Apple [stckqut]AAPL[/stckqut] is known for brutal efficiency, regularly killing off features and products that no longer serve its purposes.

So there is irony in the fact investors have taken a similarly ruthless view of Apple itself, penalizing the company heavily ahead of what is expected to be the slowest year on record for its key product: the iPhone. Apple’s share price ended 2015 down 4.6%, marking its first drop in seven years. That selloff looks overdone, even if one accepts the prevailing view that the iPhone 6s won’t sell at a pace anything like that of its predecessor.

Consider that Apple is now the cheapest stock among the 10 largest tech companies in the S&P 500, once its huge net cash pile of $150 billion is excluded. That means Apple is cheaper than other growth-challenged giants like Microsoft [stckqut]MSFT[/stckqut], Oracle, Cisco Systems [stckqut]CSCO[/stckqut] and International Business Machines [stckqut]IBM[/stckqut].

Source: Apple Peeled: Getting Under the Skin of iPhone Worries

carly fiorina photoCarly Fiorina is currently a candidate for President of the United States of America. She is campaigning for the nomination of the Republican Party to run in the general election of 2016. According to her, one of her strengths is her business background. Most notable she speaks of her background as the first CEO of a DOW30 company: Hewlett-Packard [stckqut]HPQ[/stckqut].

This site is purposefully non-political. While I tend to be a conservative and have voted for a Republican candidate more times than not, I do not want this site to reflect my personal political thoughts. I will occasionally point out a law or regulation that is tough on investors or the business community, but success at investing must be an apolitical activity. In fact, I have written that investors should probably ignore politics and political turmoil when investing.

I am writing this article simply to analyze the success of Ms. Fiorina or the lack thereof. I am fairly hard on companies and their management. It takes a lot to make my Watch List, and most companies cannot achieve that level of performance. I doubt that HP would have made that list while Ms. Fiorina was CEO, and it certainly cannot make that list today.

donald trump photoIronically, her record at HP is one of the criticisms of Ms. Fiorina. Donald Trump is famous for criticizing her as a failed CEO, and he often cites the writings of Jeffrey Sonnenfeld. It is virtually impossible to compare the success of Donald Trump as CEO with Ms. Fiorina as CEO since Mr. Trump’s businesses are not public entities while most of Ms. Fiorina’s career has been with public entities. It is possible to dig into Ms. Fiorina and see just how lousy she was as the leader of a massive corporation.

I will point out that there is an incredibly different scale in Ms. Fiorina’s career with Mr. Trump’s career. It is unlikely that in 1999-2005 (the time when Ms. Fiorina was CEO of HP) that Mr. Trump’s combined businesses would have cracked the Fortune 500 in revenue. In comparison, Ms. Fiorina was in the DOW30, which the Dow Jones company creates to give the best representation of the overall health of the stock market. In other words, Ms. Fiorina was in the big leagues while Mr. Trump was making a lot of personal money in the minor leagues.

So how did Carly Fiorina do as CEO?

It is probably best to take a look at her critics. Mr. Trump is fairly light on details, but he cites Mr. Sonnenfeld, so let’s look at his criticisms as revealed in Politico.

  • In the five years that Fiorina was at Hewlett-Packard, the company lost over half its value.
  • During those years, stocks in companies like Apple and Dell rose.
  • Google [stckqut]GOOG[/stckqut] went public, and Facebook [stckqut]FB[/stckqut] was launched.
  • The S&P 500 yardstick on major U.S. firms showed only a 7 percent drop.
  • At a time that devices had become a low margin commodity business, Fiorina bought for $25 billion the dying Compaq computer company, which was composed of other failed businesses.
  • The only stock pop under Fiorina’s reign was the 7 percent jump the moment she was fired following a unanimous board vote.
  • Fiorina countered that she wasn’t a failure because she doubled revenues. That’s an empty measurement.
  • She hasn’t had another CEO position since her time at HP

Let’s look at each of these accusations.

In the five years that Fiorina was at Hewlett-Packard, the company lost over half its value.

This is true and is a great reason that it was probably foolish to purchase the stock of HP in that time period. However, to accurately gauge the failure we must look at the reasonable peer group of HP. I contend that the reasonable peer group was Dell, Apple [stckqut]AAPL[/stckqut], Oracle [stckqut]ORCL[/stckqut], IBM [stckqut]IBM[/stckqut], Cisco [stckqut]CSCO[/stckqut], and EMC [stckqut]EMC[/stckqut]. I choose this group for several reasons. They are all quite large and, for the most part, they got their revenue at that time from either selling personal computers or from selling large and complicated systems to the IT departments of major companies.

Unfortunately, Google Finance only shows a weekly price for that long ago. While Ms. Fiorina joined HP on July 19, 1999, and left on February 9, 2005, those dates are not exactly available on Google Finance. The exact dates may be available on other sources but using Google Finance makes it easy for my readers to play with the dates as well as throw in other comparison companies.

HP comparison chart

 

If we look at the above chart it goes from July 9, 1999, to February 18, 2005. This is a very close approximation to Ms. Fiorina’s joining and departure dates. A quick appraisal shows that only Apple and Dell increased in value during this time frame. The other companies decreased in stock value, and most of them decreased in the same approximate range as HP.

In fact, you can see that several of these companies, including HP, had peak prices shortly after Ms. Fiorina joined HP. Many of the companies had significantly bigger drops than HP during the period. If we move the start date to March 2, 2000, you will see that most of these large enterprise-IT sellers had much larger drops in stock value than HP. Obviously, this was a major challenging time for companies that sold in the same market as HP. Even Apple dropped over 70% by the end of 2000. Remember, Apple at this time was not the amazing gadget, phone and entertainment content seller of today, but instead a computer company that was quite reliant on selling personal computers.Read More →

IBM International Business Machines

Company name International Business Machines Corp.
Stock ticker IBM
Live stock price [stckqut]IBM[/stckqut]
P/E compared to competitors Good

MANAGEMENT EXECUTION

Employee productivity Good
Sales growth Poor
EPS growth Fair
P/E growth Poor
EBIT growth Poor

ANALYSIS

Confident Investor Rating Poor
Target stock price (TWCA growth scenario) $140.82
Target stock price (averages with growth) $184.37
Target stock price (averages with no growth) $185.92
Target stock price (manual assumptions) $165.02

The following company description is from Google Finance: http://www.google.com/finance?q=ibm

International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) is an information technology (IT) company. IBM operates in five segments: Global Technology Services (GTS), Global Business Services (GBS), Software, Systems and Technology and Global Financing. GTS primarily provides IT infrastructure services and business process services. GBS provides professional services and application management services. Software consists primarily of middleware and operating systems software. Systems and Technology provides clients with business solutions requiring advanced computing power and storage capabilities. In October 2013, International Business Machines Corporation acquired Xtify Inc. In October 2013, the Company announced that it has completed the acquisition of The Now Factory, a privately held provider of analytics software that helps communications service providers (CSPs) deliver better customer experiences and drive new revenue opportunities.

 

Confident Investor comments: At this price and at this time, I do not think that a Confident Investor can confidently invest in International Business Machines Corp.

If you would like to understand how to evaluate companies like I do on this site, please read my book, The Confident Investor.

For owners of my book, “The Confident Investor” I offer the following analysis (you must be logged in to this site as a book owner in order to see the following analysis). If you have registered and cannot see the balance of this article, make sure you are logged in and refresh your browser.
[s2If current_user_can(s2member_level1)]
In order to assist you in using the techniques of this book, the values that I used when calculating the Manual pricing above were:

Stock price at the time of the calculation: $179.68

Growth: 0.08

Current EPS (TTM): $14.47

P/E: 12.5

Future EPS Calc: $21.26

Future Stock Price Calc: $265.76

Target stock price: $165.01

I hope that this makes you a better investor. [/s2If]

I recently came across this list on Forbes on the largest 25 tax payers. Forbes does a bit of analysis on each of them. It is probably worth your time to jump over, but I thought I would give the highlights here:

 

Rank of tax expense

Company

Symbol

Effective Tax Rate

1 ExxonMobil XOM 39%
2 Chevron Corporation CVX 43%
3 Apple Inc. AAPL 25%
4 Wells Fargo & Co. WFC 31.2%
5 JP Morgan Chase & Co. JPM 26%
6 Wal-Mart Stores WMT 31%
7 ConocoPhillips COP 51.5%
8 Berkshire Hathaway Inc. BRK 28%
9 IBM IBM 24%
10 Microsoft Corporation MSFT 22.8%
11 Philip Morris International Inc. PM 29.5%
12 Goldman Sachs GS 33%
14 Comcast Corporation CMCS 32%
14 The Procter & Gamble Co. PG 23.5%
15 Johnson & Johnson JNJ 23.7%
16 Intel Corporation INTC 23.6%
17 Occidental Petroleum Corp. OXY 42%
18 UnitedHealth Group UHG 35.9%
19 The Walt Disney Company DIS 32.7%
20 AT&T T 27.8%
21 Oracle ORCL 21.4%
22 The Coca-Cola Company KO 23.1%
23 The Home Depot Inc. HD 37.2%
24 McDonald’s MCD 32.4%
25 Google GOOG 19.4%

CNET recently put out an article discussing the most profitable US corporations. The article shows that even with Apple’s disappointing quarter that caused a major drop in stock price, Apple is still had more income than anyone else. The issue is that the analysts thought that the results were going to be even better, so the analysts were disappointed. When you disappoint analysts, they punish you by saying bad things. I am borrowing the great CNET chart below.

 

Apples disappointing quarter in context chart

 

To this analysis, I would like show how cheap these stocks really are. While I try to not compare the P/E ratio of non-competitors, I think it is valid for this one exercise.

If we look at the P/E and EPS of these companies, it is quite telling how cheap Apple really is among this peer group.

 

Company

Symbol

P/E

EPS

Apple Inc.

AAPL

9.78

44.10

Exxon Mobil Corporation

XOM

9.17

9.69

Microsoft Corporation

MSFT

15.39

1.82

Pfizer Inc.

PFE

22.36

1.26

International Business Machines Corp.

IBM

14.57

14.41

JPMorgan Chase & Co.

JPM

9.64

5.20

Wells Fargo & Co

WFC

10.85

3.36

The Procter & Gamble Company

PG

19.76

3.90

General Electric Company

GE

17.08

1.39

 

It might not be obvious from looking at the above table of values. Looking at P/E as a chart shows that Apple is one of the cheapest stocks by comparing its price to the earnings of the company.

Apple's PE compared to the most profitable companies

 

It really becomes obvious then by looking at the earnings per share in chart format!

Apple's EPS compared to the most profitable companies

 

So if you think that Apple’s days are done, you may want to think again! In fact, the biggest complaint that you can say about Apple is it seems that they are not getting enough shareholder value! 

If you think that IBM is fairly priced for its earnings then it would be realistic that Apple could increase its share price by 50% if you focus on P/E! By looking at Microsoft, you could say that the price could go up 60%! This means that it is likely that Apple has more upside potential than downside risk.

My disclaimer on this site consistently says that I ‘might’ be long any stock I talk about. In this case, I am long on Apple as I write this article. However, as I consistently point out in my book, The Confident Investor, I didn’t pay for those shares! My current Apple holdings are all free.  If you want to know how to get free stock in great companies, I suggest that you read my book. You can purchase my book wherever books are sold such as Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Books A Million. It is available in e-book formats for Nook, Kindle, and iPad.