Ty Cobb was a famous baseball player. Infamous, really. He set 90 Major League baseball records, some of which continue today. He was skillful but also mean; he had a reputation for playing dirty. Cobb was known for spiking other players: sharpening his cleats and sliding into them. Nobody much liked playing against him.
Apple is the Ty Cobb of corporate America. Like Cobb, Apple has set some impressive records. Nine years, a trillion dollars in sales, and almost no taxes paid. Apple risks having a legacy of tainted success and isolation.
The Apple Way
There’s a story I heard about electronics company Sharp. The company was about to go bankrupt and default on some major debt. This put Apple at risk, since Sharp was a major source of Apple’s LCD screens. The story goes that rather than come to Sharp’s aid, Apple instead approached the bankers and offered to buy the factory assets after bankruptcy – for pennies on the dollar of course. Talk about kicking someone when they’re down! True or not, when I share that story with others who have dealt with Apple, they shrug their shoulders and say that they aren’t surprised. That’s the Apple way.
Business is not a popularity contest, but when the winner-take-all, cripple-the-other-guy approach goes too far and begins to damage the economy, it’s time to rein things in.
The issue at hand is the way Apple’s relentless greed has undermined the US economy and damaged its future industrial competitiveness. All so Apple can make $5 more per phone.
After oil and cars, smartphones are the US’ biggest import. Almost $100B of phones was imported in 2014 (per the Census Bureau). Half of them were Apple iPhones.
The trade in smartphones cuts two ways:
- It is singlehandedly keeping afloat the economies of China, Taiwan, Korea and Vietnam.
- The flip side is that it is steadily hurting the US economy, as I’ll show in a moment.
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