Apple is 50% more valuable than Exxon! That's $200bn

Looking at the biggest companies in the world, I noticed that Apple is $200bn bigger than Exxon, the second on the list.
$200bn... is like 1x IBM valuation .
It's also 3/4 of Apple' cash reserve, which is much bigger than Exxon's one:

Cash: $150bn for Apple, vs. $20bn for Exxon

Other operating metrics for reference:

Revenues: $170bn for Apple, vs. $420bn for Exxon
Net Income: $37bn for Apple, vs. $33bn for Exxon

The extract from our monthly monitoring:

Previous review of listed companies through Google Sheets:
- Some news in the Travel Industry in July: http://floriancornu.blogspot.fr/2014/08/two-exciting-deals-in-travel-industry.html
- Explaining how it's done: http://floriancornu.blogspot.fr/2014/04/get-part-of-your-industry-intelligence.html

This month we added Media monitoring, which brings us to 8 industries:
Travel
SaaS
Gaming
Social Media
Media
eCommerce
Mobile Advertising
Global200bn (Companies with a valuation of more than $200bn)
F&B

If you're interested to receive any of these, email industry_intelligence@wearecxo.com

Apple decides that a $100bn cash balance is a minimum

Apple's grand plan to use its huge cash balance: Not to touch it!

Currently, Apple has $98bn cash; that's around $105 per share (941.6m diluted shares at Q1).

During its call on March 19th, Apple announced that around $45bn will be spent over the next 3 years (Apple Press Release and call transcript).

However, as the company generates so much cash (like $16bn in the quarter from Sept to Dec alone), the balance will actually continue to grow; probably to around $200bn (considering 50bn cash flow a year... which is actually very conservative) by the end of the program.

In details of the plan, there will be

• a $2.65 quarterly dividend, from Q4 2012, ie. the quarter from July to September, that's $2.5bn per quarter, and a 1.8% yield on current $600 stock price.
• a 3-year $10bn shares repurchase program, to start in fiscal year 2013, ie. from October 1, 2012. The main goal of this program is to neutralise dilution from employee. At today's stock price of $600, that's around 16.6m shares, 1.7% of the company's shares.

A reason mentioned for not distributing more is that $64bn of the cash is outside of the US (and significant part of the future generated cash will be outside of the US too), hence significant tax impact should it be brought back for distribution.

Hackers make it into a SEC filing: Facebook IPO document

I had never seen so many references to the word "hacker" in a SEC filing: 12 times in the Facebook registration document.


Marc Zuckerberg's letter includes one full page on what he calls the "Hacker Way", on which I bolded my favorite sentences below:

The Hacker Way 

As part of building a strong company, we work hard at making Facebook the best place for great people to have a big impact on the world and learn from other great people. We have cultivated a unique culture and management approach that we call the Hacker Way. 

The word “hacker” has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers. In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I’ve met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world. 

The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo. 

Hackers try to build the best services over the long term by quickly releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to get everything right all at once. To support this, we have built a testing framework that at any given time can try out thousands of versions of Facebook. We have the words “Done is better than perfect” painted on our walls to remind ourselves to always keep shipping. 

Hacking is also an inherently hands-on and active discipline. Instead of debating for days whether a new idea is possible or what the best way to build something is, hackers would rather just prototype something and see what works. There’s a hacker mantra that you’ll hear a lot around Facebook offices: “Code wins arguments.” 

Hacker culture is also extremely open and meritocratic. Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win — not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people. 

To encourage this approach, every few months we have a hackathon, where everyone builds prototypes for new ideas they have. At the end, the whole team gets together and looks at everything that has been built. Many of our most successful products came out of hackathons, including Timeline, chat, video, our mobile development framework and some of our most important infrastructure like the HipHop compiler. 

To make sure all our engineers share this approach, we require all new engineers — even managers whose primary job will not be to write code — to go through a program called Bootcamp where they learn our codebase, our tools and our approach. There are a lot of folks in the industry who manage engineers and don’t want to code themselves, but the type of hands-on people we’re looking for are willing and able to go through Bootcamp.