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About Apple Inc
Apple is a world leading multinational technology company which is originated in the United States. The headquarters of Apple is in Cupertino, California. The company designs, innovates, develops and sells computer hardware, software, consumer electronics, and online services. The company was founded by innovation king Steve Jobs, Ronald Wayne and Steve Wozniak. The company was established on April 1, 1976. As of July 2015, the company employs 115,000 workers where 76,000 are employed in United Sates (Elmer, 2016). In seventeen countries, the company opened 476 retail stores which include 268 stores in US and 208 in other countries since May 2001 (Macrumors.com, 2016). China is the second largest retail footprint of Apple where the company is aggressively expanding its business. Apple operates online iTunes Store, world largest music retailer, and Apple Stores. Apple possesses the high level of brand and customer loyalty all over the world. Arthur D. Levinson is the current Chairman, and Tim Cook is the CEO of Apple Inc.
Products and Services
The company manufactures and sales computer hardware, computer software, consumer electronics, and fables silicon design. The products of Apple are Mac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Apple TV, OS X, iOS, watchOS, iLife, and iWork. The services are Apple Store, iTunes Store, App Store, Mac App Store, iBooks Store, iCloud, iOS App Store and Apple Music.
Apple history of foundation
1976-1981: The history of Apple is considered as the most favorite start-ups. The company was started on April 1, 1976. At first, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded the business. Later on, Steve Jobs had convinced Ronald Wayne to join with them. The first product of Apple was Apple I, personal computer kit. It was manually assembled by Wozniak which was first exhibited to the people at the Homebrew Computer Club. People did not take this attempt seriously until Apple II debuted in 1977. In a local trade show, this new version was published. Apple II has included color graphics and plastic case. It was the first personal computer. After including Apple Disk II and floppy drive, the sales of Apple was boosted up. The company was an increase in size and employees by 1980 when the company released Apple III. In 1981, the company had faced difficulty in selling the computers because of the saturated market condition.
1982-1985: After the historic visit at Xerox PARC in 1979, Jobs along with other engineers started the Lisa project. Unfortunately, Jobs was seen as an unskilled project manager and handed over project Lisa to Mike Markkula. When IBM released their personal computer in 1981, Jobs realized the company was grown up. In 1982, Sculley became the CEO of Apple instead of Jobs. A race broke out between Macintosh team and Lisa team where Lisa team won and started to sell personal computer publicly in 1983. But, it was failed because of limited software and expensive price. After a long confrontation between Jobs and Sculley, the board took a vote where Sculley won as head of Apple and Jobs resigned from the company.
1986-1993: Under the Sculley direction, Apple first lay off its workforce and faced its first quarterly loss. In 1987, Apple introduced the Mac II. It was a powerful computer which supports the Macintosh line a viable. Again Apple came back into the competition with Microsoft after losing exclusive rights to its interface design to Microsoft. By 1990, Mac faced a problem again when Microsoft rolled out with Windows 3.0. This version could run on PC clones in the world. To challenge this situation, Apple made license the Mac OS. Apple released its first generation PowerBooks in 1991 which were an instant success.
1994-2000: PowerMac family was introduced in 1994 by Apple. It was based on Mac PowerPC chip which was a very fast processor developed with Motorola and IBM. In the 1995-95 season, the company faced the extreme worst situation ever because misjudge the market. The company tried to sell their product by low cost, but it did not work. In this circumstance, Spindler was resigned from CEO, and Gil Amelio became new CEO of Apple in 1996. The new CEO did a vast change in corporate structure. The company was to be divided into seven different divisions. In Q4 of that year, the company again showed the face of profit. In late 1996, Apple incorporated NeXT, and thus Jobs again came into the Apple. In 1997, Gil Amelio resigned from Apple because of loss and Steve Jobs took the role of Interim CEO at Apple. In that year, Apple released two new machines PowerBook G3 and PowerMac G3. Jobs declared an exclusive shift in Apple’s OS direction. In 1999, Apple has introduced its new product iBook. In 2000, Apple announced PowerMac G4 Cube. It was the biggest gamble of Steve Jobs.
2001-2015: In 2001, Apple brought a new line of PowerMacs including a new SuperDrive. In this year, Apple first opened retail stores across the United States. In 2002, Apple released flat panel iMac, iPod, and iPhoto a new software. Apple announced iLife, a bundle of the package of iMovie, iTunes, iDVD, and iPhoto. In 2008, Apple launched the App Store, and within a month the store sold sixty million applications. On January 2010, Apple announced iPad which is compatible with iPhone apps and operating system. In 2011, Apple launched iCloud, an online service for photos, software, music, and files. In 2011, Steve Jobs had died while he was acted as Chairman of Apple. From 2011 to 2012, Apple announced the iPhone 4S and iPhone 5. Apple launched new 3 stores in Tokyo in 2014. Now Apple is upgrading its existing products and services.
Vision and Mission Statement of Apple
Apple has changed their vision and mission statement recently which includes Steve Jobs’ original developed vision and mission statement. Tim Cook, the current CEO of Apple, has introduced the new vision and mission statement of the company which indicates the present position of the company.
Current vision Statement of Apple
The vision statement of Apple focuses on some major issues, such as emphasis on innovation which facilitates Apple’s innovation strategy, simplicity in product design and development, careful selection of new markets, develop unique organisational culture, collaboration with employees, and continued Apple as a global successful business organisation based on excellence and innovation (Rowland, 2015).
Current mission statement of Apple
The mission statement of Apple is unambiguous. The current mission statement of Apple is designed Macs, OS X, iWork, iLife, and professional software. Though iPads and iTunes online store, Apple leads the digital music revolution. Apple is defining the future mobile media though iPhone and App store and computing devices with iPad (Rowland, 2015).
Strengths and weaknesses of Apple
A company operating without any strength and weakness is absolutely impossible. Apple also consists of several strengths and weaknesses.
Strengths
The strengths of Apple are as follows:
ü Strong brand loyalty all over the world.
ü Continuous innovation of new designs and features of products and services.
ü Simplicity in product design and advertisement.
ü Strong brand reputation (Sepherteladze, 2015).
Weaknesses
The major weaknesses of Apple are as follows:
ü The price of Apple products is relatively high compared to other similar products.
ü The operating system is not open to the third party hence the operating system is used only Apple product which limits its software selling (Mueller, 2010).
ü Limited distribution network.
ü Narrow product line.
Major challenges faced by Apple
Apple is facing some major challenges in past several weeks such as
ü Apple wireless earbuds need to upgrade and ensure only one Bluetooth audio device will be connected at a time to a phone.
ü Improving software quality and more user-friendly.
ü Apple is popularly grown as iPhone corporation across the world but the company sales several products and services. So, the company should go beyond the iPhone.
ü Apple is facing challenges from customers about their product price which is high than other companies.
ü Apple business and share price is facing more external pressure (Swartz, 2016).
Apple return on investment
Return on investment measures the cash flow that a company earns against per dollar invested in the company (Brigham and Ehrhardt, 2013). Apple’s return on investment was 23.25% in March 2016, which is lower compared to a previous quarter (Csimarket.com, 2016). In December 2015, it was 25.67%, September 2015 (26.42%), June 2015 (26.46%) and March 2015 (26%). Though the ROI of Apple has decreased, the ROI total ranking has improved to 71 which were 161 in the previous quarter. In 2015, Apple revenue was reached $233.7bn.
As of September 2015, the return of investment of Samsung Electronics was 18.02%. In 2015, the revenue of Samsung was $176.59bn. In 2015, Nokia revenue was $26.22bn and return on investment was 10.58%. In 2015, Microsoft revenue was $93.58bn and return on investment was 9.65%. So, it is seen that Apple is doing well compare to its rival organisation.
Industry analysis
The technology industry is always changing. The landscape of this sector is defined and redefined with frequent changes of new products and innovation. Both hardware and software companies are facing challenges to grow their business in sluggish market condition. Apple, Nokia, Samsung, Microsoft, IBM and HP all are facing slow return on investment in the first quarter of 2016. The changing consumer preferences drive companies to innovate new features at their product line. For instance, Apple introduced iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, iPhone 6, iPhone 6 plus. Samsung released S3, S4, S5, S6, S7. Android is released several version of its operating systems etc. Apple is doing well in shrinking market conditions with their iPhone, iPads, and Macs. Microsoft, as usual, retains their leadership by Microsoft Office and Windows software. Unfortunately, Microsoft does not make well with their Lumia mobile. The consumer market is messing seriously that driving out many competitors from business (Wildstrom, 2014). Sony out of the PC business, Samsung lost their significance in U.S., LG is reducing their PC business and focusing on mobile development, and HP has decided to diversify its printer and PC maker into HP Inc, a new startup. On the other hand, Apple is doing very well with their online iTunes Store and App Store. So, it is clear that product and service innovation are playing vital role in technology industry where Apple is successfully done it.
The uniqueness of Apple that makes its different from others
Undoubtedly, in the technology industry, Apple creates a revolution that no other company can do it before. The company is a pioneer in technology products history. The major reasons that make this company unique are;
ü For any product that Apple develops, people want this product for them.
ü Apple creates a strong feeling of customers to their products. People, who use Apple item once, rarely shift from this brand.
ü The product design and operating are easy.
ü Apple offers unique customer service and in-store experience.
ü Innovation of unique devices such as iPod, iPad and services such as iTunes, iMovies, iPhoto etc.
These make Apple unique than other technology companies.
Apple is one of the global brand names which do revolution in the technology sector. The company is leading in the product and service innovation. Today’s competitive market, it is very difficult to grow a business with premium price tags but Apple is successfully continuing their business with premium price tags. There has no doubt that Steve Jobs brings Apple into the leader board and other CEOs also contribute as well. Now, it is the time to see how long Apple can hold their leadership in technology sector.
References
Brigham, E. and Ehrhardt, M. (2013) Financial Management. 14th Edition. Mason: Cengage Learning
Csimarket.com (2016) Apple Inc ROI per quarter. [Online]. Available at: http://csimarket.com/stocks/AAPL-Return-on-Investment-ROI.html (Accessed: 17 May 2016).
Elmer, P. (2016) Amazon now has twice as many employees as Apple. [Online]. Available at: http://fortune.com/2016/02/08/apple-amazon-hiring-spree/ (Accessed: 16 May 2016).
Mueller, J. (2010) Apple-strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. [Online]. Available At: http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2010/06/07/apple-strengths-weaknesses-opportunities-threats.aspx (Accessed: 17 May 2016).
Rowland, C. (2015) Apple’s vision statement and mission statement. [Online]. Available at: http://panmore.com/apple-mission-statement-vision-statement (Accessed: 17 May 2016).
Sepherteladze, S. (2015) Apple SWOT analysis with info graphics. [Online]. Available at: https://inevitablesteps.com/swot-analysis/apple-swot-analysis/ (Accessed: 17 May 2016).
Swartz, J. (2016) Apple faces challenges from every flank. [Online]. Available at: http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2016/01/20/apple-enters-earnings-season-facing-challenges-every-flank/78037798/ (Accessed: 17 May 2016).
Wildstrom, S. (2014) The computer struggles Apple vs. the industry. [Online]. available at: https://techpinions.com/the-computer-struggles-apple-vs-the-industry/36227 (Accessed: 17 May 2016).
Macrumors.com (2016) Apple Stores. [Online]. Available at: http://www.macrumors.com/roundup/apple-retail-stores/ (Accessed: 16 May 2016).
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