Apple should shrink its finance arm before it goes bananas
The world’s biggest firm has a financial arm half the size of Goldman Sachs
It is fashionable to say that tech firms will conquer the financial services industry. Yet in the case of Apple, it seems that the opposite is happening and finance is taking over tech by stealth. Since the death of Steve Jobs, its co-founder, in 2011, the world’s biggest firm by market value has sold hundreds of millions of phones with bionic chips and know-it-all digital assistants. But it has also grown a financial operation that is already, on some measures, roughly half the size of Goldman Sachs.
Apple does not organise its financial activities into one subsidiary, but Schumpeter has lumped them together. The result — call it “Apple Capital” — has $262bn of assets, $108bn of debt, and has traded $1.6trn of securities since 2011. It appears to be run fairly cautiously and is part of a thriving firm, but it still deserves scrutiny. Companies have a history of being hurt by their financial arms; think General Electric (GE) or General Motors (GM).
Apple Capital has lots of responsibilities but three stand out. It invests the firm’s mountain of surplus profits, mainly in “highly rated” instruments (this task seems to fall to Braeburn Capital, a subsidiary in Nevada…
