Apple is still “The iPhone Company”
Shifting from hardware to services
The registrant is a well-known seasoned issuer, as defined in Rule 405 of the Securities Act. The company’s net sales are predominantly generated by just one product, the iPhone.
Stats about Apple are always the starting point for peerless lessons in leadership. No other tech company is as successful as Apple if we look at parameters like profit, environment, responsibility in different areas, innovation, disruptive technology, code of conduct, cult, etc.
Different to many other competitors, Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, and all the other excellent employees followed a philosophy. Continuity over decades let this company grew up to the most valuable brands in the world. Apple is a mega brand right in the middle of the epicenter of technology, the Californian Silicon Valley.
Statements like
Apple’s brand is just overwhelming here.
It’s not about specifications. It’s not about rationale. It’s about owning an iPhone.
(Eiji Mori, a Tokyo-based analyst at BCN Inc.)
always incite platform wars when published in social media. Users of Apple devices always get nothing but scorn and derision if Fandroids read those lines.
The SEC …
As the leading industrial nation the USA developed rules for financial reports which are basically overtaken by other countries. The responsible commission in the USA is the SEC (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission).
The laws and rules that govern the securities industry not only in the United States but also in all other industrialized countries derive from a simple and straightforward concept:
All investors, whether large institutions or private individuals, should have access to certain basic facts about an investment prior to buying it, and so long as they hold it.
To achieve this, the SEC requires public companies to disclose meaningful financial and other information to the public.
This provides a common pool of knowledge for all investors to use to judge for themselves whether to buy, sell, or hold a particular security. Only through the steady flow of timely, comprehensive, and accurate information can people make sound investment decisions.
Numbers …
In Apple’s SEC 10-K filings (Annual financial statement) you will find the most important numbers, the unit sales of the iPhone. This device still is the product that boosts the company’s success.
With Apple’s spreadsheet app Numbers (part of the iWork suite) I put these numbers into a table and used ‘Create chart’ from the context menu to create the bar graph. In a last step I inserted some images from the camera roll and added text fields to explain it all.
It’s the task of analysts to breathe life into Apple’s declining/stagnating iPhone sales numbers.
The company already took appropriate action since years and continuously shifts its engagement into services. But because of a relatively closed ecosystem these business segments are also depending on the iPhone.
More about financial reporting
