Sunday 2 - Apple dilemma, a cash crisis !

Not the usual cash crisis that the little people face when they are unable to feed their families, not the cash crisis of a company competing on an uneven playing field, this is the cash crisis of a company that has not paid its tax due to the US treasury ...

... currently a potential (estimated) $25 billion in back taxes.

For those not able to read the Sunday Times report by Simon Duke .......

APPLE’S CASH CRISIS*
The tech giant must find a way to spend its $117bn pile and deal with threats to its dominance.
With his dark jeans, open-neck navy blue shirt and matching sports jacket, Tim Cook had assumed the mantle of Silicon Valley kingpin with ease.



At a meeting of technology executives in late May, the chief executive of Apple made it plain he expects other West Coast traditions to be upheld.
Under Cook’s command, the culture of mystery that helped transform Apple from a basket case into the world’s richest company was to be strengthened. The iPhone maker would “double down” the air of secrecy created by his predecessor, the late Steve Jobs. And all the more so where takeovers were involved.
“We buy companies. We don’t like to make it public,” Cook told his high- powered audience. “If I don’t have to, I won’t.”   The 51-year-old has lived up to his word. Just two months after this bold declaration, Cook didn’t bother to release a press release when he splashed out $356m (£228m) on a company that produces fingerprint recognition technology.
For the typical chief executive, a deal of this size would be a serious gamble, garlanded with corporate spin to win over investors. Not for Cook. With Apple banking almost $1 billion a week, the takeover of Authentic ate up less than two working days’ profit.
Like a latter-day Croesus, he has almost limitless resources at his disposal; he could buy almost any company on the planet before hitting the bottom of Apple’s war chest. With $ 117 billion ( and counting) in the bank, the cash hoard is larger than the market value of Glaxo Smith Kline, one of Britain’s largest businesses and the 33rd most valuable company in the world.
Cook, it would seem, is sitting pretty a year after succeeding Jobs. However, he is facing a critical test next month with the launch of a new iPhone.
For the first time, Apple will be leaping ahead without the creative imprimatur of Jobs, who lost his battle with pancreatic cancer in October.
Cook cannot afford any slip-ups if Apple is to maintain its supremacy. Rivals are already making inroads — Samsung, the South Korean electronics giant, sold twice as many high- end phones as Apple in the second quarter. The two companies are now slugging it out in a Californian courtroom over a multi-billion dollar patent infringement case.
Cook has not been afraid to show an independent streak. Breaking ranks with Jobs, who was set against returning money to shareholders, he has launched a $10 billion share buy-back plan and sanctioned Apple’s first dividend since 1995. He is also showing a thirst for takeovers. Apart from the Authentic deal, Apple has held talks with Twitter about a significant investment in the short-messaging service.
Although Cook’s $117 billion piggy bank is the envy of the industry, a cash crisis has begun to afflict Apple. The bulk of its money is trapped overseas — out of reach of the tax-man but also the company’s shareholders. The shining star of America’s tech industry isn’t prepared to hand over some £ 25 billion in back taxes to bring its riches home. In a courtroom in down-town San Jose, the self-styled capital of Silicon Valley, a middle-aged man with long hair and an untidy, grey- flecked beard launched a tirade against a perceived enemy.
“We’ve been ripped off, it’s plain to see. It’s offensive,” he protested.
It may sound like a domestic dispute or a street robbery, but the furious attack in fact came from one of the most respected figures in the tech industry.
Christopher Stringer, a long-time Apple designer who worked on the original iPhone, gave his explosive testimony during the opening skirmishes of the lawsuit that Apple has brought against Samsung.
It has accused the Korean rival of copying iPhone and iPad designs and is seeking damages of $2.5 billion.
Apple’s design team is a group of 16 “maniacal individuals” whose job is to “imagine products that don’t exist and guide them to life”, Stringer said. When Samsung started to “rip off” his pioneering ideas soon after the 2007 launch of the iPhone, it was hard not to quell the anger, he told the court.
Samsung rejects the charges. “This is not some copyist, some Johnny- come- lately doing knock-offs,” its lawyer said.
The case is just one flank in a worldwide legal battle between Apple and handset makers that use Google’s Android operating system to win control of the booming smartphone market. In addition to damages, Apple is seeking to have copycat products removed from the shelves around the world.
The stakes are enormously high. According to documents filed with the court, Apple earns a profit of as much as 58% on each and every iPhone shipped. At an average wholesale price of $650, that means the company has generated earnings of nearly $100 billion from the ground- breaking smart-phone since 2007.
In the current year alone, the iPhone is forecast to bring in earnings of $ 30 billion — equivalent to two- thirds of Apple’s expected profits. By contrast, the iPad contributes a modest 15% to the bottom line.
With Apple’s fortunes so tightly tethered to the iPhone, investors were unnerved by the second-quarter results.
Operating profits may have jumped 23% to $ 11.6 billion between April and June, but that fell short of the vertiginous growth rates Wall Street has come to expect.
Worrying soft patches have emerged. Sales in China, for instance, tumbled 28% compared with the previous quarter. Though an estimated 270m people in China can now afford to own an iPhone or iPad, sales of cheaper Android handsets are becoming the staple in the world’s second largest economy.
Europe’s economic woes also took a toll. Sales in France, Greece and Italy were “particularly poor”, Cook admitted, while the historically resilient German market registered growth of mere “single-digits”.
Much of the disappointment can be attributed to Apple’s savvy customers. The company may officially keep its own counsel on the timing of its next big launch, but it ticks like a metronome. The iPhone is reinvented every autumn, so Apple fans hold back in the spring and summer before upgrading.
There are reasons to fear that this pattern may be disrupted. For one thing, rivals are finally catching up. By fair means or foul, the third version of Samsung’s latest Galaxy handset has become a formidable competitor to the iPhone. Although badly wounded by Apple’s domination, Nokia and BlackBerry are fighting back.
Whether the Californian behemoth can continue spewing out profits will become clearer on September 12, when Cook is set to unveil the company’s latest iPhone.
As well as a better camera, a higher-resolution screen and a more powerful processor, it is expected to work on new super-fast mobile phone networks that offer lightning- quick downloads on the move. Although these fourth-generation services won’t be launched in Britain until next year, they are being rolled out rapidly in American, Scandinavia, Germany and developed Asian economies such as South Korea and Japan.
Other factors are likely to work in Apple’s favour. The new iPhone will be widely available for the Christmas gift-buying season in the West and for the Chinese new year. More importantly, the combination of the iTunes and Apps stores is locking customers into Apple’s devices.
“The great majority of iPhone users intend their next phone to be another iPhone. No other brand has the same loyalty,” said Benedict Evans of Enders Analysis, the research service. STEVE JOBS offers an object lesson in how fast and fickle the technology industry can be. Apple, founded by him and Steve Wozniak in 1976, was floundering by the mid-1990s. Close to bankruptcy, the once pioneering firm re-hired Jobs as chief executive in 1997, 12 years after he had quit.
Within 12 months, he had overseen the launch of the iMac personal computer. The sleek desktop was a hit with consumers but greater successes were soon to come. The iPod and then the iPhone not only turned the music and mobile phone markets upside down but transformed Apple into the most powerful and richest company in the world.
Cook and Stringer, the design guru who has spent nearly two decades at Apple, know all too well that the tech industry is brutal and the lifespan of world-beating companies can be pitifully short. As the decline of Yahoo and AOL has shown, the apparently impregnable are in reality never more than one false step from falling into irrelevance or worse.
Apple at least has the comfort of a thick cash blanket to keep ahead of its rivals. After Facebook’s calamitous float, Cook’s interest in investing in Twitter has waned. His company has the means to buy a Hollywood studio, such as Disney, to bolster the television set it is rumoured to be launching next year.
Great riches, though, are rarely the panacea they seem.
About $80 billion of Apple’s wealth is held in a gnarly web of foreign subsidiaries, where it is shielded from the US tax-man. To bring it home, the company would have to pay an estimated $25 billion in back taxes.
Because of this enormous potential bill, the treasure is effectively trapped abroad, with Apple unable to return the cash to investors or use it to fund American takeover deals.
Unless Cook solves this conundrum, he could be crushed by the burden of inherited wealth.

That $25 billion represents the stake that the US taxpayers have in Apple, this money rightfully belongs to the people, the little people who are the unregistered stakeholders ............

... Theresa May, facist, not wanted ...

... on our democratic journey when she prevents Maryam Rajavi from exercising an invitation to speak to members of our parliament.

Theresa May and the pathetic civil service running her office is preventing an eminent and well respected dissident from the tyrannical Iran regime from speaking on the subject of "women and their mistreatment in Iran", her crime is "to call for a democratic and secular government committed to the rule of law and respect for human rights".

There is distinctly unpleasant smell emanating from the Home Office, it is the smell that accompanies lies, half-truths and appeasement, the government of the 1930's did much the same with Nazi Germany and 60 million people died as a result (including 6 million Jews).


In a parady of democracy Theresa May said she had taken into account the views of the Foreign Office and other departments ...

"I have concluded that maintaining Mrs Rajavi’s exclusion is justified as I do not consider her presence in the UK to be conducive to the public good.  The government makes no apologies for refusing people access to the UK if we believe they might seek to undermine our society."

Well, I have thought about our "freedoms of thought and expression" and about "appeasement of tyrannies" ...

...It seems our government and their civil servants prefer the company of "international bullies" to the more civilised company found amongst the British people and those Members of Parliament who try to represent their views and feelings.

It takes only one person, but only if it's the right person, ...

... being the right person meant that people listened, paid attention to the words and deeds.  Only a very few people are able to command that sort of attention.

Mohamed Bouazizi, by his actions, set alight North Africa and the Middle East, a conflagration that continues, the conditions that led to his anger and subsequent action, he asked his government for justice.  It took just over a month for the President of corrupt Tunisia to flee with his family to Saudi Arabia, ever the ..... democratic deficit, the country will not allow half the population to drive because they are ................ women.

His need for justice flew across borders much like tumbleweed in old western films,it jumped a country into Egypt with similar consequences, Egypt's president didn't escape, he awaits trial with his family.

In Libya the fighting continues as it does in Syria, leaders of both countries without the legitimacy of democratic elections, but in both case, too far away in time from the martyrdom of Mohamed Bouaziz, there is no-one that fits the bill of "the right person" to drive a wedge into the tyranny.

In the Middle East there is a deficit of democracy, in Saudi Arabia there is a democratic deficit, a country that helps Bahrain suppress the voice of democracy, Sport might just galvanise this small kingdom into progress towards granting those  freedoms we take for granted.

At home we have only one "right person" at present, and he has created the conditions for a constitutional crisis, in the green grass of home we have the technocrat who will do exactly what the majority of people want, very little change, at the heels of this man will be the rabid voices of radical nationalism, a distraction only, Carwyn Jones has a good five years ahead, but only if he is able to ignore the tumbleweed that is nationalist politics (MH takes the biscuit with this little gem), less is more just now, radical can wait a year or two.

Bill, Bahrain or Montreal, a question of ...

... ethics or a forlorn gesture.

I don't know anyone in Bahrain, yet the Formula 1 teams and drivers seem old friends.

It's all about freedoms, freedom of association and freedom of speech to name but two, the people of Bahrain are denied these freedoms, yet the FIA who enjoy these freedoms are not prepared as yet to acknowledge the people of Bahrain should also be able to protest injustices.

So this weekend I will sit out the race and watch "Chariots of Fire", sometimes we have to become principled, I cannot get it out of my head the Bahrain authorities put on trial the medics who treated people injured by the state to warn others of the futility of opposing the state.


Closer to home, Bill asked the question ...

"I think though that we need something better than the self serving elitist Westminster bureaucracy we currently have, and England really must have some form of identifiable government, and not just a vacuum like present.

Wales, with its assembly, seems to have taken an interesting turn of late. Could they lead the way?

But what should the format be? I don't know. But I'm open to suggestions."

Bill has opened our political Pandora's box just a little, just a chink, he questions the vacuum that exists in British politics, a vacuum that is home to 50 million plus voices that have no sound, where can Bill get his voice heard above the drone that is the Westminster hive of inactivity ; this same 50 million people who pay the lions share of revenue raised by government, who asks where is England in the great equation we call Britain and British.

I am on record as saying that no individual should expect more than the next person, yet we have a set of circumstances where Scotland receives the lion share of revenue per head of population, some argue that NI has a greater share, but that particular province needs additional help in the fight against terrorism and the effects of terrorism over many decades, although some expenditure goes towards certain people I remember adorning wanted posters .....

So in terms of Bill or Bahrain, Bahrain is a monster of morality, whilst Bill is the monster yet to come in Britain, "who speaks for England", not many I think.....

Michael Caine said education is cheaper than prison ...

... when talking to Chris Evans this morning; he was talking about the kids of London's Elephant & Castle, they had asked him how he got out of the Elephant.  My thoughts turned to our devolved administration and education, and policing, and justice, and the voices of the also ran who are calling for further devolution of these powers to solve the very issue MC spoke about

Unfortunately in Wales the very communities who need the education leg-up are failed, there exists an imbalance of resources, money is denied to the very people who need additional resources, squeezed by the middle class resource hungry parents who in turn have been manipulated by politicians with an agenda beyond the ken of the electorate.


There exists in Wales a voice disproportionate to reality, Plaid Cymru, it has influenced policy in a way that creates division and denies fair allocation of resources to our children.  Try the blogger MH, his is a voice that discriminates against those starved of good education, his peddled nationalism is undermining when considered in the context of the fair governance of Wales, particularly towards education policies.

... just as blithe Spirit haunted  Noël Coward's socialite and novelist Charles Condomine in the play by that name, so the Labour Party in Wales is haunted by the ghost of their annoying and temperamental first wife, my advice to Carwyn Jones is to turn your back on the Separatist Party of Wales and turn your attention to the people who need so much help.

Remember, for every young person entering prison there could be a family dispossessed of hope for the future, and how many neighbours of the young inmate are in a similar position.  Doing your duty towards the prisoner should create a better place to live and work for all, helping those at the bottom of the ladder lifts everyone.


Bad news from Syria, the regime is moving to punish its citizens for dissent, time for the democracies to act, there should be no room for barbarism in this world.

The hippocratic oath ...

is not difficult to understand, it reads thus ...

I swear to fulfil, to the best of my ability and judgement, this covenant:

I will respect the hard-won scientific gains of those physicians in whose steps I walk, and gladly share such knowledge as is mine with those who are to follow.

I will apply, for the benefit of the sick, all measures [that] are required, avoiding those twin traps of over-treatment and therapeutic nihilism.

I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon's knife or the chemist's drug.

I will not be ashamed to say "I know not," nor will I fail to call in my colleagues when the skills of another are needed for a patient's recovery.

I will respect the privacy of my patients, for their problems are not disclosed to me that the world may know. Most especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death. If it is given to me to save a life, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty. Above all, I must not play at God.

I will remember that I do not treat a fever chart, a cancerous growth, but a sick human being, whose illness may affect the person's family and economic stability. My responsibility includes these related problems, if I am to care adequately for the sick.

I will prevent disease whenever I can, for prevention is preferable to cure.

I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind and body as well as the infirm.

If I do not violate this oath, may I enjoy life and art, respected while I live and remembered with affection thereafter. May I always act so as to preserve the finest traditions of my calling and may I long experience 

the joy of healing those who seek my help.

Unfortunately the oath does not apply in Bahrain ...

... where dozens of doctors and nurses who treated injured protesters in Bahrain have appeared in court charged with attempting to topple the monarchy, it is a grotesque miscarriage of human rights to pervert this ancient oath taken by medical staff, it demonstrates a level of barbarism unwanted in this world we live in, don't take my word for it read it here.

Bernie Ecclestone was so wrong when he supported the return of the F1 Bahrain Grand Prix to the racing calender, the Hippocratic Oath would need to become the Hypocritical Oath to satisfy the brutal regime in Bahrain.

Listen to the people of the world Mr Formula One .... we do not want you supporting brutality wherever it exists.

Turn a blind eye ...

... seems to be the buzzword at Betsan's blog, the storm in a teacup at the assembly.

In my personal experience, if you turn a blind eye, it becomes impossible thereafter to apply the principle. 

Our police are inclined to turn a blind eye, though only where they are diverted to something deemed more urgent or serious, a resources issue, at the Assembly there is plenty of time, resources in abundance, hot air by the dirigible full.  It could or should use this episode to demonstrate the pursuit of Wales political excellence.

I wonder what might have changed in the world if we hadn't turned an international blind eye, would the Syrian dictator be murdering the people of Syria, would Gaddafi have bombed the people of Libya, would Apartheid have lasted so long in South Africa.

Closer to home, Alex Salmond has raised his corpulent head above the political parapet, this man of the Scots people has decreed today that post independence our nuclear submarines will no longer be welcome, though with his jowly arrogance he suggests that Faslane as a base would be retained in partnership with our British government.

There are 10,000 jobs related to our nuclear submarine base in Scotland, it is time to bite the bullet and transfer the base out of the reach of Salmond, I'm sure the Devonport skill-base would welcome the opportunity to look after our nuclear fleet.  Salmond feeds the fire of independence, it is time that plans are put in place to begin the disengagement as soon as possible, if Whitehall are under the impression that the Scottish question is going away, they are wide of the mark, bring the submarines south as soon as possible, and bring the jobs not the jobbers.

The more brutal the regime, ...

... the more urgent the call for "freedom".

In Syria many thousands of anti-government protesters have protested against against Syria's brutal regime, no violence from the protesters, but their message must point the way to the cliff of oblivion for Assad and his despicable regime.  In the countries third largest city of "Homs", the protesters insist they will not leave until they bring down the country's leadership,

In response to the weekend protests by the people of Syria, President Bashar al-Assad interior ministry has said the unrest amounts to armed insurrection, unfortunately for the people the arms of Assad's brutal regime were turned on innocent people asking for "freedom", to be let loose from the chains of Syria's long-standing emergency laws (48 years of oppression and counting) and a call for the release of political prisoners.

Human rights groups say at least 200 protesters have been killed in the past four weeks by security forces propping up the dictatorship of Assad, for these 200 people the man needs a trial in Syria, and when found guilty of ordering the murder of those 200 people should be taken to a public gallows as an example to the rest of the world.



And in Wales there is the election having the flavour of gruel, where politicians debate issues that are outwith their political remit, it is easier to discuss UK wide taxation as opposed to the underfunding of out schoolchildren to the tune of £600 per pupil year ............... they had the money, where was it spent.

... and Gollum continues to eat fish in the political back alleys of Cardiff Bay ... whilst in Swansea Plaid are out in force playing out their nationalist confidence trick, elsewhere the politicians discuss things amongst themselves, it is dangerous to interact with the electorate and their families.

Why would you serve food on ...

...such a sharp stick he asked ....

... of course you could have sharp food on a blunt stick ...

... particularly when we need to protect people in fear for their lives ...

... fleeing from Gaddafi, a man who sends tanks against the people of Lybia.


The leaders of the US, the UK and France have said in a joint letter that there can be no peace in Libya while Muammar Gaddafi stays in power ........... so say all of us .......... or do we ?

Democracy ...

... or tyranny ................

... I'm glad I wasn't there, just to old to hate so much I guess, or is it just not my democracy .........

......... in Syria the police are shooting people who are asking for democracy, and elsewhere in this world we share.......