Apple in big solar power deal, market cap closes over $700 billion

Apple CEO Tim Cook speaks at the WSJD Live conference in Laguna Beach, California October 27, 2014.

Credit: Reuters/Lucy Nicholson

(Reuters) - Apple Inc (AAPL.O) will buy about $850 million of power from a new California solar farm to cut its energy bill, the iPhone maker said on Tuesday as its stock market value closed above $700 billion for the first time.

The First Solar Inc (FSLR.O) plant, with the capacity to power the equivalent of 60,000 homes, will be used to supply electricity for Apple's new campus in Silicon Valley, and its other offices and 52 stores in the state, Chief Executive Tim Cook said at a Goldman Sachs technology conference in San Francisco.
Cook addressed investors as Apple's stock market value closed at $710.74 billion for the first time, buoyed by record sales of big-screen iPhones and a December-quarter profit that was the largest in corporate history.
Apple was already the world's largest publicly traded company by stock value.
The plant in Monterey County, California will also power an Apple data center in Newark, California that already relies on solar power.
"We expect to have a very significant savings because we have a fixed price for the renewable energy, and there's quite a difference between that price and the price of brown energy," Cook said.
"We know in Apple that climate change is real. The time for talk is passed," he added. "The time for action is now."
First Solar, based in Tempe, Arizona, manufactures solar panels and builds solar power plants, many of which it sells to power producers.
Construction of the 2,900-acre California Flats Solar Project is expected to start in mid-2015 and finish by the end of next year, First Solar said in a statement.
Apple will receive electricity from 130 megawatts of capacity under a 25-year purchase agreement, the largest in the industry to provide clean energy to a commercial end user, First Solar said. Output of the project's remaining 150 megawatts will go to Pacific Gas and Electric Co (PCG_pa.A).
Apple will not receive an equity stake in the project and will make the payments over the lifetime of the deal rather than all at once, First Solar spokesman Steve Krum said.
"The reason that they made this choice is because they saw a way to save economically," Krum said. "You won't have price volatility from other fuel sources. The fuel is free. It's competitively priced from other options they would have."
The project could not have gone forward without Apple’s participation, Krum said.
Apple already uses renewable energy to power its data centers. Last week, it said it would invest $2 billion over 10 years to convert a failed sapphire glass plant in Arizona into a data center that would be powered mostly by solar energy.
"Apple still has work to do to reduce its environmental footprint, but other Fortune 500 CEOs would be well served to make a study of Tim Cook," Greenpeace said in a statement following Tuesday's announcement.
Shares of Apple ended up 1.92 percent at $122.02. First Solar rose 3 percent in extended trade after closing up 4.77 percent at $48.54.
(Aditional reporting and writing by Noel Randewich; Editing by Richard Chang)

Original post found here: http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/02/11/us-apple-cook-idUSKBN0LE2RN20150211

Harvard Business Review: Apple is in trouble and it’s trying to hide it by reporting record profits

Harvard Business Review: Apple is in trouble and it’s trying to hide it by reporting record profits

When Apple announced its record-crushing earnings last week, we wondered where were all the people who had been doom-mongering about the company for the past couple of years. While it seemed at the time that “Apple-is-doomed” hot takes had fallen out of favor, Professor Juan Pablo Vazquez Sampere gives it the old college try writing for the Harvard Business Review with a particularly unique spin on the old formula: Namely, Tim Cook is using Apple’s record earnings to distract you from the fact that it’s out of ideas!

“By dazzling us with dollars, it seems that Apple’s leaders are deliberately trying to divert our attention,” the professor writes. “By making such a communication effort to let us know how much money they’ve made — instead of what they’ve done to change the world recently — they are inevitable forcing us to ask ourselves, is this what we get from the new Apple?”

There are times when you really just have to shake your head.

Apple wasn’t trying to “deliberately divert our attention” when it revealed its holiday quarter earnings. It was, in fact, meeting a legal obligation that every publicly traded company has to meet. If Apple had decided to not report its earnings (which wouldn’t have even been legal), people would rightfully be slamming the company for trying to hide something.

Harvard Business Review: Apple is in trouble and it’s trying to hide it by reporting record profits

Elsewhere, Sampere brings up the old, tired refrain about how Apple hasn’t produced anything really innovative since Steve Jobs’ passing while conveniently forgetting that when the iPad first came out, it was dismissed by some as nothing more than a large iPod touch and supposedly showed that Apple had lost its innovative edge. And of course, Sampere ignores that the Apple Watch is going to release in the next couple of months, which represents the first major new product category of the Tim Cook era at Apple.

At any rate, even if the Apple Watch is a huge success, Sampere will probably remain unimpressed. After all, if the watch is a hit, it will lead to more big earnings reports — and as we all know, those are just clever distractions.

Original post found here: https://www.yahoo.com/tech/s/harvard-business-review-apple-trouble-trying-hide-reporting-192031686.html

What global company may purchase Apple all the money that is?

Apple has broken records with its recent gains, making the most valuable US company now collect even more money. Apple now owns 178 billion dollars to spend - an amount sufficient to purchase the majority of the largest companies in the world and many of its competitors.

The US company now has more money than the market value of some of its main competitors, including names like Intel and Amazon. Intel is estimated at 173.1 billion dollars, while Amazon is allegedly worth 143 billion dollars.

If Apple decides to spend its resources then it could even buy all of these companies: Uber, Tesla, Twitter, Netflix, Dropbox, Snapchat, Airbnb and SpaceX, and still will remain around 20 billion dollars as waste.

Some of its competitors remain the largest outside of Apple's ability to buy them.

Google, for example, is valued at the price of 352 billion dollars and Facebook is worth $ 211 billion. Apple itself is estimated that 635 billion dollars worth.