For a company that recently had a $600 billion market cap, for which scale is everything, and for which every sentence begins with "if you exclude its cash, its multiple is" two things have to be consistent: it has to keep growing its cash, and said growth has to be proportional to the firm's scale. For Apple, in Q3 the first condition was satisfied... but just barely. Total cash and equivalents did rise from $117.2 billion to $121.3 billion, but the rate of sequential increase, which was only $4.1 billion, was the slowest increase in cash and equivalents since March 2010, when Apple's total cash load was a far more modest $41.7 billion, as was its market cap. While AAPL continues to be a growth juggernaut, in its pursuit to appease Wall Street with dividends and other guimmicks, is it starting to lose the big picture, which is and always has been about generating cash flow? And how long until the organic growth to cash generation is not even enough to cover the dividend outflow? What happens if and when AAPL actually has cash decline in one quarter? Finally, is it time for the infamous Braeburn Capital [3]to show Simon Potter who truly is boss?
Total cash:
[4]
Sequential change:
[5]