It has been a very interesting couple of weeks for Apple. Tim Cook (CEO) and Peter Oppenheimer (VP of Finance) announced that Apple will be paying a dividend for the first time to their shareholders. You may ask why this is a big deal, well the late Steve Jobs fought against the dividend plan. His idea was that dividends gets taxed heavily and thus costs the company more than what the public sees.
This is not a “Jobs would have done this” or “Apple is losing the plot’ post but rather a highlight reel of the changes Apple is going through. Since Cook took over a few big things have happened.
The company released a list of all of their suppliers into the public domain. This was never done in the Jobs era and was a closely guarded secret. I get the idea that Tim Cook is trying aggressively to ensure that Apple can be seen as a “normal company” in the mind of the consumer. By telling the world who your suppliers are, you make the suppliers happy as it is a bit of free marketing. Secondly, Apple wants to ensure that these companies treat their employees fairly and ethically.
Secondly, Apple is taking an in depth look at their staff. By buying back these shares from shareholders they add value to the shares that their existing staff owns . The large companies all have share plans for their staff and I get the idea that Cook wants to end the dilution of value. Remember every time shares are offered to the market, the initial share loses value.
The other very interesting thing that is happening is that China seems to be the in the sight of Apple management. Yes they have partnered with China Mobile to provide the iPhone to the Chinese market but there is talk that Apple wants to partner with Baidu in China as being the search engine of choice seen on Apple devices. That will potentially be a big deal as Apple then further highlights there movement away from Google & Microsoft (Bing) as the default search engines. Steve Jobs never visited China and by Cook going there it highlights how important foreign markets are for Apple. If Apple makes the big entry into China as I think they will, they will increase their global footprint and decrease the gap to Android.
One other side note about China, Cook could also be trying to smooth over the legal issues that Apple has with the local company (Proview) over the iPad trademark. At the moment Apple cannot sell the iPad in China through official Chinese channels as they are currently in a legal battle with Proview.
You may wonder why Apple in China may be a big deal for us in South Africa. I take into consideration that the South African market is very small in comparison to China. This entire story shows that Apple is looking at markets they are not officially in. The China roll out has been accelerated over the last 12 months, so what stops Apple doing the same with South Africa? Please Mr Cook, you have a lot of Apple users here in our country. What about showing us also a bit of love…
