Hmmm. This is the best argument I’ve ever heard for not using Apple products (besides the overinflated prices). Being flush with cash is probably why the CEO says he doesn’t care about the ROI (return on investment) and won’t make the costs transparent per a shareholder request. Seems like a sensible business request to me.
Some headlines/screencaps. FORTUNE magazine:
More: http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2014/03/01/apple-cook-shareholders-sustainability/
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The Mac Observer:
More: http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/tim-cook-soundly-rejects-politics-of-the-ncppr-suggests-group-sell-apples-s
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Press release from NCPPR:
Tim Cook to Apple Investors: Drop Dead
Apple CEO Tim Cook tells Investors Who Care More About Return on Investment than Climate Change: Your Money is No Longer Welcome
As Board Member Al Gore Cheers the Tech Giant’s Dedication to Environmental Activism, Investors Left to Wonder Just How Much Shareholder Value is Being Destroyed in Efforts to Combat “Climate Change”
Free-Market Activist Presents Shareholder Resolution to Computer Giant Apple Calling for Consumer Transparency on Environmental Issues; Company Balks
Cupertino, CA / Washington, D.C. – At today’s annual meeting of Apple shareholders in Cupertino, California, Apple CEO Tim Cook informed investors that are primarily concerned with making reasonable economic returns that their money is no longer welcome.
The message came in response to the National Center for Public Policy Research’s shareholder resolution asking the tech giant to be transparent about its environmental activism and a question from the National Center about the company’s environmental initiatives.
“Mr. Cook made it very clear to me that if I, or any other investor, was more concerned with return on investment than reducing carbon dioxide emissions, my investment is no longer welcome at Apple,” said Justin Danhof, Esq., director of the National Center’s Free Enterprise Project.
Danhof also asked Apple CEO Tim Cook about the company’s green energy pursuits. Danhof asked whether the company’s environmental investments increased or decreased the company’s bottom line. After initially suggesting that the investments make economic sense, Cook said the company would pursue environmental goals even if there was no economic point at all to the venture. Danhof further asked if the company’s projects would continue to make sense if the federal government stopped heavily subsidizing alternative energy. Cook completely ignored the inquiry and became visibly agitated.
Danhof went on to ask if Cook was willing to amend Apple’s corporate documents to indicate that the company would not pursue environmental initiatives that have some sort of reasonable return on investment – similar to the concession the National Center recently received from General Electric. This question was greeted by boos and hisses from the Al gore contingency in the room.
“Here’s the bottom line: Apple is as obsessed with the theory of so-called climate change as its board member Al Gore is,” said Danhof. “The company’s CEO fervently wants investors who care more about return on investments than reducing CO2 emissions to no longer invest in Apple. Maybe they should take him up on that advice.”
“Although the National Center’s proposal did not receive the required votes to pass, millions of Apple shareholders now know that the company is involved with organizations that don’t appear to have the best interest of Apple’s investors in mind,” said Danhof. “Too often investors look at short-term returns and are unaware of corporate policy decisions that may affect long-term financial prospects. After today’s meeting, investors can be certain that Apple is wasting untold amounts of shareholder money to combat so-called climate change. The only remaining question is: how much?”
The National Center’s shareholder resolution noted that “[s]ome trade associations and business organizations have expanded beyond the promotion of traditional business goals and are lobbying business executives to pursue objectives with primarily social benefits. This may affect Company profitability and shareholder value. The Company’s involvement and acquiescence in these endeavors lacks transparency, and publicly-available information about the Company’s trade association memberships and related activities is minimal. An annual report to shareholders will help protect shareholder value.”
Apple’s full 2014 proxy statement is available here. The National Center’s proposal, “Report on Company Membership and Involvement with Certain Trade Associations and Business Organizations,” appears on page 60.
The National Center filed the resolution, in part, because of Apple’s membership in the Retail Industry Leaders Association (RILA), one of the country’s largest trade associations. In its 2013 “Retail Sustainability Report,” RILA states: “Companies will often develop individual or industry voluntary programs to reduce the need for government regulations. If a retail company minimizes its waste generation, energy and fuel usage, land-use footprint, and other environmental impacts, and strives to improve the labor conditions of the workers across its product supply chains, it will have a competitive advantage when regulations are developed.”
“This shows that rather than fighting increased government regulation, RILA is cooperating with Washington, D.C.’s stranglehold on American business in a misguided effort to stop so-called climate change,” said Danhof. “That is not an appropriate role for a trade association.”
For even more information on RILA, read “The Retail Industry Leaders Association (RILA): A Cartel that Threatens Innovation and Competitiveness,” by National Center Senior Fellow Dr. Bonner Cohen.
“Rather than opting for transparency, Apple opposed the National Center’s resolution,” noted Danhof. “Apple’s actions, from hiring of President Obama’s former head of the Environmental Protection Agency Lisa Jackson, to its investments in supposedly 100 percent renewable data centers, to Cook’s antics at today’s meeting, appear to be geared more towards combating so-called climate change rather than developing new and innovative phones and computers.”
After Danhof presented the proposal, a representative of CalPERS rose to object and stated that climate change should be one of corporate America’s primary concerns, and after she called carbon dioxide emissions a “mortal danger,” Apple board member and former vice president Al Gore turned around and loudly clapped and cheered.
“If Apple wants to follow Al Gore and his chimera of climate change, it does so at its own peril,” said Danhof. “Sustainability and the free market can work in concert, but not if Al Gore is directing corporate behavior.”
“Tim Cook, like every other American, is entitled to his own political views and to be an activist of any legal sort he likes on his own time,” said Amy Ridenour, chairman of the National Center for Public Policy Research. “And if Tim Cook, private citizen, does not care that over 95 percent of all climate models have over-forecast the extent of predicted global warming, and wishes to use those faulty models to lobby for government policies that raise prices, kill jobs and retard economic growth and extended lifespans in the Third World, he has a right to lobby as he likes. But as the CEO of a publicly-held corporation, Tim Cook has a responsibility to, consistent with the law, to make money for his investors. If he’d rather be CEO of the Sierra Club or Greenpeace, he should apply.”
“As in the past, Cook took but a handful of questions from the many shareholders present who were eager to ask a question at the one meeting a year in which shareholder questions are taken,” added Ridenour, “leaving many disappointed. Environmentalism may be a byword at Apple, but transparency surely is not.”
The National Center’s Free Enterprise Project is a leading free-market corporate activist group. In 2013, Free Enterprise Project representatives attended 33 shareholder meetings advancing free-market ideals in the areas of health care, energy, taxes, subsidies, regulations, religious freedom, media bias, gun rights and many more important public policy issues. Today’s Apple meeting was the National Center’s third attendance at a shareholder meeting so far in 2014.
The National Center for Public Policy Research is an Apple shareholder, as are National Center executives.
The National Center for Public Policy Research, founded in 1982, is a non-partisan, free-market, independent conservative think-tank. Ninety-four percent of its support comes from individuals, less than four percent from foundations, and less than two percent from corporations. It receives over 350,000 individual contributions a year from over 96,000 active recent contributors.
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h/t to “cincinatuschili”
UPDATE: Yes, he must have.
@wattsupwiththat Wonder if he's forgotten about all those coal fired power stations running his Chinese factories?
— Karl Bentley (@bentleykarl) March 2, 2014
Poptech
Haha, nice …an actual reason to buy an iPhone, just for your app.
Aw shucks Poptech 🙂
Interestingly there is a reason I didn’t write an Android version. Android make it painful to write an app which is larger than 50Mb, and the smallest I could compress the archive was around 70Mb, even with leaving out all the non email documents.
You have to break the app into chunks, and Google changed their mind midflight about how the chunks should be downloaded, which makes supporting different versions of Android a pain.
That sort of thing happens quite a lot on Android unfortunately – as a software environment, it is less stable than Apple iPhone.
I was considering putting duel boot linux on my macbook pro. Today I saw a series of samsung devices at best buy. Quality was good. Tomorrow, I will make the move and divest myself of the apple operating system. Thanks Tim for helping me make that decision….
There are plenty of fruit-bearing trees in the investment orchard of Wall St. so I can easily do without an APPL, but I hope this lunatic doesn’t Cook the goose that feeds him, because, investment or not, I won’t go without my Macs. Don’t diminish the company that Jobs bequeathed you, numbnuts.
I’ll do one better, I won’t buy their products either. I prefer my PC and Android phone any way.
Betcha the board forces him out over this, and over Gore’s dead body. This is some ferocious bad P.R.
Not only will I get out of Apple stock, which is an obvious move if the company is going to be this stupid, but I will also get out of Apple products. My current iPhone 4S will be my last Apple product, of many that I have purchased going all the way back to my first Apple IIc. I do not want my money going to people who insist on increasing the already heavy hand of government control in order to solve imaginary problems.
I heard Apple was going to invest in Tesla Motors in order to save the World from Global Warming. Because using electricity generated away from the point of consumption and then running off of a battery is supposed to be somehow better for the environment. You would expect a tech company would not be quite so stupid.
Anyway, once a company starts throwing money around for any reason other than improving product and increasing share, they are doomed. Apple had a good run, but nobody can afford to flush money down the toilet.
“With CyanogenMod installed or stock? I don’t own a Nexus 7, so I cannot comment but am incredibly skeptical.”
Stock, and it’s true of any Android device I’ve used. Even something as simple as scrolling a web page is much smoother on the iPad; I’ve yet to see any of the kind of graphics pauses that plague the Android UI.
Now, the Nexus has to process about 4x as many pixels as the iPad, but it has twice as many cores, and each core should be significantly faster.
I bought at $4, before Tim Cook even heard of Apple
I’d say I’d boycott Apple – except that I’ve never owned any Apple product and have absolutely no plans to ever own one. So in a sense, he’s right. He’s alienated a population that doesn’t buy his product anyway.
It’s OK, the Beeb will keep them in business … iTV Tax Funded.
@Paul in Sweden –
There would be no question that any senior executive or member of the board of directors of a publicly traded company who deliberately does things that are contrary to the shareholders’ interest would be guilty of a breach of fiduciary duty. The present climate Nazi administration in DC won’t touch Cook for that, but if there is a change of regime in 2016 he could well be putting himself at risk of prosecution.
As far as investing in Apple goes, no one in their right mind would invest in a company whose leadership puts pursuing a superstition before business due diligence Cook seems to be quite stupid and .careless enough to run Apple into the ground. Caveat investor!
Not only that, but the man’s tirade just positively reeks of the lowest sort of hypocrisy, right up (or actually down) there with that of his idol, Bloody Mess. I can smell it from here.
.. or for another iTake on the matter in iTabloid land.
Sorry, ludicously long link is:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2570000/How-iSpend-licence-fee-Outrage-BBC-lavish-2-5million-4-000-iPhones-400-iPads-800-MacBooks-staff-just-two-years.html
Steve Jobs would never have issued such a statement.
Goldie says:
March 2, 2014 at 4:53 pm
Note to moderator – off topic
The post title includes: “ – get out of Apple stock ”
So, should I sell AAPL because Tim says so, or because the company wastes money, or because the products are less useful than other company’s products? Are the Company’s fundamentals good, or doesn’t that matter? In any case the only AAPL we own is via index funds and it is not sensible to sell that because Tim isn’t aware of how and why Earth’s systems work. Still, I do not own any of the Company’s products.
Your earlier comment, and comments of others, came close to this idea:
In a corporation, the board of directors, as a body, has a fiduciary responsibility for the decisions they make with regard to corporate assets and the rights of stockholders. It does seem that this is the proper issue for Tim and the Board to be aware of.
Or, is it that you think this ought not be a post on WUWT? It does seem to fit this statement from the banner:
“Commentary on puzzling things in life, nature, science, weather, climate change, technology, and recent news –”
It’s your business what phone and computers you use and what shares you buy. But I think some of you have missed the bigger picture.
Apple is generally much more profitable than its competitors. So this question of ROI on everything is, to me, not genuine. I also assume that those who accuse Apple of overpricing are not shareholders.
Apple does things which I disagree with strongly: this Product RED initiative. I do not for one moment accept that HIV has anything to do with AIDS. So what am I going to do, boycott Apple for that? Get real.
As for AGW, I don’t know yet if it’s true but I do believe it’s worth my time investigating, just as I have done with AIDS. I hope that I can learn a lot about climate from people here, even if some of you today have exhibited disappointing attitudes.
If dumb ass Cook serves the market with better longer lasting Apple products I forgive this him for his incredible ignorance but they don’t. The life cycle of their computer products has declined in a terrible way.
So screw them. It’s Hackintosh for me next time.
Steve Jobs was “insanely great”. Tim Cook is half the CEO Jobs was.
Who needs profits when gay rights and global warming (I just drove through zero-F weather in Nebraska!), and whatever else. Let the stock go to zero as long as he does the right thing.
Perhaps he can give condoms to the starving children in Africa which seems to be Bill and Melinda Gate’s response. Various Linux distributions are looking better all the time.
Anyhow, Apple is going down the drain anyway, just like Microsoft and Samsung.
Market share and profits eaten by Google, see the publications at the Boom Bust Blog from Richie Middleton.
From what Pat says (March 2, 2014 at 6:18 pm) it does not appear that Tim Cook actually used the term ‘d*niers’. Did he issue a statement afterward? The reports say he flew off the handle at the question from the conservative group (a perfectly reasonable question for an investor to ask, of course), but nothing beyond that. Reprehensible, to be sure, and maybe even foolish. But not quite what the headline here claims.
/Mr Lynn
Most folks buy their first computer based on what a friend has, or on their work or school requirements. After that, changing from a PC to a Mac, or vice-versa, is like learning a new language. Most people don’t want to learn a new operating system, so they stay with the one they know. As time goes by, they get more and more entrenched.
That is why Apple won’t go out of business. They have a very loyal user base that does not want to re-learn a new OS. And really, Macs are pretty user friendly.
But a CEO like Tim Cook can cause a lot of damage to the brand. The mere fact that he is getting sidetracked into globaloney nonsense shows his lack of focus — a very bad trait in a CEO.
Apple should focus on what it does best. But with Cook at the helm that probably won’t happen. And of course there’s Algore meddling in the background in order to continue enriching himself.
If Cook and Gore were forced out, it would be the best thing for the company’s shareholders and customers. It will be interesting seeing how low Cook’s inept leadership takes the company, before it divests itself of him.
Mac (the irony, heh) nailed it at 5:30pm:
“… a publicly held company refuses disclosure of relevant operating expenses… .
THAT is what will result in a big bite out of Apple. Prehhttty dumb.
*****************************************************************
Attention all Enviroprofiteers:
Your CEO’s short-sighted publicity* stunt = LONG TERM LOSS.
*(authors who want to sell books file frivolous lawsuits for P.R. …..
used car dealers dress like clowns and dance with chimpanzees….
…corporations needing P.R. say outrageous things in public…..)
*****************************************************************
Sorry, Al Baby (and the rest of that investor pool) — no matter HOW loudly you scream about “deniers” and junk like that… WINDMILLS AND SOLAR AND “GREEN” energy stock prices are heading doooowwwwwwnnnn…. into the region to which you appear to be headed someday and where it very well may BE “millions of degrees.”
Bwah, ha, ha, ha, haaaaaaaaaa!
Yeah. The people running Apple are idiots. And I’d be happy to dump my Mac, except for two things: I spent years fighting with Windows to keep it running, got tired of it, went to Mac, and never looked back; and, also spent time with Linux, and it requires even more work and dedication than Windows does. Besides, Microsoft supports global warming, too. It hasn’t told it’s stockholders to get bent, but….
Poptech on March 2, 2014 at 5:42 pm
Well, this is well OT, but no, I’m talking by own experience and I’m not confuced about what’s dead remaining or cached in memory. A terminated task may be cached for later use but is not allowed to remain in regular memory when fully stopped or even crashed. It doesn’t make any sense with a double/multiple set of non active prog’s still remaining in the memory … That’s pure sloppy programming if it’s allowed! (Remember the Atari bomb’s, Amiga Guru Med’s and early Windows Blue Death, all due to “out of memory” problems caused by limited programming skills?)
The original purpose of a software cache is to expand internal memory (DRAM, that was limited due to high cost at the time but still so needed for functionallity) using a temporary file on a harddrive. Today, in proportion the memory cost issue is far gone, also any issues regarding speed, so there’s not much sense caching at high levels. Internal CPU caching is quite enough today! (Using 8GiB internal memory in my own Win7/64-box and along with other tuning, the file cache is turned of, as the cache file is basically symbolic in size even at high loads – no noticable speed difference, with or without.)
There are several examples of app’s incl. those from Google and Samsung, that remain both as terminated in main memory and in the cache pool at the same time for no reason (rebooting solves the memory clogging problem temporarily though). That’s a pure waste of resources! Some of the apps even restarts quietly directly after termination … (Among those apps/bloatware that I don’t need at all and I’ve manage to deactivate, “Memo S” (Samsung) sometimes starts hidden anyway, even twice at the same time … Discovered when the mobile suddenly started to generate disturbing drop outs when listening to music …)
Adding to the multiple-app-copies-in-memory problem, some “programmers” thinks/believes preloading software is a good thing, as it looks like the app starts faster then it actually do – a couple of those apps may clogg the memory quite quickly and causes as a result the system to slow down, sometime quite noticable. You’ll never know ahead if you install any of those, before checking the memory afterwards. The “programmer’s” will not tell you …
So, the limits are not within the hardware, you’ll find them in lacking programming techniques. Not only at app/program level, but also at OS level. Faster CPU’s and cheaper memory isn’t an excuse for sloppy programming (something Microsoft – The Patch Masters – still has not discovered yet …)