becomes the largest market cap company as Exxon-Mobil is. Of course, these two companies are in very different industries and Exxon is in a much dirtier industry. That said, Apple will have to ensure working conditions are suitable in their contracted manufacturing plants so that they don't have to deal with the allegations of worker abuse; otherwise, Apple will be looked at in the same light as Exxon.

I don't see how we can equate this one way or the other. I've read some economic writing that claim many things about dividends, stock buybacks, etc. But I've never seen amy evidence that any of it matters in the long run.

We've got people stating that if Apple offers a dividend, the stock will go higher, as that will make it more desirable.

In the case of Exxon, over the years their market cap has risen and fallen with oil prices. What do you think will happen to their stock if oil goes to 125, what about if it drops to 75?

We'll have a good experiment shortly, as HPs' board has given Apodeker $10 billion for a buyback, another vehicle for the purpose of raising stock prices and therefor market cap.

Strange, others have gotten to it.

And that an odd statement.

Those are completely worthless numbers. As has been pointed out in a number of articles, "shipped"doesn't equal "sold". The fact that more manufactures are making tablets, and shipping them means little. When you consider that the only tablet maker so far who is willing to state how many they sold is Apple, you must take all the others numbers with a dose of salt.

I'm willing to bet that Apples' marketshare right now is a good 85%, if not more.

You can make up anything you want. It doesn't make it true. More manufacturers are now making tablets, so more tablets are being shipped, that doesn't mean they're being bought

Look at the Playbook. They shipped 500,000, as against analysts numbers of 400,000, but they directly refused to say how many sold. In one article, it was said that the number would be between 0 and 300,000. But now we read that RIM missed their sales target for the Playbook by 90%, and they may discontinue the current WiFi model. We know they discontinued development on the 10" model.

How many other manufacturers are in the same boat? Good shipments that are sitting in warehouses and on retailers shelves, don't count as sales. So yes, there are many more tablets being made by more manufacturers, and so many more have been shipped. so what?

Another business article recently said that business is buying tablets by the truckload. But Goode, who supplies software for business on tablets to run databases and such said that 95% of them are iPads.

Maybe others have a CNN account.

As for the observation that markets don't necessarily respond to logic, I didn't think to be odd at all.

I've never seen long term benefits to the share price from a dividend. As you fellows have been saying, it's the fundamentals of the business that determines how well the stock does. Short term, it can help, but as soon as there's a dip, it gets wiped out, and then it's very difficult to prove if it's been effective.

Is that what you meant? It wasn't clear. But we must assume a value for future investment purposes, or we can't invest at all.

deleted

You're going further off the fringe. You know very well how this works, or do you? Assuming you're serious. You must be in a mythical place where all is Android tablets. I haven't seen a single one here in NYC yet.

We'll see in a couple of quarters how this is working out. A lot of companies stuff the channel, and that can only work for a couple of quarters.

That's a psychological effect of the dividend, and it can go either way - I'm not talking about that.
I'm just saying that having paid dividends Exxon has retained less earnings than it would have otherwise. Retained earnings absolutely increase market cap. Stick another 50BN in Apple's bank and their value will go up, maybe not 50BN but by a good proportion.


Obviously Exxon correlates with oil price, but it's not just an oil price derivative, it depends on other things too.


They're not supposed to necessarily increase share price, they are supposed to increase total shareholder return.

If you had two otherwise identical firms, one of which pays a dividend and the other doesn't and retains the cash - then the former would provide a better investment return, but the second would (eventually) have the higher share price.

Bit of a difference if Apple has only declined to 85% though isn't there? 60% of shipments could easily be 85% of sales. Heck it could be more.

A particular value? I never have, and it hasn't prevented me from investing. Even if you invest in diversified index funds, you can't assume anything but a range of future values dependent on probability factors over which you have no actual control and can't be accurately forecasted. Investing in individual stocks is an educated crap shoot, at best.

On another subject, I have to weigh in on the bizarre notion that a company's "retained earnings" (read: unused cash) is of value to investors. Unless it's being paid out those same investors in the form of a dividend, it is not. I've seen AAPL priced by the markets at essentially 100% of the company's cash on hand value. If this money meant something, anything, to investors, this would be impossible. Investors, at least investors with a clue, know that "retained earnings" is dead money because it's not being used to either grow the company's business and consequently its earnings, or it's not being distributed to stockholders.

If you think AAPL is overvalued, sell your shares. But be clear about how you define words like "overvalued" or "bubble." On a similar note, you've probably seen the media describe social networking as the "next tech bubble" but so far, there is no data to back that up.

Similarly, a lot of people seem to think that AAPL is overvalued. This talk sprang up when Apple overtook Microsoft in market cap. They thought AAPL was overvalued. Clearly that was not the case. Right now, AAPL is trading at 15x earnings. Trading at 15x earnings is not a bubble by any means. Neither is $76 billion in cash. Apple's valuation is high. But Apple has the results to back it up.

Agreed. Terms like "overvalued" and "undervalued" only have meanings after the fact. When a stock climbs, it's fair to say it was undervalued. If it declines, it's safe to conclude that it was overvalued. Making claims beforehand that a stock is over, under or fairly valued is a form of prognostication about future values that even the best-educated experts in investing can't make accurately on a regular basis.

There are extreme cases when it is clear, Netscape back at the peak of the bubble was overvalued for example, it was clear to anybody in the industry that the browser wasn't worth that much money because it couldn't be monetized directly.

An extreme example of undervalued stock would be Barclays which sank to under 50p a share, at which point it was priced effectively as an option. The market noticed fairly fast and a few days later it was back above 100p.

Yes, well, I've read just the opposite. That holding too much cash actually lowers the value. It seems wrong, but then, investing isn't always sensible.


Of course it does. But oil pricing is the largest determiner of their sales, and profits. Of course, these days, oil companies are also subject to the whims of the governments of the countries they do business with, so that has an effect as well.


[/
They're not supposed to necessarily increase share price, they are supposed to increase total shareholder return.

If you had two otherwise identical firms, one of which pays a dividend and the other doesn't and retains the cash - then the former would provide a better investment return, but the second would (eventually) have the higher share price.[/QUOTE]

i'm not sure I can agree with that. I've seen a fair amount of analysis that shows that dividends lowers the company's value, and so keep the share price lower than it would be, thereby lowering the return to investors.

So the problem is that depending on who your read, it can go either way.

As most dividends are a very small percentage of the stock price, I question whether it's of value in the long run. If it suppresses the share price, it's a negative.

And return can be measured different ways. I look at the value of my investments in total. If there is a dividend, how does that affect the investment? Generally, growth companies don't give dividends, but it's not always true.

Measuring all of this is impossible because of the many varied factors that involve a company's success, or lack of same.

Not an exact value, but an approximate one over some time.

I don't think it's any more bizarre than many other investment beliefs. This is a bizarre industry to begin with . It's subject entirely to human whim. Economists have no way to predict what will happen.

Exactly. Markets are based entirely on human behavior factors. Experts can't predict what they will do in advance with much more accuracy than amateurs, or coin flips.

You say it is clear, but the only clarity that actually matters is the market, and everyone knows the true value of something after the fact. Knowing before the fact is the much harder part. It's an old saw but a truism that the dynamics of the markets are the opposing forces of fear and greed.

In addition, Netscape did charge for their browser from the very beginning. I paid $39.95 for a boxed version, and then an additional $14.95 for a Netscape cap. I still hav e both, for historical reasons. Above that, Netscape was selling their Enterprise server software for $5,000 a pop. Back then, organizations bought the server software if they ran the browser. It may seem backwards today, but that was the way it was.

Netscape had no problem monitoring it's products until Ms gave IE away for free, and made it almost impossible for people to get Netscape on their machines.

Our friend doesn't seem to understand the issues of the day that led to the federal lawsuit against MS.

Of course, though it sometimes seems that way, the market isn't entirely random either, and so we can make investment decisions long term that work for us.