Apple Inc penalized chief executive officer Tim Cook for the iPhone maker’s first sales slump in 15 years with a 15 percent pay cut.
Cook still did extremely well, with a compensation package valued at US$8.7 million for Apple’s fiscal year that ended on Sept. 24, according to a regulatory filing made on Friday. However, the amount was down from nearly US$10.3 million in the prior year.
The Cupertino, California, company cited a downturn in Apple’s revenue and operating profit as the main reason it cut the pay of Cook and its other top executives.
Photo: AP
Apple’s revenue dropped 8 percent to US$216 billion, while its operating profit declined 16 percent to US$60 billion. That was mainly because it sold fewer iPhones for the first time since the device came out in 2007.
It also marked the first time that Apple’s annual revenue decreased since 2001, which was just before the company’s late cofounder and chief executive Steve Jobs unveiled the iPod. That digital music player set the stage for the iPhone and iPad.
Investors have expressed concerns that Apple has become too dependent on the iPhone, a nagging worry that has been aggravated by the company’s inability to introduce another breakthrough product since Jobs’ death in 2011. Cook, Jobs’ anointed successor, had hoped Apple would have another huge hit with a smartwatch unveiled in 2014, but that device has only had moderate success.
Apple’s regulatory filing revealed that the company was bracing for a sales drop last year, although not quite as steep as what occurred. The compensation committee for Apple’s board of directors had established a revenue goal of US$224 billion for last year, which would have been a 4 percent decline from the previous year.
The company expected sales to rebound during the holiday shopping season on hopes that consumers would be snapping up its latest iPhones, the 7 and 7 Plus. Apple is to release its quarterly results that include the holidays later this month.
Separately, Canada’s competition watchdog on Friday announced that it was closing its two-year investigation into whether Apple’s contracts with local wireless carriers illegally stifled competition when it introduced the iPhone.
The probe, opened in December 2014 by the Competition Bureau, failed to find sufficient evidence that the tech giant had engaged in anti-competitive behavior.
“The bureau did not find sufficient evidence to conclude that Apple has engaged in an abuse of dominance under the Competition Act,” the agency said.
The watchdog was investigating whether the contracts were affecting wireless carriers’ incentives to push iPhones over other brands.
Additional reporting by AFP
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the