Apple has accumulated more than $ 250 billion in cash, which is not yet going to spend. This is reported on Monday WSJ.
Apple's leadership each launch of a new product and every quarterly earnings report begins with a record of record performance. The first quarter of fiscal year 2017, which ended on December 31, 2016, was not an exception.
At the end of three months of operation, the Californian techno giant sold 78.3 million iPhones, 13 million iPads and 5.3 million Mac computers, while earning $ 78.4 billion. Against the background of the fall of the global smartphone market and the slowdown of the Chinese economy, experts did not expect any achievements from Apple. Nevertheless, the company showed an increase in sales of the iPhone. With such revenues, the company's net profit increased to $ 17.9 billion.
But the record quarterly profit and the stunning success of smartphones - this is not the main prizes of Apple. The company was able to accumulate an incredible cash reserve, which by the beginning of May exceeded the figure of a quarter of a trillion dollars. This amount of cash Apple was able to accumulate in just under 12 years, since in those days when the appearance of the first iPhone went only rumors, the amount of cash owned by the "apple" giant was only $ 5.5 billion.
Despite the fact that today Apple has the largest cash reserve of all technology companies in the world, Tim Cook and other top managers of the corporation are in no hurry to invest these funds anywhere.
According to analysts of the market, such a stock of funds could be invested in at least three areas: for carrying out various daily transactions, protection in the event of a slowdown in the pace of business development and possible investments if an appropriate opportunity. However, in the case of Apple, cash is not used for almost no operations.
The California giant spent an insignificant amount (in comparison with its reserves) for acquiring third-party companies, buying a music company Beats Music, AuthenTec, which develops fingerprint scanners, responsible for the Siri voice assistant, and investing in several more projects. In this case, none of the amounts of transactions, other than related to the purchase of Beats, does not exceed $ 1 billion.
At the same time, Apple's competitors are investing billions in robots, Internet services, unmanned vehicles and artificial intelligence systems. For example, Facebook spent more than $ 20 billion on the messenger WhatsApp and producing technology virtual reality Oculus VR.
As for Apple, in Cupertino it seems that they are not going to spend a cash reserve just to buy something.
"Money does not burn our pocket, so we stick to the strategy and wait and think carefully before making a choice," said Cook once.
Despite the fact that in Cupertino they decided to hold their stock of cash for a "rainy day", according to analysts' estimates, the "fruit" corporation could spend its honestly earned $ 250 billion to finance the colony on Mars, purchase Tesla Motors and enter the electric car market, Operator of cellular communication, the acquisition of all sports teams in the US and even buy out almost all of their devices launched on the market.