Penguin, the last of five publishers, including Hachette, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, and Macmillan, has offered to terminate its e-book deal with Apple in order to settle with EU antitrust regulators. The e-book agreements forbade other retailers from selling the e-books from these publishers at lower prices than Apple's iBookstore.
Apple CEO Tim Cook will be required to testify for 4 hours on the eBook price-fixing scandal the company was accused of. Apple is the last company, out of 6, to be testifying in this case. The other companies, which include Hachette, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Penguin, and Macmillan have all reached a settlement with the Department of Justice. The companies had to terminate their agreements with Apple and other retailers, and follow a list of guidelines administered by the DoJ to ensure this issue would never happen again.
Apple's annual shareholders meeting was held today, and present were many shareholders who were concerned about Apple's decline in stock prices since September. Apple's stock price is down 35% since its $702.10 peak in September. Its stock price is currently sitting at $443.77. This drop in stock price took out a total of $240 billion in shareholder wealth, and shareholders want to know what Apple plans on doing to change things around.
This week in speaking with the crowd at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference, Tim Cook let it be known that Apple has reached a new high mark in cash paid out to developers. While Apple announced back in early January that they'd paid around $7 billion dollars to developers in all, Tim Cook announced today that Apple has paid out more than $8 billion. That's one massive up-swing in a very short amount of time!
As Tim Cook spoke at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference this week, a question of "cannibalization" came up, prompting the Apple CEO to speak about the first time he'd ever been asked such a question. Believe it or not, it wasn't when the iPad mini was introduced - it wasn't even when the iPhone or the iPod nano was introduced. In fact it was back when the iBook was revealed back in 1999.
This week Tim Cook spoke at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference about the affordability of Apple products. Having been asked a question about prepaid customers working with smartphones and other smart products in emerging markets, the same commenter suggesting cheaper iPhones, Cook let it be known that Apple was already there - so to speak. Cook made it clear, "we lowered the price of iPhone 4, we lowered the price of iPhone 4S, [and] in the most recent quarter we didn't have enough stock of iPhone 4 after we lowered the price. It surprised us ... so we are making the move to make things more affordable."
This week we're hearing quite a bit about a stockholder issue with Apple surrounding a lawsuit headed by David Einhorn's Greenlight Capital - and today Tim Cook has fired back. In a talk at this year's Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference, Tim Cook spoke about how Apple's biggest shareholder Greenlight Capital is suing the company, saying Apple should be dishing out more money to investors than they already do, saying that Preferred Stocks would be a good idea for the company. Cook spoke up today saying that the issue is being "considered" by Apple, but that in the end, it's all a bit of a waste of time.
The Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference will host Apple CEO Tim Cook for the second year in a row. Apple updated its Investor webpage today to note the addition of the conference, which will be live streamed in an audio-only format starting tomorrow at approximately 10:15 am ET. At last year's conference, Cook spoke about the tablet market and the company's growth over the years.
This week Apple's Tim Cook made no effort to hide his excitement over the success Apple has had over its first fiscal quarter of 2013, letting investors know that it's largely because of the products of 2012 that this good time for the company is driven into the future. Back when Cook promised us big things in 2012 early last year, we saw new iterations of essentially every product Apple had on the market, along with a couple new ones to boot. Cook's affirmation here at the beginning of 2013 could very well mean big things for the company through the next 12 months as far as production goes - just as long as the supply chain Apple relies on doesn't get in the way.
Yesterday Apple announced new record results for their financial Q1 2013 including sales of iOS devices as well as overall revenue, and with those announcements came an invite from Tim Cook to employees for a town hall meeting being held this morning. This town hall meeting will likely be extremely similar to the meeting held last year at this time after the company released its 2012 Q1 financial results, question and answer session included. At the moment we're not entirely sure if we'll be seeing the results of this session or if it will be closed-door employees-only in the end.
This week the folks at Apple have revealed their full Q1 2013 earnings report complete with a new record for revenue in the first quarter. This includes revenue of $54.5 billion for the quarter as well as a net quarterly profit of $13.1 billion USD, this being a lovely set of results comparatively as well as on their own with last year's revenue and net quarterly profit coming in at $46.33 billion $13.06 billion respectively. It may be the iPhone that we see as the star here, as compared to the already monstrous 37 million units sold in the first quarter last year, the 47.8 million sold reported today seems rather fantastic.
Apple had a great first quarter of 2013, but the company hasn't forgotten about the few rough spots from the year prior. One of these rough spots was the launch of Maps, which came with the roll out of iOS 6. Despite a few stumbles, Apple is looking forward, with Tim Cook saying today in the company's earnings call that Apple is constantly improving Maps, and that it won't stop until the service lives up to "our incredibly high standards."
