IT Director for a non-profit in Washington, DC. Man About Internet.
Today Apple reported their third quarter financial results. M.G Siegler at Techcrunch has a nice writeup of the key points from the conference call with reporters. Macworld has a lot of pretty charts and graphs too.
Another good writeup I found that expounds on what David Heinemeier Hansson said earlier this week. Conor Sen, writing for Minyanville:
So a company that owes $230 million more than it has, and appears to be burning through $100 million or more a quarter, is using money raised from later investors to pay back early investors? Sounds vaguely familiar. I'm not accusing Groupon of doing anything illegal or unethical. Ponzi, Enron, and Madoff all swindled their investors by misleading them about the financial health of their enterprises. As Minyanville's Todd Harrison likes to say, "The only difference between intervention and manipulation is communication." Groupon is telling you exactly what they are in their filing forms and by their actions. Invest at your own risk.
David Heinemeier Hansson at Short Logic:
Groupon has filed its S-1 and hopes to raise $750M in its initial public offering. Given they’re currently losing a staggering $117M per quarter, despite revenues of $644M, they’ll be burning through that cash almost as soon as it hits their account. At the moment, it’s costing them $1.43 to make $1, and it doesn’t look like it’s getting any cheaper. They’re already projected to make close to three billion dollars in revenues this year. If you can’t figure out how to make money on three billion in revenue, when exactly will the profit magic be found? Ten billion? Fifty billion? My wife shops Groupon a lot. I do not. Partly because I feel I don't need to spend money on most of the things they offer and I know if I simply ignore Groupon, I will save money. I feel the bottom is going to drop out from under Groupon in a few years and everyone in the tech media will raise their hands and run around shouting about how no one saw this coming, how could this happen, etc. For the record, I saw it coming. ( 1:00 PM June 3, 2011 - for future reference)
Andy M. Zaky, writing for Bullish Cross:
If it then carried that 2013 0.00% growth rate into 2014, the company would have $230 billion in cash or just about $250 in cash per share. 2015 it would have $300 billion in cash or $330 in cash per share. Again, that assumes 0.00% growth for 2013, 2014, and 2015. So if Apple grows 0.00%, then by 2015, it will have more cash per share than the stock is trading at today. While the whole world already discusses Apple's massive cash holding, they have absolutely no clue just how major that cash flow is going to actually be. If Apple is trading anywhere close to where it's trading today 2-years from now, it would be able to take itself private with very little outside help. Just something to think about as wall street debates its daily moronic bullshit about whether there's an iPhone delay, whether Steve Jobs is coming back or whether iPad production is hurt as a result of some explosion in china. Indeed.