On October 5, 2011, six years ago, Steve Jobs died. The American, a visionary entrepreneur who revolutionized the world with his patents, left a titan of technology, almost 350 billion dollars in size, in the hands of his partner Tim Cook, who has demonstrated in this period to be a worthy successor to the founder of Apple, taking the company up to the current 792 billion.
Since Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 – he left the company in 1985, despite having founded it 9 years earlier – until he left the company in the hands of Tim Cook, on August 24, 2011, the capitalization of the US firm rose by more than $345 billion.
It was 14 years of growth, in which the company launched, especially since the new millennium, a multitude of innovative products, which in some cases, like the iPhone, have changed the way technology is consumed around the world.
Taking over Jobs was not easy, but Tim Cook, who was offered by Jobs himself a substitute, has proven to be a more than worthy successor, at least, as regards the company’s valuation in the market: while Jobs took 14 years for the company to grow 345 billion, Cook has managed to increase the company’s size by more than 444 billion in just six years, bringing the firm to nearly $800 billion today.
Cook’s strategy was somewhat different from that of Jobs: while the latter was critical of the decision to distribute dividends on the part of the companies, since he considered that it was a sign that the company had run out of ideas, under the command of Cook the company has begun to carry out this practice: the consensus of the market that collects FactSet expects that in 2017 Apple will distribute a dividend of 1.56%, an amount that will grow during the following years, to the 1.91% that is estimated to distribute in 2019.
With Tim Cook as the chief of the firm, the company has just released a new device, the Apple Watch, and the strategy has been based on the iPhone, the company’s hard core revenue, a product in which they have taken more than 10 versions since its creation, and continues to renew year after year.
Of course, there are market analysts who consider that this is beginning to be a weakness for Apple, since there is an excessive dependence on the part of the company to that product, and a long time ago that there is not an invention as innovating as it was the iPhone.
