English 4.0
Bedeutet der Einbruch des Aktienkurses, den Apple-chef Tim Cook mit seinem Schreiben an Investoren Anfang Januar auslöste, den Untergang des Konzerns? Weit gefehlt! Innovationen werden auch in Zukunft sein Fortbestehen im irischen Cork sichern.
The end of Apple’s empire?
Appleocalypse. It’s my word of the year, so far. Appleocalypse is a combination of “Apple”, the name of the multinational technology company headquartered in California, and “apocalypse”, a word from the Bible that originally meant “the destruction of the world” and now means “catastrophe”. The Appleocalypse began on the first working day of this year, when Apple CEO Tim Cook wrote a letter to the company’s investors. Here’s the sentence that caused the controversy: “While we anticipated some challenges in key emerging markets, we did not foresee the magnitude of the economic deceleration, particularly in Greater China.”
In simple English, this means Chinese consumers are buying fewer expensive iphones, and Cook’s letter, which was seen as a warning about future sales, led to the price of shares in Apple dropping by nearly ten per cent. Apple, which was the largest publicly traded company in the US at the end of 2018, was suddenly worth less than Microsoft, Amazon and Google’s parent company, Alphabet, at the start of 2019.
The rise and fall of enterprises and empires is not the kind of thing one usually thinks about while walking around Cork, an old city on Ireland’s southern coast, but the historic street names along the River Lee, which runs through the city centre, tell a fascinating story. Seven Ovens Quay was named after a Dutch trader, Theodore Vansenhoven, and Amsterdam’s Meerdijk reappeared in Cork as the popular Mardyke promenade. Meanwhile, Lavitt’s Quay was named after Joseph Lavitt, a French merchant
“Cork’s historic streets tell a fascinating story”
who had come to Cork in 1690 and made a fortune selling sugar and whisky. These names date back to the business contacts between Europe and Cork in the 18th century, and the business contacts between Cork and Apple in the 21st century update our story in ways that are both global and local.
Walking along Lavitt’s Quay, one comes to Half Moon Street and the Apple office, where some 500 experts work in such key areas as finance. If anyone knows the secrets of the tax deal that helped bring Apple to Ireland, these specialists do. The company has been in Cork since 1980, when it opened a manufacturing facility with 60 staff. It now employs around 6,000 people in Ireland, most of whom work in Cork and who support all aspects of the business. A further 1,000 work remotely in Ireland, 700 of them for Applecare technical support.
One of those Applecare professionals lives near the farmhouse where I grew up, 65 kilometres from Cork city. His country cottage is surrounded by fields dotted with cows and sheep, and he spends his days answering questions from Apple users around the world: “My battery died near the end of the OS X installation. Now, the login screen freezes. What can I do?”
Brian, our Applecare neighbour, accepts that the mobile market is reaching saturation, but he claims that Apple has won the high end of the game. There are 7.7 billion people on earth: five billion have a mobile phone and more than three billion of them have a smartphone. Apple has sold almost 900 million of those.
There is no Appleocalypse, he says. It’s just smartphones maturing. As we look across the fields towards the Galty Mountains, I ask if Apple can innovate its way to some radically new kind of 5G device.
“Chalk it down!” Brian says. That’s Corkonian for “certainly”.
“There is no Appleocalypse, according to our Applecare neighbour”