http://www.eweek.com/mobile/apples-tim-cook-heading-to-china...
Tim Cook meets with Chinese government to smooth over relations and then immediately Apple announces a capital investment in China, what a major coincidence!
Same with most tech companies actually, just that Apple does very little R&D in China ATM, so investment it is.
Note that while tax reform has broad support from both parties, the exact details of those reforms are fairly divisive.
Outside of the financial sector, they're now one of the world's largest corporate carriers of debt at $69.3 billion. At the pace they're picking up debt, they'll hit $100+ billion in debt in two years, while their annual profit and stock price declines simultaneously (upsetting investors, increasing pressure for greater dividends). Given their position in the smartphone market is in no way guaranteed or a monopoly, it's an extremely dangerous position they're putting themselves into.
Apple would accept a 5% penalty on their pile of cash any day of the week to repatriate it. Their financial situation in the very near future will become such that they start to get threatened with credit downgrades as the debt piles up and their growth keeps going backwards or otherwise stagnates. What they're doing can't continue for more than a few more years before it causes serious problems.
Umm, what? That is nowhere close to a dangerous amount of debt. They're issuing debt because rates are so low that it is advantageous to do so. Free cash flow can easily take care of all their expenses (including dividend).
Bringing back some of the production to the US, which will benefit everybody by getting skills that are exclusively available in Asia onto the continent where most of it originated but now has been perfected and is only available outside the US. I don't live in the US but it's worrisome that we're comfortable with the concentration of EE manufacturing skills in one particular region of the world. Other industries are not like that and have state of the art production in all places of the world.
Everybody, besides Apple, because that means they'd pay more for the same work being done. Actually, they'd get robots to do the building.
One has larger risk but upside.
Regardless, a $1B is not a small chunk of change, even for Apple. Clearly, natural synergies could arise when Project Titan matures. But Apple tightly coupling itself with a rising player in the Chinese tech sector is a smart play (not to mention associating itself with other notable Didi investors like Alibaba). We've seen similar moves by Uber, who took a large investment from Baidu.
Interesting times ahead.