AAPL - Apple Inc.
| Previous Close | 198.78 |
| Open | 198.54 |
| Bid | 199.12 x 800 |
| Ask | 199.13 x 800 |
| Day's Range | 198.17 - 200.16 |
| 52 Week Range | 142.00 - 233.47 |
| Volume | 11,102,576 |
| Avg. Volume | 28,749,171 |
| Market Cap | 916.029B |
| Beta (3Y Monthly) | 1.03 |
| PE Ratio (TTM) | 16.75 |
| EPS (TTM) | 11.89 |
| Earnings Date | Jul 29, 2019 - Aug 2, 2019 |
| Forward Dividend & Yield | 3.08 (1.55%) |
| Ex-Dividend Date | 2019-05-10 |
| 1y Target Est | 210.89 |
- TechCrunch•48 minutes ago
iOS 13 brings many much needed quality-of-life improvements
In developer lingo, quality-of-life updates are all about refining things that already work. Thanks to these incremental improvements, it should make the end user experience much more enjoyable. And with iOS 13, it feels like Apple’s main focus is on this concept.
- Engadget•1 hour ago
iPadOS makes Apple's tablets feel like a priority again
When I reviewed the iPad Pro last year, I was torn. With iPadOS, Apple is striking a better balance between those two priorities. After using a beta build for a few days, I'm already impressed with the changes Apple has made.
- Yahoo Finance•2 hours ago
Why we're seeing so few IPOs — and why that's bad for investors
One reason why investors may be going gaga over the recent mini-flurry of IPOs (Uber, Beyond Meat, Slack, etc) is the simple fact there are so few of them.
- Yahoo Finance•3 hours ago
Breaking up Google isn't the answer
Google is being eyed by lawmakers who want to break it up.
- Bloomberg•28 minutes ago
Rocked by Stock Rout, ‘Hunger Games’ Studio Is Ready to Talk
(Bloomberg) -- The studio that brought you “The Hunger Games,’’ “Mad Men’’ and “John Wick’’ is now facing its own existential question.Lions Gate Entertainment Corp. has lost more than half its market value over the last year as the once-idolized filmmaker struggles to find new megahits. On top of that, recent mergers have created entertainment behemoths that threaten to make smaller studios an afterthought in Hollywood’s new blockbuster environment.All that has created a new sense of urgency around the 22-year-old Lions Gate as it weighs its future: open itself to being acquired, sell off pieces, or try to bulk up to compete with the giants.“Some studios have scale and unfortunately some studios are now subscale,” said John Tinker, an analyst at Gabelli & Co. “The question is obviously, if you are a smaller studio and you do not own Marvel, what are you going to do?”Investors are worried and frustrated that management may have missed the M&A boat, said Geetha Ranganathan, a Bloomberg Intelligence analyst. “Time and options seem to be running out.”Lions Gate shares fell as much as 5.3% Monday to a seven-year low of $11.38 in New York. The company declined to comment.The studio was formed in 1997 in Vancouver by movie-loving mining financier Frank Giustra. It made its name distributing R-rated movies like “American Psycho” and, with the acquisition of Summit Entertainment in 2012, was propelled into the big leagues by the teen-vampire “Twilight” film saga. That same year it also launched the “The Hunger Games’’ franchise. (The studio announced last week there might be a prequel.)But as a smaller company, Lions Gate has long been a target of merger speculation. Companies from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to Sony to CBS Corp. have been linked to potential deals. Two years ago, Lions Gate walked away from talks with game-maker Hasbro Inc. involving a $41 a share offer, worth almost $9 billion, people familiar with the situation said.Today, the stock trades at around $12, weighed down by two years of declining revenue in its motion picture division, and merger talks have picked up again. Lions Gate has held informal discussions in the past year with companies that may be interested in buying the whole business, people with knowledge of the situation said. But with the stock at seven-year lows, the studio isn’t interested in selling itself at the moment, people close to the situation said.A handful of other strategies are under discussion. One is to buy a stake in Miramax, the film producer formerly owned by the Weinstein brothers, one of the people said. Its current owner, BeIn Media Group, has recently sought buyers for a minority stake. Such a move would give Lions Gate access to a library of Oscar-winning movies such as “Shakespeare in Love” and, more recently, revived franchises like “Halloween.” A Miramax spokesman declined to comment.Starz SaleThe company is also considering selling the studio’s pay-cable network Starz, which contributes more than half its profits. Lions Gate last month turned down a $5 billion informal bid from CBS for Starz, but a sale remains a possibility, according to people familiar with the situation. If that happens, industry sources say, a slimmed-down Lions Gate might become more attractive to potential bidders. Others suggest the studio would be a tough sell without Starz.Meanwhile, the studio is looking to raise perhaps several hundred million dollars from investors to expand Starz internationally. That effort will be slowed down by upcoming negotiations with AT&T’s DirecTV over fees to carry the channel.At recent stock prices, Lions Gate is valued at less than the sum of its parts, according to Tim Nollen, a Macquarie Capital analyst. Shares could be worth $21 in a breakup, with a $5 billion valuation for Starz, $1.5 billion for the motion picture unit and $1 billion for the TV segment.Malone StakeFor investors such as cable magnate John Malone, who first bought shares in 2015 at around $30, it’s a rare miss. He controls about 8% of Class A shares. Hedge fund manager Mark Rachesky, Lions Gate’s chairman, is the biggest investor with a 19% Class A stake. He has owned shares since 2004 and backed the studio in fighting off a takeover by Carl Icahn in 2010.A spokeswoman for Malone did not return requests for comment. A spokeswoman for Rachesky declined to comment.Trends sweeping Hollywood will only make it more difficult for Lions Gate to remain independent. The merging of Disney and Fox’s film companies, and AT&T and Time Warner Inc., along with Comcast’s Universal Pictures, has created a trio of studios that own and produce well-known blockbuster movie franchises, such as the Marvel superhero universe and DC Comics. The result is a small group of big films increasingly dominating the box office.Netflix ProductionMoreover, buyers for Lions Gate’s typically mid-budget fare may be shrinking. Disney and WarnerMedia are investing billions in making their own shows to lure subscribers to new streaming services. Netflix Inc., too, is producing more and more of its original content in-house, a big change from the early days when Lions Gate’s “Orange Is the New Black’’ helped make the streaming channel required viewing. That trend could lessen demand for TV programs and films made by independent studios.Lions Gate has had some successes lately. “John Wick: Chapter 3--Parabellum” helped lift it to fourth in the box office this year, ahead of competitors like Viacom Inc.’s Paramount Pictures and Sony Pictures. And the studio is still finding buyers for its shows, recently selling to HBO, NBC and even streaming platforms run by WarnerMedia and Apple Inc.Jim Gianopulos, chief executive officer of one of the smaller shops, Paramount Studios, said that appealing programming will ultimately win out regardless of production size. “Scale has its virtues, but the creative process is independent of it,” Gianopulos said in an interview.But some analysts aren’t so confident.“For the longest time, people thought the studios would come out as the winners because they own the content,” Ranganathan said. But in the wake of the mergers, “You need established franchises. If you don’t have scale, you can’t compete.”(Updates with analyst’s comment in fifth paragraph.)To contact the reporters on this story: Anousha Sakoui in Los Angeles at asakoui@bloomberg.net;Nabila Ahmed in New York at nahmed54@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: David Papadopoulos at papadopoulos@bloomberg.net, ;Nick Turner at nturner7@bloomberg.net, Larry ReibsteinFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
- Reuters•56 minutes ago
Apple says it collects fee on less than 1% of Spotify users
Premium customers pay a monthly fee or are in a free trial of Spotify's premium service, which is ad free. Spotify has a total of 217 million customers including users of its free service. Apple competes directly with Spotify with its Apple Music service.
- American City Business Journals•1 hour ago
Apple will confirm big lease in South Lake Union
A 630,000-square-foot lease would give Cupertino, California-based Apple enough space for 4,200 employees using the industry standard of 150 square feet per employee.
- MarketWatch•1 hour ago
Microsoft stock rallies toward 8th-straight gain, 6th-straight record
Shares of Microsoft Corp. surged 0.9% in afternoon trading Monday, putting them on track for an 8th-straight gain, as Oppenheimer technical analyst Ari Wald said the software giant was a "top buy" given the long-term bullish technical backdrop. That would mark the second 8-day win streak this year, and third since it went 9-straight sessions ending Oct. 16, 2017 without a decline. The last time it rose for nine-straight days was the 9-day stretch ending Oct. 21, 2013. Microsoft's stock was also headed toward a 6th-straight record close day. "[Microsoft's stock] checks all our boxes," Wald wrote in a note to clients. "Key positives include the stock's bullish trend, high momentum score and top-down tailwinds based on our view that the technology sector is a prime candidate to be a key driver of the S&P 500's secular advance over the coming quarters to years." The stock has run up 35.4% year to date, as it continues to hold the top spot as the U.S.'s largest company by market capitalization, with a market cap of $1.054 trillion. The company is way ahead of second-place Amazon.com Inc. at $938.7 billion and third-place Apple Inc. at $919.3 billion.
- Investopedia•2 hours ago
Who are Microsoft's (MSFT) main competitors?
Are you investing in Microsoft? Learn the main competitors of technology giant Microsoft and the stiff competition facing in this technology industry leader.
- Market Realist•2 hours ago
Lessons from Other Countries: Are Interest Rates the Only Issue?
Last week, the US Federal Reserve in its press release indicated that it's amenable to easing if the situation so warrants. The S&P 500 (SPY), which had already been on an uptrend this month, rose to a record high. But would a rate cut help revive the economy?
- Motley Fool•3 hours ago
A Foolish Take: Which Mobile Payment Apps Are US College Students Using?
PayPal and its peer-to-peer payments app Venmo still dominate the older Gen Z market.
- Bloomberg•4 hours ago
Qualcomm Faces Second EU Fine as Vestager’s Last Big-Tech Target
(Bloomberg) -- Qualcomm Inc. faces another European Union antitrust fine a year after being ordered to pay 997 million-euro ($1.13 billion) penalty for thwarting rival suppliers to Apple Inc., according to three people familiar with the latest case.The chip giant may be fined as soon as next month, said the people, who asked not to be named because the process isn’t public. That would make it the last U.S. technology firm to get a large antitrust penalty from Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager.Vestager is due to step down later this year after punishing Google with more than $9 billion in fines and ordering Apple to pay more than 14 billion euros in back taxes. She warned in May she was "definitely not done yet" with big tech as she weighs potential new probes into Amazon.com Inc., Google and Apple.The EU’s current Qualcomm investigation targets 3G chips for internet mobile dongles sold between 2009 and 2011. Regulators allege these were sold below cost in order to push Icera, now owned by Nvidia Corp., out of the market. The EU took the unusual move of sending an extra antitrust complaint to Qualcomm last year to bolster its arguments of a "price-cost" test it used to show far below cost the prices were.Qualcomm and the European Commission declined to comment on the fine. The timing of the penalty could slip beyond the EU’s August summer break, one of the people said.Last year Qualcomm was handed the EU’s fifth-largest antitrust penalty over payments to Apple that the EU said were an illegal ploy to ensure only its chips were used in iPhones and iPads. Qualcomm is challenging the fine at the EU courts.Qualcomm, the largest maker of chips for mobile phones, is unique among semiconductor makers in that it gets most of its profit from licensing patents. Makers of handsets pay the company royalties, whether or not they use its chips. That lucrative profit pool has come under attack as governments around the world scrutinized Qualcomm’s business practices.To contact the reporters on this story: Aoife White in Brussels at awhite62@bloomberg.net;Gaspard Sebag in Paris at gsebag@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Anthony Aarons at aaarons@bloomberg.net, Peter Chapman, Molly SchuetzFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
- Zacks•4 hours ago
Micron, Nike, FedEx, Applied Materials and Apple are part of Zacks Earnings Preview
Micron, Nike, FedEx, Applied Materials and Apple are part of Zacks Earnings Preview
- Investopedia•5 hours ago
Analyzing Porter's Five Forces on Apple (AAPL)
Evaluate Apple's position in the marketplace by looking at it through the perspective of the Porter Five Forces Model for industry analysis.
- Zacks•5 hours ago
Google Pay, PayPal Integration Revs Up Payments System Market
Alphabet's (GOOGL) Google is integrating deeper with PayPal to boost presence in digital payments industry and be more competitive against Apple, Amazon, Samsung and Square.
- Market Realist•5 hours ago
Record Highs to Iran Tensions: Key Highlights from Last Week
Last week was quite remarkable for US markets, as the S&P 500 (SPY) reached record highs. There were some key developments last week that helped make the feat possible. Donald Trump tweeted after a telephone conversation with Chinese President Xi Jinping that the two leaders would be meeting at the G20 Summit.
- Bloomberg•6 hours ago
The Internet Is Everywhere, But Internet Jobs Aren’t
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- The internet was supposed to render geography irrelevant.(2) But the corporations that dominate the internet have turned out to be remarkably concentrated, geographically speaking. In internet publishing and web search portals, a somewhat ungainly but very important North American Industry Classification System category, 58% of all U.S. jobs in December could be found in just five counties, and more than 70% in the top 10.The location quotient is a measure of how concentrated an industry is in a particular place — a quotient of 1 means it’s right at the national average — and the location quotients in the above table make clear that this particular industry is heavily concentrated in the top five counties, especially the three bordering San Francisco Bay. In San Mateo County, home of Facebook Inc., one is about 30 times more likely to encounter an internet publishing and web search portal employee than in the country in general. Just to the south in Santa Clara County, the heart of Silicon Valley and the home of Google and its corporate parent Alphabet Inc., it’s 27 times more likely. Just to the north in San Francisco County, home of Twitter Inc. and Pinterest Inc., it’s 13 times more likely. The Bureau of Labor Statistics actually didn’t release fourth-quarter San Mateo County data for the sector, presumably because it was so dominated by Facebook that this would amount to disclosing private information, so I backed out the numbers using metropolitan-area data and a little elbow grease. The BLS did release San Mateo County numbers for the third quarter, and the employment total and location quotient were close to those I came up with (the average weekly wage was higher, at $8,872), so I don’t think this was much of a stretch.Related: Where Microbrewery Jobs Are OverflowingFinancial Jobs Aren’t Just in New YorkA Booming Local Health-Care Industry Isn’t Always a Good ThingEmployment location quotients of 30 and 27 are, it should be stressed, quite high, especially for such populous counties (San Mateo County has about 770,000 inhabitants; Santa Clara County nearly 2 million). Wayne County, Michigan, the headquarters of the U.S. automobile industry, had a December employment location quotient for motor vehicle manufacturing of 16.7; the District of Columbia’s location quotient for federal government employment was 13 and change.Santa Clara County did have a dizzying December location quotient of almost 64 for electronic computer manufacturing (thanks mainly, one assumes, to Cupertino-based Apple Inc.) and 40 for semiconductor machinery manufacturing (industry leader Applied Materials Inc. is based in the city of Santa Clara), but those are at least industries that revolve around creating complex, tangible products, which it stands to reason necessitates lots of people working in the same place. The internet is on first impression different: It’s everywhere, and it can be worked on from anywhere. Yet employment at the corporations that shape it is concentrated in a handful of places in the U.S. and has been getting more so. In March 2014, the top five counties accounted for 48% of the nation’s internet publishing and web search portal jobs, and the top 10 62%.Facebook and Google have been expanding overseas, so it’s possible that this focus on U.S. data is somewhat misleading — sadly there’s no global counterpart to the hyper-detailed Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages from which the data in this column (as well as pieces over the past few days on breweries, financial services and health care) is taken. Also, it’s not all about engineers at Facebook and Google: As the lower average wages outside of Silicon Valley indicate, this category also includes journalists working at online enterprises such as BuzzFeed Inc. and Vox Media Inc. in New York and elsewhere. It may also include contract workers slowly going crazy moderating Facebook pages in Phoenix; it’s often hard to know for sure how specific corporate activities are classified by the BLS, because the BLS isn’t allowed to say, but the goal is to assign the people working at a location to the industry sector that best fits what most of them are working on.Traditional media has a tendency toward concentration, too: Los Angeles County has 27% of the nation’s jobs in motion picture and sound recording industries. New York County (aka Manhattan) has 18% of all U.S. periodicals publishing jobs. The two counties together account for 20% of broadcasting employment. But the top-five and top-10 counties’ shares of jobs in these sectors are much smaller than with internet publishing and web search portals, and in motion pictures and periodicals, the very top counties have actually been losing employment share in recent years as media companies shift production to less expensive locales.In their much-cited 2009 review of what drives economic activity and the resulting wealth to “agglomerate” in certain cities, economists Edward Glaeser and Joshua Gottlieb wrote that:The largest body of evidence supports the view that cities succeed by spurring the transfer of information. Skilled industries are more likely to locate in urban areas and skills predict urban success. Workers have steeper age-earnings profiles in cities and city-level human capital strongly predicts income. It is possible that these effects will be reduced by ongoing improvements in information technology, but that is not certain and has not happened yet.It’s presumably the value of this transfer of information among skilled workers that has driven internet companies to concentrate in a few places. High costs in those places and those “ongoing improvements in information technology” might drive dispersion, although there’s no sign of that yet in this data. Politics might, too: As Facebook in particular has been discovering lately, having your employees concentrated in a few places can mean having few friends in Washington. But for now, the work of internet publishing and web search portals remains tightly clustered along the San Francisco Bay, and to a lesser extent the Hudson River and Puget Sound. Geography still seems to matter, a lot.Coming Tuesday: the sectors with the highest location quotients.(1) I realize that this has become something of a straw man, and that by this point far more has been written attacking the idea that the internet renders geography irrelevant than espousing it. But as someone who was at least halfway paying attention in the 1990s, I think it's fair to say that most people in those days assumed that universal connectivity would lead to a spreading out of economic activity rather than a concentration.To contact the author of this story: Justin Fox at justinfox@bloomberg.netTo contact the editor responsible for this story: Brooke Sample at bsample1@bloomberg.netThis column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business. He was the editorial director of Harvard Business Review and wrote for Time, Fortune and American Banker. He is the author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinion©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
- MarketWatch•7 hours ago
The antitrust suspects: Facebook and Apple appear to be most at risk
Facebook Inc. and Apple Inc. are most at risk if government regulators are serious about pursuing antitrust actions against Big Tech.
- Market Realist•7 hours ago
Does Trumponomics Signal the End of Made-in-China Era?
China has grown at a breathtaking pace over the last couple of decades. The growth has been led by a couple of drivers, namely higher infrastructure investments and rising exports. Now, the infrastructure and investment-led model have their own limitations.
- Investopedia•7 hours ago
Steve Jobs and the Apple Story
On August 2, 2018, Apple made history by becoming the world’s first $1 trillion company. In October 2011, Steve Jobs passed away at the age of 56. Jobs was an entrepreneur through and through, and the story of his rise is the story of Apple as a company, along with some very interesting twists.
