Apple Will Pump $11 Billion Into Capital Expenditures Next Year
Here’s a noteworthy data point from Apple’s recent 10-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission: The company has budgeted $11 billion in capital expenditures for fiscal 2014 — 57 percent more than the $7 billion it spent in 2013. What is Apple planning to do with all that additional money?
Approximately $550 million of it is budgeted for retail store facilities — some 30 new stores and remodeling of approximately 20 existing ones. The rest — all $10.5 billion of it — is allocated to “other capital expenditures,” specifically “product tooling and manufacturing process equipment, and corporate facilities and infrastructure, including information systems hardware, software and enhancements.”
So Apple continues to invest in its ability to build certain products and components in-house, or in cultivating that ability in its manufacturing partners by outfitting them with tooling equipment and whatnot. It’s also likely pushing money into new data center capacity to bolster its iCloud and iTunes back end; the company is still hard at work building its massive new data centers in the Pacific Northwest and Reno, Nev.
Standard stuff, I suppose. Apple’s just spending quite a bit more money on it than in years past. The company’s capital expenditures budget for fiscal 2010 was just $1.9 billion. Today it’s more than five times that.
Of course, as Carl Icahn would be quick to remind us, it’s not like Apple is short of cash.