Gisteren was het exact vijf jaar geleden dat Steve Jobs aftrad als de CEO van Apple en dat Tim Cook zijn positie overnam. Een moment waarop veel publicaties proberen de balans op te maken, en te kijken in hoeverre Tim Cook als CEO zichzelf succesvol kan noemen.

Veel publicaties zullen dat subjectief doen, maar Jan Dawson van Beyond Devices heeft juist een poging gedaan om de balans zo objectief mogelijk op te maken: met cijfers.

Daarvan weet iedereen al hoe ongelofelijk Apple in de afgelopen vijf jaar gegroeid is, dit is voor een groot gedeelte de verdienste van Tim Cook. Want al onder Steve Jobs was hij de manager die wist hoe je ervoor kan zorgen dat de toeleveranciers optimaal functioneerden, terwijl de voorraden zo klein mogelijk gehouden werden. En dat heeft een groot aandeel in de enorme financiële groei van Apple.





Aan het eind van het tweede kwartaal van 2011 had Apple 76 miljard dollar in kas, die teller staat nu op 231,5 miljard. Tel daar nog bij op dat Apple in deze periode 117 miljard aan eigen aandelen heeft teruggekocht en 163 miljard als dividend aan aandeelhouders heeft uitgekeerd (Steve Jobs was trouwens tegen dat laatste).

Die 117 miljard aan teruggekochte aandelen zijn trouwens gefinancieerd, dus die heeft Apple niet met eigen geld betaald. Dat heeft onder andere te maken met het feit dat veel van Apple's geld buiten de VS op de bank staat. Dat kan je ook zien in de grafieken hierboven, vijf jaar geleden was dat 63 procent, op dit moment is het maar liefst 93 procent.

Het andere wat meteen opvalt is de enorme toename van wat Apple tegenwoordig uitgeeft voor Research & Development.





De uitgaven voor R&D waren vijf jaar geleden 2,5 miljard dollar voor het hele jaar, de teller staat hierbij nu op 10 miljard. Dat betekent dat het niet alleen absoluut, maar ook percentueel is toegenomen is. In 2011 was dat nog 2 procent, inmiddels geeft Apple 4 procent uit aan R&D. Met andere woorden, Tim Cook zet zwaar in op de toekomst en heeft daarvoor kennelijk grote plannen.

Nog veel meer van dit soort analyses, cijfers en grafieken kan je vinden op deze pagina. Hieronder de conclusies van Jan Dawson:

Conclusions

I've deliberately made this more of a factual post than an evaluation of Tim Cook's tenure - as I said up front, this week will see lots of this sort of stuff, and I've already talked to several reporters doing their best to sum up five years of work in a few hundred words. But I think it's worth noting several things here, some of which I've mentioned in the text:

• Apple under Tim Cook has sold far more iPhones and iPads than it ever did under Steve Jobs - 87% of total iPhones sold and 90% of iPads ever sold. Though Steve Jobs launched these products, it was always Tim Cook who ensured the supply chain met demand as well as possible, and it's been Tim Cook who's overseen the massive expansion in that supply chain over the last five years as the scale has grown to something unprecedented.
  
  
• Tim Cook has made the decision to increase Apple's spending on research and development not just in dollar terms commensurate with revenue growth but actually doubling it as a percentage of revenue during his tenure despite the massive growth in revenue. That reversed the trend under Steve Jobs, and the increased investment in R&D is roughly equivalent to the drop in margins during this time - Cook has made a massive bet on R&D and by implication on future products.
  
  
• Cook has made China a special focus, and this focus has paid off in a big way, with a roughly fourfold increase in revenue from Greater China and an equivalent increase in operating income. Greater China has grown from 10% of revenues to roughly a quarter, and Apple's retail footprint there has also grown dramatically. That growth in China has been a major contributor to Apple's overall growth in the last five years, and Cook clearly remains committed to China as a focus for Apple as evidenced by his recent investments there. He's begun to talk more about India and its potential, but I remain skeptical that India can be much more than a rounding error for Apple over the next few years.
  
  
• Only one entirely new hardware product has launched under Tim Cook, and yet we have almost no official data to go on to evaluate the performance of the Apple Watch so far. Opinion remains divided about how to evaluate the Watch, but I'm on the side of those who considers it a modest success in Apple terms and a smash hit in the context of the market into which it was launched. Like the iPhone the year Tim Cook took over, it's going through an interesting transition as its release moves from the first half to the second half of the year, but I suspect that like the iPhone in late 2011, the Watch is due for big growth in late 2016 and beyond.
  
  
• I suspect the transformation we've seen in Services, driven largely to date by the App Store and latterly by Apple Music, is just the start of what we'll see under Tim Cook. He's already hinted several times at additional services to come, and TV is an obvious focus here. But I also think some of the rhetoric about Services has been overblown - it's still only 10% of revenue, and unlikely to grow massively past that point unless Apple decouples services from its devices, which I think would be a mistake.
  
  Perhaps one of the most significant contributions Tim Cook has made at Apple can't be seen in any of these charts, because it's about the changes to Apple's culture that have happened under his leadership. The increased openness, best exemplified by the frequent interviews Cook and other executives now regularly grant to various publications (and even podcasters), is one element of this, though Apple's secrecy about future products remains as tight as ever. But an increased sense of social responsibility, especially as regards the environment and contributions to social causes is another major change. This doesn't have a direct financial impact, but it's made a positive contribution nonetheless, and no evaluation of Cook's tenure would be complete without a recognition of that fact.
  
  

Tweeënhalve dollar R&D per jaar, goh, da's ook niet veel...  

Zolang richting R&D gaat en niet R&R hé