Horace Dediu on Apple’s Cash Holdings

Horace Dediu points out that many financial reporting services are overlooking over $20 billion in Apple’s assets:

To illustrate, the following chart shows the total cash equivalents for the company. The orange colored bars represent long-term securities. If they are excluded, an investor may conclude that Apple’s cash has been declining since 2008 when the opposite is true. The company is shifting an increasingly larger proportion of its holdings to long-term (but fully liquid) securities.

If Dediu’s Asymco isn’t on your daily-read list or in your RSS subscriptions, I highly recommend it. He’s been killing it. E.g., check out this comment he wrote yesterday, positing that today’s Android handsets are iPhone knock-offs, along the same lines as the various BlackBerry knock-offs that were popular a few years ago, like the Samsung Blackjack, Motorola Q, and HTC Dash.

★ Tuesday, 3 August 2010