Tim Cook is in for a treat. A filing submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has just revealed that the 58-year-old CEO of Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) has raked in an impressive $15.7 million in 2018. However, the Cupertino giant itself seems to be in muddy waters at the moment. In that pretext, was it wise to award their CEO with as much money as they did? Let us analyse the development in a little more detail.
Details of Apple’s paycheque
As revealed earlier, Apple awarded their CEO with a paycheque of $15.7 million for all his work in fiscal 2018. This consists of his base salary of $3 million with an additional bonus of $12 million. The rest of the $680,000 comes under the ‘other compensations’ category. This includes privileges such as private air travel and security.
This represents a considerable increment of 22% for Tim Cook in relation to his paycheque last year. In 2017 and 2016, he was awarded a total of $12.8 million and $8.7 million for his services respectively.
Apple’s Justification
When asked about the paycheque and the hefty bonuses, Apple pointed towards their strong performance in sales in fiscal 2018, ended on October 30 last year. To go into figures, the company has achieved a net sale value of $265.6 billion along with an operating income of $70.9 billion. Furthermore, this represented a Year-on-Year increase of 16%, something which exceeded the annual cash intensive program goals that they had set for the year.
However, are things really as rosy as the people at Apple claim it to be?
Apple’s Fall in Value
Apple hasn’t been having the purplest of patches recently. It was only last week that the Cupertino giant cut down on its revenue estimates for fiscal Q1 2019 from last year. When asked about the decrease, Tim Cook blamed it on fewer iPhone upgrades.
But this isn’t the only crack that the 58-year-old is trying to paper over. Ever since Apple became the first publicly traded US company to reach the trillion dollar valuation in August of 2019, its shares have either stagnated or declined. In fact, in a time period spanning between October and December last year, Apple is said to have lost a colossus $452 billion in market capitalisation! To put things into perspective, this loss alone eclipses the individual market values of tech mammoths like Facebook and J.P. Morgan.
Rather unsurprisingly, since October of last year, Apple’s shares have fallen by a massive 39.1%. This has also partly got to do with their disappointing sales of their new iPhone models last year as well. Hence, the subsequent predictions for iPhone sales aren’t very impressive either. This is also touted to be one of the major reasons behind Apple refusing to reveal its individual device sale statistics anymore. With the quantity and quality of opposition that has now entered the competition, things are only going to get more difficult for Apple.
Plenty to Look Forward To
Despite all the downsides pointed above, Apple is in a better position than most companies around. Even after the number of losses that it incurred, Apple is still fourth in the list of biggest companies by market capitalisation. The ones above it include Amazon, Microsoft and Google parent Alphabet. Hence, it is completely in their hands as to how they plan on turning things around. And judging by their track record, they won’t just be giving up their market positions succumbing to pressure anytime soon.
