Apple's changing business model: What should the world's richest company do with all those profits?

Apple Inc. stands out as the world's most famous, and currently richest, company. To the general public, Apple is known for three things: its intriguing CEO Steve Jobs, who has achieved iconic status in death as in life; its amazing iOS products, especially the iPhone and the iPad, and their predecessor the iPod, which have literally placed sophisticated technology in the hands of the masses; and its stratospheric stock price, which even when in March 2013 it had dropped to 63 percent of its September 2012 peak, gave Apple the highest market capitalization of any company in the world. As a result of its phenomenal success, at the end of fiscal 2012 Apple had $121 billion in liquid assets. In April 2013 the company committed to distributing as much as $100 billion to shareholders in stock buybacks and cash dividends by the end of calendar 2015. By employing the theory of innovative enterprise to analyze how over the course of its 37-year history Apple became so profitable, we argue that there is no economic justification from a risk-reward perspective for this distribution to Apple's shareholders. Taxpayers and workers have superior claims on these profits. In analyzing by whom value is created as a basis for considering for whom value should be extracted, we raise the implications of Apple's changing business model for the future of innovation at this heretofore exceptional American company and even in the U.S. economy as a whole.     

Apple's financial success: The precariousness of power exercised in global value chains

The topic of this paper is the Apple Inc business model and how, in a financialized world, the success of this business model is represented by what we term financial ‘point values’. Our argument is that there is a tendency to promote specific point valuation multiples as measures of success, but these values, by their nature, do not reveal the contingent and variable nature of the power relations exercised in and along global supply chains. Firms such as Apple exploit their resources and capabilities to ‘create value’ but also exercise power to recalibrate relationships with suppliers in the value chain to secure ‘value capture’ for financial transformation. Value capture is an active ingredient that can help inform our understanding of the fragility of the Apple business model value proposition and frame a critical argument regarding the precarious nature and sustainability of Apple's substantial profit margins.     

Owning the consumer—Getting to the core of the Apple business model

This paper uses a business model framework to analyze the main limitations of Apple Inc. post-2003, a significant turning point in the company's history. As such, we move beyond an exclusive focus on what makes Apple unique or different by evaluating the mundane and out-dated elements of its business model. To do so, we examine the end-to-end supply chain, from source to store, to present a more holistic evaluation of the Apple business model. Drawing on the existing literature, we argue that the quintessential element of the Apple business model is its ability to ‘own the consumer’. In short, the Apple business model is designed to drive consumers into its ecosystem and then hold them there, which has been hugely successful to date and has allowed Apple to wield enormous power in the end-to-end supply chain. We demonstrate this through a detailed evaluation of Apple's physical and content supply chains and its retailing strategy. Moreover, we find that the very business processes that enable unparalleled corporate control bring with them new problems that Apple has thus far been unable, or unwilling, to adequately address.     

Financialization across the Pacific: Manufacturing cost ratios,supply chains and power

This article argues that thirty years ago favourable cost conditions helped build productive power in Asia, whereas now US financial power drives and benefits from low labour costs in China, using the very different supply chain positions of Apple Inc. and Foxconn International Holdings (FIH) as examples. In the first section, the authors bring together the literatures on financialization and global supply chains to contextualise the pressures and outcomes discussed. A temporal dimension is added in section 2, using macro evidence on labour costs to compare new entrants into the industrial world order since the 1970s. The article then presents company illustrations in sections 3 and 4, deconstructing Apple's financial success and its trans-Pacific relations with its handset supplier FIH. The article concludes by observing that the rise of the post-national corporate player changes the alignment between large corporate interests and the US economy where Apple hoards its cash surplus and the success for the stockholders does not align with the broader needs of the US economy and society.     

基于内容提供商视角的传统媒体定价策略研究

随着移动互联网的发展,新媒体平台的出现和传统媒体的经营模式转型正在改变媒体市场结构。考虑传统媒体转型和新媒体内容外包,引入新媒体平台建立三方双边市场结构模型,考察竞争型市场结构中传统媒体平台的定价策略。研究发现：针对消费者和广告商进行差异性定价可以给传统媒体平台带来最佳收益,因此对消费者的低收费和补贴是合理的,并不构成非正当竞争;平台间差异化程度直接影响到其议价能力和利润水平;此外,消费者对广告的容忍程度也会影响媒体平台对广告商的定价,容忍程度越低,广告费用越高。     

大宗农产品远期交易市场模式的定位分析——兼论生猪电子盘

对大宗农产品电子交易市场到底是变相现货,还是变相期货的多方质疑,凸现出对这种远期交易商业模式的现实及理论的困惑,以生猪电子盘为例,参照现货交易、期货交易,从市场结构、市场功能、市场合约、市场监管、市场目标五个方面对这种商业模式进行了定位分析,得出结论:大宗农产品电子交易是以现货交易为基础、以远期交易为主体、以期货交易为机制的一种B2B的电子商务平台;并提出相应的政策建议。     

财务战略驱动企业盈利模式——美国苹果公司轻资产模式案例研究

本文首先明确了企业现金流结构是连接企业价值与盈利模式的关键变量,架构了"企业价值→财务战略(现金流结构主导)→盈利模式(轻资产模式)→商业活动与资本行为→财务业绩"的财务战略驱动盈利模式的理论框架。文章以美国苹果公司为分析对象,选取该公司自2001年至2011年间的主要业务经营资料与关键财务数据,从财务战略驱动视角,透视苹果公司持续轻资产模式运营的基本要点,包括实施简化生产和标准化零配件、快速供应链、极短的存货周转期、高额现金储备和营运资本、小额固定资产投资、巨额研发与销售终端投资、并购技术性优势企业、内源融资主导等等,这些轻资产战略的基本特征的概括既丰富了财务战略的理论主张,也给企业战略管理实践提供了许多实操性的启示。     

Digital insurance brokers—old wine in new bottles? How digital brokers create value

This article analyzes digital brokers in the countries of the DACH region, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, from a business model perspective. We argue that the potential to create new value for insurance customers has not yet been fully realized. Our analysis has identified two strategic action areas. The first concerns the exploitation of the wealth of customer data available. Those digital brokers who will succeed in generating new content and services using data analytics have the potential to take customer centricity and individuality to new bounds. The second centers around introducing aspects of community, such as connecting peers and enabling them to interact. The critical success factors are volume, a high degree of automation as well as leveraging the infrastructure and data to delivering new, value-adding content and services that go beyond traditional intermediation.     

How One Company Drives Ownership Behavior to Innovate and Create Shareholder Value: The Case of Varian Medical Systems

For the past 70 years, Varian Medical Systems has helped lead the fight against cancer by developing new and more effective cancer treatments and is today's market leader in radiation therapy, treating over four million cancer patients last year. From its founding in 1948, Varian's competitive advantage has been seen as deriving from its “culture of innovation“—a culture that has been fueled by significant investment in research and development. But after a long run of innovation that extended Varian's therapeutic reach and resulted in strong growth, the company's shareholder returns began to sag. And as a number of analysts noted, the stagnation of the share price appears to have been highly correlated with a slowdown in the company's release of new, innovative products. To help steer the company back toward the success of its old ways, Varian's management put in place a new measure of periodic corporate operating performance that helped management gain more insight into the most promising areas for allocating resources and investment in different business lines and regions. The intent behind adopting this new measure, which also became the basis for the incentive pay of the company's executive team, was to restore and reinforce the company's high‐investment strategy while instilling strong discipline for earning market returns on those investments and, at the same time, meeting the short‐term demands of quarterly earnings (EPS) targets. In this article, the company's CFO and one of the company's advisors describe the thinking behind, the actual implementation of, and the early returns derived from Varian's adoption of a new performance measurement and reward system. The effects go beyond those normally associated with adopting a “merely financial” measure, including a reinvigoration of ownership spirit and a much admired corporate culture of innovation and growth.     

Money as a weapon: Financing a winner-take-all competition

We investigate the capital structure of pioneering startup firms, which are frequently credited with opening new markets and niches in the digital era and often face the threat of the potential entry of successful, cash-rich firms from adjacent markets. Our analysis is made in the context of a winner-take-all competition in the form of an all-pay auction for the monopolistic position in a new market. We show that a pioneer's optimal capital structure exhibits widespread diversity and is determined by a tradeoff between entry deterrence and post-entry competition intensification. A pure-equity (a mixture of equity and risky debt) structure is optimal when (1) barriers to entry are small (large), (2) the future prospect of the new market is fairly certain and/or, (3) the new market is likely (unlikely) to create large externalities on the potential entrant's existing business. The post-entry competition is likely to engender large losses to both the winner and the loser.