From records set to supply-demand controversy, Tim Cook opened up about Apple’s business with “Mad Money” host Jim Cramer.
Investors may be buzzing about Tim Cook’s announcement that Apple will invest $1 billion in U. S. manufacturing jobs, but here are five things from the CEO’s Wednesday interview with CNBC ” Mad Money ” host Jim Cramer that may have slipped under your radar:
Cook revealed that to fund Apple’s advanced manufacturing project, Apple will have to borrow $1 billion, so it does not have to pay taxes on its $256 billion it has stashed overseas. The CEO said that both repatriation and comprehensive tax reform would help make sense of this convoluted system.
“If you sell globally, you earn money globally. If you earn money globally, you can’t bring it back into the United States unless you pay 35 percent plus your state tax, ” Cook said. “You look at this and you go, ‘This is kind of bizarre.’ You want people to use this money in the United States to invest more.”
As Apple’s massive developer community grows, Cook said that the company never stops asking itself key questions such as, “How can we empower the next generation of developers? How can we touch even more people? How can we train more people to code so they can pursue their passion?”
When Cramer asked if Cook would ever put money behind this mission, Cook replied:
“We would. We would, and we will, and you’ll be hearing more about that across the summer.”
Aside from Wall Street’s bearishness on iPhone sales, which Cook said were caused by rumors of a new phone coming in late 2017, the company saw growth across the board.
“We had a great quarter. If you get into the numbers just a little bit for a few minutes, the Mac grew 14 percent. This is huge. Services continued this really fast growth. It grew 18 percent year on year and we continue to be on target to be a Fortune 100 company this year with our services business. The Watch almost doubled year on year, ” Cook told Cramer.
During the first quarter of this year, the Apple Watch grew so dramatically that it overtook the struggling Fitbit to become the largest wearable tech vendor .
When Cook mentioned that the iPhone 7 Plus was doing incredibly well in China, seeing double-digit growth year on year, Cramer asked the CEO if the quarter would have looked different had Apple produced more of that smartphone model.
“No, I wouldn’t say that, because I feel that we were in supply-demand balance at the beginning of the quarter, ” Cook replied.
Though Samsung seems to have recovered from its exploding phone scare, Cook was not worried about Apple customers switching to the Galaxy phones.
Instead, the CEO said that Apple actually set records both for how many people switched to Apple from other providers, and for how many people in the world upgraded their phones.
“On the switcher side, we were very pleased that we set a record for switchers outside of China for the first six months of this fiscal year. As you know, we start in October and we just finished the first half in March, ” the CEO explained. “We set a record there and we set a record for upgraders across the world. And so this felt really good.”
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