USA Today published an article today "Apple plans to work on making exec compensation more competitive." Apple is quoted as saying the following.
"At current levels, the company's executive compensation program is not competitive," Apple said in the Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
The article went on to say the following.
Apple will ask shareholders at its April 21 annual meeting to approve the cash bonus plan.
Jobs' success in harnessing the iPod's appeal to sell other products helped first-quarter Mac shipments rise to the highest level in four years.
Apple's 16% growth in U.S. PC shipments in 2004 was faster than the market's 11%.
A little closer look at the numbers might lead someone to question whether the Apple executives are doing such a great job in their core business, computers.
According to Apple's 10-k statement, Apple shipped 3,290,000 units in FY04 fiscal which was up 278,000 units over Fiscal FY03.
The industry shipped between 177.5 and 189 million units in calendar FY04 depending on whether you use IDC or Gartner numbers.
If you adjust for the Apple's fiscal quarters to make them calendar quarters, that gives Apple a FY04 calendar unit total of 3,507,000
So if this is a growth of 16%, Apple's unit calendar unit growth was 483,724
During the same period IBM had a higher unit growth and they are selling their PC business.
Dell had a 23.1% growth and grew their business 5,826,000 units or more than 12 times Apple's unit growth.
In fact Dell grew their business in one year the equivalent of a new company that is 1.73 times the size of Apple.
This still leaves Apple at 1.85% worldwide market share.
And they are rewarding these executives? Let's hope Dell doesn't reward it's executives proportionately.
The real question is what happens when the iPod miracle (and it is a typical Apple miracle) disappears?
-DLS
Here's a special treat for all Apple watchers, the cover from the June 24, 1985 issue of InfoWorld. We are coming up on the twentieth annivesary of this cover.
Given a market that is 100% penetrated, is Apple really taking market share from Linux & Windows, either on the corporate desktop or in the data center?
Marginally, but not enough to effect Microsoft's total revenue or share price of either company. What few major wins AAPL gets are sensationalized because they are so few. Nobody cares about 10-20 units in the graphics or engineering workspace when compared to the total numbers of a company.
Take a look at the HPC space. Linux Networx and Dell are winning tons of deals, but they are not newsworthy. AAPL pays and cajoles the few Mac champions to tout the company products, but these wins are merely based upon favoritism and less upon unglorious responses to RFPs.
There was an article at one of the Mac websites a while back during the famous "Switcher" campaigns about why didn't AAPL spend some of its 5 billion in cash by converting a Fortune 500 company from Windows to Mac and document the TCO, cost savings, etc...
How many Fortune 500 companies run more than 25% of their desktops as OS X, or more than 25% in their data center?
Perhaps I should adopt the Mr. Gannon methodology of journalism during AAPL's next quarterly earnings call and ask some of the hard questions in order to ascertain the ambiguity of the underpaid AAPL executives...
Posted by: Stephen | March 16, 2005 at 04:55 PM