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on topic since we own a wee bit.

https://www.ft.com/content/1297b0b8-7932-427c-accc...

"As a result, the recent surge in its sales ' and profits ' has come without the need to pour more capital into its operations. Its return on capital employed jumped nearly 20 per percentage points in 2021, to 48 per cent. Last year it leapt again, to around 60 per cent.

That is roughly double the ROCE at Alphabet and Microsoft ' companies often thought of as being founded on a software business model that is inherently superior to that of a 'hardware maker' like Apple."


pretty impressive ROCE.

For those Apple lovers. What's your expected EPS growth rate over the next 10 years?. (Assuming $6 2022 as a starting point)

"For those Apple lovers. What's your expected EPS growth rate over the next 10 years?. (Assuming $6 2022 as a starting point)"


Hard to say. I believe they will shrink the float 2% a year. Prices will go up in general while the average selling price of the iPhone continues to rise. You can see this already with the outsized demand for Pro versions.

Forays into health related spaces and AR are coming. The Apple Car is too speculative to judge.

Analysts seem to be predicting 7.39 in 3 years so that's a run rate of 7.19%pa.

For those Apple lovers. What's your expected EPS growth rate over the next 10 years?. (Assuming $6 2022 as a starting point)

It's possible their biggest (or near-biggest) source of growth in real earnings per share will be buybacks.
They could build out several huge businesses successfully, and it still wouldn't matter much percentage-wise considering the immense scale of what they're doing now.
The fact that the iPhone is the most profitable product in human history by a mile is a high class problem. But it's a problem.

Meaning the biggest single variable in how fast the EPS figure rises might well be how popular the shares are: what the future average valuation multiple is.

In early 2021 they were buying shares at a multiple of 40 on then-recent earnings.
That might well have been a good use of capital, but it's certainly a lot worse than the same dollars spent on the same business at a low multiple.

It's a strange multiplicative effect, hard to get your head around.
A firm with perpetually high multiples will not do so well with huge buybacks because it's a lowish return on that capital: it's a high multiple for a business with a headwind.
Conversely high buybacks for a firm with a forever-cheap share price works wonders--that mere fact makes them a much more attractive investment, worth a higher multiple.
So, other things being equal, a firm doing large ongoing buybacks as their main "expansion capex" is worth a high multiple if it has a low multiple, and vice versa.

Jim

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/app...

Impressive!

The macrotrends link gets the gist correct, but for whatever reason, the way they scrape the data results in an incorrect share count for Apple for each 10K (each 9/30 date). Apple's share count doesn't stop falling and rise all of sudden each fiscal forth quarter. But the data presented in a 10K is a different format from a 10Q so somehow this site is scraping the wrong (not-comparable) figure for each fiscal Q4.

For reference, at 9/30/2022 Apple had 15,943,425,000 shares outstanding.

The most recent share count released (from the proxy) is 15,836,213,000 on 1/9/2023.

I believe the above figures indicate that Apple again slowed their share repurchase activity during a period it was seeing weakness in the business. The most popular iPhone model were supply constrained during the holiday quarter. The previous quarter (fiscal Q4), Apple repurchased over $25 Billion in stock. This looks like fiscal Q1 repurchase slowed from that pace. They have done this in the past when they are seeing a weak quarter. Unfortunately it often has the effect of slowing repurchase activity when the share price is lower and ramping it back up when the share price is higher.

I believe that puts Berkshire at 5.78% for what it's worth.

I've always been a fan of this document that Apple has put out consistently each quarter for a long time:
https://s2.q4cdn.com/470004039/files/doc_downloads...
(this is a pdf from Apple's investor relations website)

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