Apple earnings, profits, and cash embarrass Microsoft - Page 2

Bull. In what sense is this correct?

If MS can't find a good use for the money (such as to buy somebody) they really need to give it back to the stock holders. That's what dividends are about. That's what companies are about. Unless they plan to buy someone big like Adobe, that's what Apple should do as well.

They already have

As much of a Apple fan as I am, I have to admit the comparison is off base. Apple has grown by leaps and bounds but... MS made 4.37 Billion in profits in a bad quarter, Apple made 2.4 in a great one (when are we likely to see 7M iPhones ship again? I am hoping for 3-4 this quarter)

MS made 29% net profit in a cycle where it could be argued their products are not very popular. Apple made 20% net profit in the same time. I know the trend lines favor Apple, but 29% net when your products suck means any turnaround could be huge. I hope Apple can grow their market share, but in the macro environment, people will be buying fewer computers and products, it remains to be seen if they can steal enough of MS's thunder to not have their growth eaten into in a big way.

That's absolutely true, and I have been saying this for many months already...MS has "won" on the basis of illegal monopolistic practices, attractive corporate packages and the fact that Apple stayed in the Limbo during the late 90s...now that the masses have FINALLY seen the light, there is no reason NOT to surpass MS in all financial terms...MS IS DEAD.

I love Apple products as much as everyone else on here, but what you just said makes no sense to me. The highlights of Tiger and Leopard were all copied off someone else, or they bought the company that invented it. Since Leopard Apple's become more like Microsoft, its buggy, slow, now less secure than Vista and when Snow Leopard comes out they'll even be able to say its not compatible with all older Macs despite building the hardware.


Not sure what you mean, but if the numbers show a company with a small market share can make almost as much as one with a big it means the smaller company is making way more per unit, hence a tax for the same thing.


Thats a great point, Apples doing well and MS is doing bad yet they still make more.

I don't really get the whole GAAP thing and what's included and what isn't in terms of subscriptions. But does the figure for MS include all the subscriptions? After all most people pay a license subscription to MS for their products.

"While Microsoft executives like to talk about Apple as an insignificant company with less than 5% of the worldwide market share of all PCs and servers sold, ...."

I thought MS's share of PC's "sold" is 0%.

MS's Zune share is about 3%, one sale for every 24 iPods sold.

MS's smartphone has a ??% market share.

Mac's North America/Europe share is around 14%, of the other 86% most of them are running a 7 year-old OS and "free" app's.

In Bill Gates office the Mac share is 50% (1-PC and 1-Mac).

In Steve Balmers dreams the shares are about even (25% Mac, 25% iPhone, 25% iPod and 25% OS X 10.5/10.6 and 25% Safari).

And they have had a pretty aggressive stock buy back going on as well. While I like Apple a lot (I'm waiting on my new MBP now), and I'm a shareholder, this story is just lacking....

I think calling them irrelevant just makes you a fan boy...

Hi,

The thing about Apple is that they invest very carefully. Consider that no Apple Store has ever closed. So, even if they have lots of ideas, they use up the cash slowly compared to most companies.

During this credit crisis and potential recession, I think it's great for Apple to just keep the cash on supply and maybe they will invest while prices are cheap - say open more Apple Stores or buy more knowledge. The real question will arise once the economy is healthy again. Then we should be asking what they plan to do with that cash pile.

P.

My biggest concern as a consumer is that Apple could be tempted out of its winning formula by its increasing ability to compete with Microsoft. I think that is one of the reasons that Steve Ballmer sometimes taunts Apple with his 'advice'.

Microsoft wins through dominance and customer lock-in through proprietary data and system standards. So their ideal market share is 100%. But Apple's premium product positioning means that there's a sweet spot. Say 10% globally may be good for them (and us).

The really cool benefit of Microsoft's stumbles is that it could open the way for a more standards-based ecosystem. By supporting open standards Apple can play in the bigger pool with a modest market share, cherry-picking the best ideas, and offer the premium product that I want to buy.

If we figure 200 Million units sold worldwide, then 10% is 20M units. That is half of what they are doing now.

At 10%, I think, Apple's Mac platform would be receiving about the same profit that MS receives from their ~88% of Windows marketshare.

I truely am suprised at the hatred for Microsoft, they have done alot of good for the computer industry, and I honestly don't believe we would be were we are today if it were not for Microsoft. Not everyone can afford a Mac, and their prices and everyone's prices would be higher had it not been for the idea of licensing an OS to any copycat hardware.

Second you compare a company that makes ONLY software to a company that makes Hardware & Software. (In terms of a Computer)

In addition the MAJORITY of profits are not from OS X or Mac Hardware but from the iPod and iPhone (albeit with roots in OS X, which itself has roots in BSD, which is free and open source).

So this article is WRONG, WRONG, WRONG. And while I enjoy my Macbook, I also enjoy my Windows Media Center on Vista together with Blu-ray support.

Obviously Microsoft does see that Software will only bring them so much profit and have focused on the Xbox 360 and Zune. I would suggest to them to make a Windows Mobile or Zune phone themselves, perhaps even make their own PCs as its HP and Dell and Acer that give Vista a bad name...

For the record I own alot and compare, and neither companies offerings are 100% perfect. My phone is AT&T Tilt unlocked on T-Mobile. I own a White 30GB Zune, iPod Touch 8GB 2G, Macbook, HP Slimline for HTPC, built my own desktop, Xbox 360.

Huh? Microsoft has its OS on phones, lots of them.

Microsoft also makes an iPod competitor. How would that be in ANY way irrelevant to an apples vs apples comparison? True Microsoft does not make telephones as such. But they do make things like the XBox 360. To say Microsoft is not a hardware company is wrong. They do make hardware, and the Xbox and Zune are real Microsoft company products.

Just because Apple's iPhone OS and iPod product are so successful, does not the comparison irrelevant. Microsoft is asking for direct comparison. A

pple does make less money on its OS. iWork also makes far less money than Microsoft Office. Yet the products do compete.

WRONG WRONG WRONG. A PC for example makes profit for both HP and Microsoft. A Mac makes profit only for Apple. (If you ignore Intel, Nvidia etc, as they make profit in both cases) Thus Microsoft is a software company and Apple is Hardware and Software in regards to Computers. I specifically stated that.

Microsoft did not do any comparison either, and neither did Analysts. Its fan driven website that is, and you are not comparing apples to apples (no pun intended). In fact its a stark reminder that the Mac is still way behind then it should be, and its the fact the iPhone and iPod are competively priced that they are doing so well.

A direct comparison of Zune vs iPod profits is welcome, and Apple obviously succeeds there. But a true comparison of the state of Microsoft would be a Windows vs OS X profits. Microsoft even beat analysts expectations, so its no suprise then that Apple had more profits as this has been expected based on analysts expectations on both sides. The whole spin has been as a failure when Microsoft and Vista is doing fine, and they are exceeding expectations with profits from Vista and Office. The ONLY reason Apple is up is do to the iPod and iPhone. I don't see how that threatens Windows, unless those users switch to Mac. Microsoft's core business is still Windows. While Apple has switched from being Apple Computer to Apple to focus on the iPod and iPhone.

You make some reasonable points, but Apple is up quite a bit in their Mac sales. It may pale in comparison to their other product categories, but Macs are getting 50% of its business from switchers. While I agree that MS has little to worry from Apple, the other PC vendors are worried. Apple's Mac sales account for 1/3 of all PC sales (that is by revenue, not unit sales) in the US.

That number is for "retail" computers only. The vast majority of the pc's are bought by corporations.

Yes, I did forget to add the term retail.

Hi UltimateKylie, ( I like your username by the way )

I think that when people give credit to microsoft for what we can do with computers, microsoft's dominance means they often compare today with a world in which there were no computers on the desktop.

I am not old enough to remember all the early computers that were around, but there were alternatives that would have developed over the last 25 years. But microsoft has been unique in its refusal to implement basic security, and this has led to a world of malware and spam.

Consider also that unix-variants are dominant on servers and the internet and are taught at universities so this was one of the alternatives. Users of Linux / Ubuntu computers report that their computers take 5 seconds to start up, are completely stable and fast and never have viruses or become spambots. Imagine those systems with an extra 20 years of consumer development as an 'opportunity cost' of having Windows.

Bill Gates's, belief that users only want features and won't pay for a better engineered OS, plus his principle that it's ok to write inefficient code because the hardware will get faster, have not only brought software of dangerous incompetence into our lives and businesses, but have also trained the world to believe that viruses, spam, instability and an ever-increasing need to replace working hardware are a natural consequence of technology.

When people are losing their precious time, money, work or baby photos I think there is reason that some might hate Microsoft.

( rant over )

@ruffryder,

You're right about the 75% growth, which is a minor detail, since as you note, it's still a very high growth rate. I calculated that a year ago, if you did non-GAAP accounting you might have $6.6B in sales, not $6.2B. Compared to either number $11.7B is huge!

Where you're wrong is the second point you make. If you listened to the conference call, you would have heard Oppenheimer go thru how they calculated the non-GAAP figs. They backed out the previous deferred revenue, before adding in the current revenue. They're NOT that stupid. And, GAAP would allow this kind of accounting if Apple would only charge for significant feature upgrades to the iPhone and ATV. So far, this kind of accounting has saved iPhone users, one fee over the last 15 months. I think Apple has lost far more in analyst confusion than it has gained in goodwill by not charging its iPhone owners $10 for one new feature set.

I do not understand why Apple is leaving the Server market to MS and Unix/Linux? OS X Server has some brilliant features such as: Spotlight Server, TimeMachine Server, the Wiki, and the simple intuitive interface; however, OS X Server is destructively unstable. All Apple needs to do is workout the instability issues, especially with Permissions & Keychain, add more permission control without having to run Terminal commands, add simple features like online backup for Windows workstation (since they can't do TimeMachine), and allow to NetBoot a Windows image. Also why is Apple not competing with Exchange Server?

If Apple treats server administrators professionally, they can quickly and easily give Windows 200x Server a run for its money, instead Apple is backing off again!

That is something to consider. What would the stock valuation be if Apple wasn't using GAAP but charging for updates like it does with the iPod Touch?

But surely the difference is that customers are expected to consume, and analysts are expected to analyze. It's the latter bit that's deficient.

All.


Apple's market cap would be the same as it is now. The professionals on Wall Street are not stupid. They understand exactly what these numbers mean.

The difference between GAAP and non-GAAP earnings a year ago were small (Apple earnings in the 2007 4th quarter were understated by 87.5% of the 1.2 million iPhones sold Q4, and overstated by 12.5% of the 270K iPhones sold in Q3). We don't know what the profit margins were on the 1st generation iPhones, but assuming that it is the same as 2nd gen ($208 profit per phone), that means that non-GAAP earnings for 2007 Q4 would have been $211 million higher than GAAP earnings.

GAAP 2007 Q4 earnings were 904 million, so non-GAAP would have been 1115 million. So year over year real growth of non-GAAP earnings is about 215% (net income rose from 1115 to 2400).

Revenue is a similar deal: non-GAAP revenue in Q4 2007 would have been $600 million higher (6617 million), and non-GAAP revenue in Q4 2008 was 11,700 million - a 56.5% growth rate.

Saw the title and knew interesting who had written this article. *yawn*

Who cares about Microsoft? They don't compete with Apple on any serious level. Why this obsession with them?

It's also worth pointing out that having massive stock piles of cash is generally considered a bad thing. It incurs massive opportunity costs and gives poor value of money to shareholders. That's why Microsoft got rid of their great swimming pool of cash.

When you are going into a recession, with credit markets totally screwed up, piles of cash is a very good thing. Microsoft only dished out their cash in a dividend in an attempt to appease angry shareholders who has seen zero capital gains in 5 years - Apple, OTOH, has nothing to apologize for, so no dividend needed.

Dividends are not something to apologize for. They're the reason companies exist.

And if you'd like to talk about capital gains, people who have invested in Apple last December, or even as late as last August have lost half their money. Yes you can blame the economy, but if the company had paid out dividends regularly, the investors would not have lost so much. There's a reason why the Warren Buffets of the world prefer companies that pay out dividends.

The apology was not for the dividend - THE DIVIDEND WAS THE APOLOGY. You need to read my post better - the dividend was like roses when you cheat on your spouse. Nobody would ever need to apologize for a dividend, I don't know how you could even think I meant that.

The dividend was apologizing for this: Red = Microsoft, Blue = Apple

http://finance.google.com/finance?ch...AQ:AAPL&ntsp=0

There is a misconception on your part. That money IS invested and they do get a pretty good return on it.

I think it's worth pointing out that the people that consider having liquidity and no debt a bad thing are among the very people that f-ed up Wall Street. The problem is that, a little debt has a tendency to balloon into a lot of debt if things don't go right. Best to have a good cushion, not only that, it eliminates the risk that you have of banks trying to control your operations.

I agree, people are always quick to say Microsoft are rubbish yet they have done a lot of good. Office is used by everyone not because there locked into using it, but because it was better than the rest early on and continues to.

Even now they are fixing the flaws with there main problems. Yes Vista doesn't run all your old programs and it wont run on all hardware but eventually your hardware will need to be replaced anyway (even with a Mac) and the restrictions on software has made more secure than a Mac! As for speed which someone else mentioned, Vista boots up faster on my iMac that OS X does. Apple goes on about how great it is to make the hardware and software but if thats the case how does an OS made be another company that has to support a lot lot lot more hardware configurations start faster than there's!!!

When you are a growth company with a long and distinguished track record of buying up smaller companies, paying a huge one time dividend is the absolute opposite of good sense. Dividends which are designed to "give back" to the shareholders should be reasonable in size and regular in interval. Anything else is a bad sign.

has MS not shot the largest portion of their wad on the ill timed dividend they could have bought Yahoo outright first time around. But they didn't. MS had to bluff with mostly stock swaps and the Yahoo shareholders didn't buy it hook line and sinker. The merger may eventually happen, but the 800 pound gorilla is now more like a 250 pound gorilla. Sure you can't ignore it, but it doesn't dominate the financial conversation to the tune of geting it's way no matter what.

So, you do realize that Apple copied their UI from Xerox long before Microsoft copied it from Apple, right?

No, dividends are not the reasons companies exist. Companies exist to make profits.

Regular dividend returns are a way value and income companies maintain stock favorability when they are the owners of a market where potential growth is restricted due to near market saturation.

One-time dividends by growth companies in non-saturated, still rapidly growing markets do not fit he mold of how dividends are used as a long term stock value tool.

Copied, not stole. One was invited to and were given permission to copy, the other wasn't.

Apple did not "copy" the Xerox GUI. They got permission to use it as the wunderkinds in charge Xerox-PARC couldn't see how it would be applicable to their document reproduction business.

When you get permission it is not "copy", but "evolved from", or "originated with". The original idea folks still got all the credit for coming up with it and thanks was given for allowing the use.

I may seem like a cheezy difference in language, but it is a significant difference in Karma.

While basically accurate, this reading of history ignores Steve Jobs' genius. At the time, Xerox as well as other research labs and clever inventors, had hundreds of bright ideas. No one at Xerox was visionary enough to realize that the GUI would be the principal way people use computers in the future. It was Jobs' genius that enabled him to say 'no' to 99 other bright ideas, and focus on and develop this bright idea. No one else at Xerox or Microsoft had or has this genius. The man is uniquely gifted and it's all too easy to underestimate him.

Steve Jobs retains the same genius today; what has changed is that he's now a more experienced and shrewd businessman. Microsoft's humiliation has just begun.

The sad thing in a way, although not to much, is that the mac is a cheapened brand now and equally, the MBP is a rip off. Same body, everything as a MB with bigger screen and firewire (yeah, duh, okay, express too) so marginally in the same "cost" category yet Apple (SHOCKER) charges much more and people ARE NOT buying them.

I've spoken to several Apple friends, and many are the GENIUSES (hate that term), anyway, they said they are arriving DOA and many hate that the MB has no fire wire.

Apple has cheapened their image, even at the higher price point.

Your confusing Steve with Jonathan Ives.

Sorry.

The first part makes no sense, the second part is anecdotal if true and hardly relevant, and the third part isn't true.



You're confusing Ives with Jobs.

I saw it as a way for the majority shareholders to get the cash out of the company for themselves, at the expense of smaller shareholders.

I wonder who the majority shareholders are ...