

Apple's market cap tops $300 billion - bvi
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/01/03/apples-market-cap-tops-300-billion/

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eddieplan9
Irrelevant, but do you think Facebook is worth 1/6 of Apple?

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tptacek
Paraphrasing Joel Spolsky, every time Facebook figures out a way to make 10
additional pennies from each of its users, it adds a recurring $50MM income to
its cash flow. These are apples/oranges comparisons, but Facebook is worth a
lot.

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revorad
Let's do some math based on numbers usually reported:

total users 600,000,000

daily visitors 300,000,000

annual revenue $2,000,000,000

average daily revenue $5,479,452

average daily revenue per visitor $0.02

So, unless I've made some serious order of magnitude error, on average they
make 2 cents per visitor everyday. Maybe they can make a lot more than 10
additional cents per user per year.

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kmfrk
Do Apple still have the problem of not knowing what to do with all their
money? I recall they had an absurd amount of money lying around that they
needed to invest to get some decent returns on.

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jonknee
They have $25B in cash or short term investments sitting around ($11B in cash
or equivalents):
[http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:AAPL&fstype=ii](http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:AAPL&fstype=ii)

They have invested pretty heavily in facilities/equipment, growing from $2.8B
to $7.2B over the past four years. I'd imagine that's stuff like their giant
new data center and partnership agreements in their Asian operations. Where
they really bulked up is "Long Term Investments". None four years ago, $25B
today (and just $10B last year). Unsure what that would entail...

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czhiddy
I think they have closer to 50B in the bank. They were definitely north of 40
all of last year.

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jonknee
Unless Apple lied in their SEC filings and in doing so risked jail time for
high level executives, I think you're mistaken. There are different
designations for assets, but the "Cash and Short Term Investments" portion is
$25B. Cash makes up $11.2B of that total. They have a little over $75B in
total assets, which counts some less liquid assets like property and long term
investments.

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xenophanes
Most of their "long term securities" are actually short term by any reasonable
meaning of the word. It's just a technical terminology thing for filings that
doesn't mean what you assume it means. They have been north of 40 billion for
a while.

The relevant thing is how much is liquid fast enough to use it for what they
want to use it for. For that we should listen to Apple telling us directly
(which they have repeatedly done), not just check some field on their govt
filings.

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jonknee
> For that we should listen to Apple telling us directly (which they have
> repeatedly done), not just check some field on their govt filings.

Between trusting a company on what they claim and what they actually report,
I'd go with what they report. That's what's legally binding. Not that the
final result is much different, cash isn't an obstacle in whatever Apple wants
to do (and hasn't been in quite some time).

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xenophanes
You aren't listening. You're taking a field on a report which means X rather
than Apple's statement about their Y. They are NOT THE SAME THING. You're
simply looking up the WRONG STATISTIC from an official source and saying it
trumps A DIFFERENT STATISTIC from another source.

Financial reports use phrases that sound like common sense things but actually
have precisely defined meanings that are not equivalent to what they sound
like they mean. Basically it's excluding a great deal of Apple's liquid assets
because they don't fall under a specific definition.

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jond2062
No sense in arguing over something that is easily accessible (see Note 2 to
the financial statements):
[http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/320193/00011931251023...](http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/320193/000119312510238044/d10k.htm#tx37397_5)

Total cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities as of 9/25/2010 =
$51.011 billion.

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J3L2404
Probably just a fad. ;)

