Posted on Wednesday, January 19 2011 @ 21:12 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
Apple COO Tim Cook
revealed the company has made a two-year, $3.9 billion deal with three suppliers to secure a "very strategic" component for its products. Last quarter Apple paid out $650 million and this quarter it plans to spend another $1.05 billion on these mystery components.
Here's an interesting little note from Apple's record-breaking Q1 2011 financial sales call: according to CFO Peter Oppenheimer and acting CEO / COO Tim Cook, the company's made a two-year, $3.9 billion deal with three suppliers to secure a "very strategic" component for its products. Cook wouldn't identify what the component was, citing competitive reasons, but he did say the arrangement was much like Apple's famous deals to source iPod flash memory that date back to 2005. According to Tim, "We think that was an absolutely fantastic use of Apple's cash, and we constantly look for more of these, and so in the past several quarters we've identified another area... these payments consist of both prepayments and capital for processes and tooling, and similar to the flash agreement, they're focused in an area that we think is very strategic."
