Evaluating The Quality Of Apple's Financing Position : Balance Sheet And Risk

This paper presents a brief discussion and analysis of Apple Inc. using the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) management model as a way of providing the reader an “at a glance” perspective prior to making a decision to invest in the firm. Some of the company’s financial figures obtained from its recently published 2011 unaudited financial reports such as the income statement, balance sheet and cash flow reports are included in the analysis and will be used as a reference for the explanation of the concepts here reviewed.

Apple Inc. is part of the electronic equipment industry that designs, manufactures, and markets mobile communications. Apple also creates and sells media devices, personal computers, and portable digital music players worldwide. This company was founded in 1977 and serves various customers. Apple’s top three competitors are Blackberry Limited, Google Inc., and Hewlett-Packard Company (Yahoo Finance, 2014). The purpose of this paper is to discuss the financial health of Apple by using horizontal analysis, vertical analysis, ratio analysis, and Altman’s z-score for the year 2011, 2012, 2013.

Refer to the financial reports of Apple, Inc. for the year ended September 25, 2010

When analysts question a firm’s earnings quality, it raises concerns regarding under or over aggressive accounting practices that may be allowing the firm to manipulate the earnings. Earnings quality is defined as the strength of the current earnings in being used to predict future earnings and cash flows. Since earning quality is indicative of future performance, analysts are more likely to address issues that have substantial impact on the earnings quality. An issue arises when the nature of the earnings is questioned. While permanent earnings are part of normal operations, any irregular, one time earnings can skew the earnings, making the firm look more profitable than it is. This is due to the inability to recreate similar one-time transactions that will give rise to such numbers. Investors prefer predictable

For the fiscal year (FY) 2013 fourth quarter (Q4) Apple posted revenue of 37.5 billion and quarterly profits of 7.52 billion. Figure 1 shows financial data for three consecutive years from 2011-2013. See Appendix Figure 1 for financial details. Net sales for FY 2013 were $170,910 million an increase of $14,402 million from FY 2012 (Apple reports, 2013). Apple sold 33.8 million iPhones, 14.1 million iPads, and 4.9 million Macs during 2013 Q4. Apples App Stores’ sales exceeded $10 billion for FY 2013. App Store customers downloaded almost three billion apps in December 2013 making it the most successful month in App Store history (App store sales, 2013).

Quality of reported financial information is a critical element in evaluating financial statement data. The higher the quality of financial reporting, the more useful the information is for business decision making.

Throughout the past year, Apple stock has had an astounding growth of 45% over the past twelve months, as well as a 10% growth of dividends by 10%. This increase in dividend is expected to increase by 7.43% over the next 12 months. Along with stock price and dividends, earnings per share is also expected to rise. Earnings per share is expected to rise from the current amount of $1.88 to as high as $10.74 per share. Apple’s marketing strategy is designed to keep stock prices high and shareholders happy. This growth in Apple stock is expected to continue to rise with a median change of 8.7% in the next twelve months. The current state of Apple stock is very impressive and market predictions show that it should become even more impressive in the next twelve months. (Financial Times

One of the most important factors is reliability of financial statements. Reliability is further ensured by audit of financial statements. At last but not least, financial statements should be made in a comparable format either with previous periods or with the competitors.

In the article “Apple Forecasts First Sales Drop Since 2003 on iPhone Slowdown” by Adam Satariano he discusses many factors contributing to Apple’s first sales decline in over 13 years and what steps they plan to take to recover. Apple’s revenue was expected to produce $55.5 billion this quarter but the company believes it will be $50-$53 billion dollars (Satariano, “Apple Forecast”). This decreased is believed to show signs of saturation in the smart phone market. Along with iPhones, Apple also had a pause in its iPad and Mac sales last quarter (Satariano, “Apple Forecast”). Apple is still overwhelmingly profitable but they cannot rely on the adoption of smart phones to carry the iPhone sales anymore.

Apple, one of the leading technological companies in the world has recorded revenues uncharacteristically short of expectations. Wall street analysts predicted iPhone sales during their fourth quarter earnings to be ’20 million sales’, with a short fall of ’17 million sold’. With overall revenues recorded at $28.3 billion, substantially short of expectations (Sky News, 2011).

One of the most innovative companies of the 21st century, Apple has the financial disciple and strength most companies aspire to have. Sound financial revenue recognition polices and solid financial ratio’s is the reason Apple’s market value is projected to exceed $1.0 trillion in 2017. This paper will discuss Apple’s revenue recognition policies, and key financial ratios.

Based on the information the following would be one of the assumptions the financing imperatives and speculation conduct, a developing assortment of analyzes the part outer data quality in diminishing these limitation for both Apple (AAPL) and Verizon (VZ). The Verizon income statement indicates continuous growth that keeps up the presumption that higher quality monetary increase, thus announcing diminishes in accordance to the data The venture sensitivities of market-to-book and income are every positive and again utilized to gauge these wellsprings of speculation of favorable

Refer to the financial reports of Apple, Inc. for the year ended September 25, 2010

We chose to research Apple Incorporated, one of the most innovative companies of our generation. It is safe to say that nearly every one in the US and many foreign countries have used or at least heard of Apple products. We will be looking at the macroeconomic variables that impact Apple’s business as well as how the current developments in the industry have impacted Apple’s financials and we will also look at how Apple competes with other firms in the same industry.

Apple had nearly $137 billion of cash at the end of Dec 2012. Over the past few years, the Company had been highly successful with the launch of the iPhone 3G in 2008, and which was followed by the launch of iPad in 2010. The Company enjoyed high profitability, and was able to keep its costs at a minimum. The gross margin on the iPhone was between 49% and 58% from October 2010 to March 2012, and the gross margin on the iPad was between 23% and 32% in the same time period. Apple’s capital structure included no debt; hence, there was no outflow of cash for making interest payments.