Apple’s best practice in margin control

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The power of margin decision

Looking back 1996, apple is in the crisis of low gross margin of 9.8%. In 1997, Jobs returned to Apple as CEO after the company’s acquisition of NeXT. Timothy Donald Cook joined Apple in March 1998 as a senior vice president for worldwide operations, and then served as the executive vice president for worldwide sales and operations. He was made the chief executive on August 24, 2011, prior to Jobs’ death in October of that year. 

Appleperformance Min
Apple1996financials 1

https://d1lge852tjjqow.cloudfront.net/CIK-0000320193/4e62e8f8-f9b6-4593-ad38-2ec2917d1b06.pdf

Targeted production make sales efficient

There was 350 products in 1995 generating US$11,062 million , which had gross margin of 25.8% and 14.3%(US$1,583M) of selling admin cost. Whereas in 1999, there is only 10 products generating US$6,134M with US$996M of admin cost(declined 38.1%). Targeted production did not change the gross margin of production but that totall changed efficiency of selling.

Apple1999financials

https://d1lge852tjjqow.cloudfront.net/CIK-0000320193/a5bc2fa9-0c1f-4ea1-8ba7-7c0cedbd5482.pdf

When apple’s revenue came back to >US$10 billion in 2005, gross margin was still controlled around 29%, selling cost is 

Apple2005financials

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/q405fin_statements.pdf

With the Internet spreading linke wildfire and reaching every part of our daily life, more and more traffic is directed to websites in search for information.

Apple2007financials

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/q407fin_statements2.pdf