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Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

You know how everyone jokes that we expect consumers to have 6 months of savings for emergencies, but big corporations start begging for bailout within days of the epidemic?

With $260bil revenue and $55bil net income, Apple’s monthly expenses are around $17bil. That means they need $102bil cash on hand for emergencies.

As someone else mentioned, they’ve experiences near bankruptcy before. Maybe they never wanna be there again.

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I think a comment above pointed this out too, its a bt misleading to add up expenses with 0 revenue for 6 months, can think of all those subscriptions and services to be bringing in revenue even in times of a pandemic when factories get shut and phones and macs are on sold, its difficult to imagine apple bringing in 0 revenue. so $194 billion cash is just way too much, even for emergencies me thinks

I’m sure airlines thought the same. As did hotels and restaurants.

That’s the point of an emergency fund. It’s for when the unthinkable happens.

Croatia for example is a country with a GDP of $63bil. 20% of their whole economy is tourism.

This year tourism is down 90%+. Oops

Airlines, Hotels and Restaurants don't sell services that are necessary for operating the devices they already sold you.

Even if Apple sold zero iPhones next year, they would still collect a lot of revenue from all the App Store Sales and iCloud services.

It would probably take a decade of zero iOS updates and no new iDevices being released to make Apples revenue decline so dramatically.

Yeah maybe, I don’t know what goes on in Apple’s mind. I’m merely pointing out that emergency funds get ridiculously large when you’re a big corporation.

The risk an emergency fund has to guard against is of course offset by your level of diversification of revenue streams. And again, Apple knows better about their situation and risk tolerance than I would.

Emergency funds are designed just for that.

Emergencies.

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