Apple (AAPL) just had the biggest cash year in its history, and it didn’t need to build a fleet of AI data centers to get there.
The iPhone maker generated about $136 billion in free cash flow — the cash left over after running the business and paying for buildings and equipment — in its fiscal year ended in September, according to its results Monday. That’s up about 38% from a year earlier and well above its previous record of about $111 billion in 2022.
It’s also roughly twice what Microsoft (MSFT), Meta (META), Alphabet (GOOGL) and Amazon (AMZN) made combined over their latest four quarters, by Yahoo Finance calculations.
The difference is the shopping list.
Those four companies spent more than $600 billion on capital expenditures over the past four quarters, much of it on AI chips and the data centers to house them. Apple spent about $9 billion in its fiscal year. That’s down nearly 30% from a year earlier.
That bill is now showing up in their cash. Amazon has burned through about $42 billion over the past year, a record. Alphabet’s free cash flow turned negative in the third quarter, and the stock just had its worst month ever. Meta’s went negative for the first time since 2012.
Apple, meanwhile, brought in about $145 billion from its operations on record revenue of about $479 billion.
“We generated $28 billion in operating cash flow during the quarter, allowing us to return $28 billion to shareholders,” CFO Kevan Parekh said in the release.
For the full year, Apple handed back about $102 billion through buybacks and dividends. Even that couldn’t keep up, so the pile kept growing. Net cash — cash and investments minus debt — rose to about $57 billion from about $34 billion a year earlier.
The September quarter was the slow one. Operating cash flow came in slightly below a year ago.
Wall Street has noticed. Apple has become the market’s hedge against the AI trade, and the stock was up about 25% this year through Nov. 2. Amazon, Microsoft, Meta and Alphabet ranged from a loss of about 11% to a gain of about 6%.
Apple isn’t sitting out AI. Parekh said on the call that Apple will “significantly increase our overall investments in AI,” mostly through research and development. He also said the cloud costs of running its new Siri will show up in what it spends to deliver its services. Asked whether Apple’s spending was cooling after a heavy year, Ternus didn’t budge. “We feel confident that we’re spending what we need to spend to achieve our roadmap,” he said.
Internal AI tools helped analyze interview transcripts, research, and draft this post. Humans reviewed, edited, and fact-checked this post before publication.
Jared Blikre is the global markets and data editor for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on X at @SPYJared or email him at [email protected].
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Source: finance.yahoo.com
