Apple Inc. No Longer Top-tech Company for Having ‘Nothing Better to Do’
Apple Inc. continues to reap criticisms with its recently announced stock split.
Speaking with Benzinga, Jarrett Lilien, former president and COO of E*TRADE (NASDAQ:ETFC), said that the announced stock split just means Apple Inc. has nothing better to do.
"Sometimes it just means you've got nothing better to do, A couple years ago I saw Charles Schwab [make] some price changes. To me that just shows such lack of creativity. The market is not asking for lower prices. If that's the best you can do to try and shake it up, you're on empty."
Lilien said that dividends and stock splits may be viewed as similar entities.
"On the other hand, there is the argument to be made for [a company] like Apple that if the stock is really high, and your customers are generally retail and you'd like some of your shareholders to be retail, [it's] not a bad idea to align your stock price so it looks more affordable to your own customer base. I could see it both ways. It does seem like a lack of better things to do. But it also doesn't seem like a terrible idea to have a lower-priced stock so that the customers can also be shareholders."
One of top tech investors, Fred Wilson of New York's Union Square Ventures, believes that Apple Inc will no longer be the top tech company in the world by 2020.
Wilson said that Apple is a company that is "too rooted to hardware."
"I think hardware is increasingly becoming a commodity. Their stuff in the cloud is largely not good. I don't think they think about data and the cloud."
Wilson was speaking at a TechCrunch Disrupt Conference in New York.
He predicted that it will be Google, Facebook "and one that we've never heard of" that will make it to the top three tech companies when the time comes. He had no idea what the number three company will be.
As for Twitter, he predicted it will be "four, five, six, seven ... but I'm not sure it will be number-two [or three]."
As precedent for Apple Inc.'s situation, Wilson took Yahoo as an example.
Yahoo is projected to be excluded from the list to be published in June by Fortune 500.