private.Apple in Visual Finance

Apple has been posting amazing financial results for several years, and those results are so good that they are hard to describe.

Look at them in the Visual Finance app

With every stack worth $5bn, you can see that its near-25% profitability is giving over $25bn for the year ending September 2011.

On the Balance Sheet, it has almost no long-term debt.

The largest amount of Fixed Assets is over $55bn of long-term Investments - the largest amount of Other Assets is over $15bn of short-term Investments. Add that to the $10bn in Cash on hand, and you've got $80bn in Cash and Securities that just seems to be sitting there.

Their Return On Assets may be high, at over 20%... but if they disposed of all their unnecessary Cash and Securities (say as Dividends), they would be perfectly functional with ROA at an amazing 70%.Given that their 2012 Q1 results (not included here) were hugely better than anything prior, and that they are now the highest-worth company in the world, and that their cash and investments are up around the $100bn mark now... all I can say is that Steve Jobs' vision paid off, and CEO Tim Cook is an operational genius.

But what is Apple going to do with that much spare cash? Apple doesn't have a culture of buying things... but it doesn't have a culture of paying dividends, either. The rumor mills are talking about the latter, though.