Team Player, problem Solver, a sensible player, and a design genius Apple (AAPL) CEO Tim Cook took over from Steve Jobs on 25 August 2011 from his previous position as COO leading Apple to become a $2.3 Trillion unbeatable company.
“Tim may not be able to design a product like Steve. But Tim understands the world to a degree that very, very few CEOs I’ve met over the past 60 years could match,” says Warren Buffett, who knows Apple CEO, Tim Cook well and his Berkshire Hathaway Inc. has $111 billion stakes in Apple, as of a September filing.
Tim Cook, CEO of Apple joined Apple in 1998 after several years at IBM Corp. and a six-month service at Compaq. Cook would work 18 hours a day and send emails all through the night, and when he wasn’t at the office he was found in the gym. Unlike his predecessor Jobs, he had no pretensions to being an artist.
Apple products, including iPods, iPhones, and iPads that followed, are manufactured in massive quantities and in a variety of versions under his leadership. Tim applied strategies similar to those in use by HP, Compaq, and Dell, companies. His global supply chain greatly improved upon the fabrication approaches that Dell and Compaq had developed. Big PC brands outsourced both manufacturing and significant design decisions, resulting in devices that were cheap but not distinctive. Cook’s innovation was to force Foxconn, Apple Inc.’s main partner, and its other suppliers to adapt to the extravagant aesthetic approach with great quality specifications demanded by Jobs and Jony Ive, its industrial design head.
Apple’s informed engineers crafted specialized manufacturing equipment and made frequent visits to China, investing long hours in production floors looking for hardware refinements and bottlenecks on the line and not spending time in conference rooms as their PC counterparts did. Contract manufacturers worked for all the big electronics companies, but what set Apple apart was Cook’s spending big to buy up next-generation parts years in advance along with striking exclusivity deals on key components ensuring Apple gets them ahead of rivals. His obsessing with controlling Apple’s costs was quite evident. Every millimeter was scrutinized for savings.
Apple turning into a more diversified company, created more dependence on China. Apple’s close dependency with China would have put Cook in a drowning political position after Donald Trump was elected president in 2016 and his campaign which was prominently marked by anti-China rhetoric, threats of a trade war, and promises to bring jobs lost to Shenzhen back to Americans. Surprisingly, Apple survived under Trump. In August 2018, Apple reported a market value of $1 trillion, and even after two years and Trump’s consistent railing on the campaign trail that “these stupid supply chains” in China should move to the U.S, Apple surpassed $2 trillion.Cook’s shrewd management and equally shrewd political diplomacy, and extremely effective approach at deflecting political pressure helped Apple maintain its market share. Cook was happily willing to do what was necessary to protect Apple’s China-centric supply chain, even if that meant letting Trump spread falsehoods. Trump stated to the Wall Street Journal in mid-2017 that Cook has personally promised to build “three big plants, beautiful plants” in the U.S., which was not true and which obviously Apple declined to correct. After the photo op in Austin, Trump tweeted
Dow 30 component Apple (AAPL) has revolutionized personal technology with the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984. Today Apple leads the world in innovation with iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Apple TV. Apple’s four software platforms — iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS — provide seamless experiences across all Apple devices and empower people with breakthrough services including the App Store, Apple Music, Apple Pay, and iCloud. Apple’s more than 100,000 employees are dedicated to making the best products on earth, and to “leaving the world better than they found it. To learn more about Apple (AAPL) and track its ongoing progress at Vista Partners Apple (AAPL), Coverage Page.
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