Stefan/Robert/et al: > Right on! Apple clearly wants to take over the world.
Not quite. Apple is in fact very pleased to be a *minority* market-share holder -- as it is in everything except iTunes and iPads (for the moment) -- just as long as it gets UNNATURAL margins from its products. As perhaps the only ex-Wall Street analyst on this list, I can tell you that Apple's success has been founded on two principles 1) get your semiconductors at "below" market prices (to drive up gross margins, at the expense of all the other non-fab semi-conductor buyers) and 2) keep the system closed (so that the minority in the market who prize this end-to-end engineering will be happy *plus* to ensure that you have no direct competitors.) And, it's worked pretty well . . . however, they will inevitably run out of CHEAP-chip "string." In particular, IBM, Motorola, Intel and Samsung (i.e. the world's "largest" semiconductor shops) have all "gotten over" having Apple as a semiconductor customer. Btw, Apple's shift from Power to the Intel architecture was a direct result of IBM and Motorola refusing to "subsidize" Apple anymore, whereas (for a while) Intel was willing. Then (for a while) Samsung was willing . . . now Hynix and others? For what it is worth (which could be a lot, if you like to gamble shorting AAPL), gross margins at Apple cannot remain so far outside the industry norm forever and at the first sign of declines, the stock will fall and never again regain its lofty valuation. Or so I used to tell my hedge-fund clients . . . <g> Mark Stahlman Brooklyn NY -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/private/sursound/attachments/20120409/e4625052/attachment.html> _______________________________________________ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
