Tim Cook wrote a winning recipe for Apple. business News & more related News Here

Sometimes a company limits its time. Ford and its Model T captured the charming mood of the Roaring Twenties. IBM embodied the techno-optimism of the first computer age in the 1970s. General Electric symbolized the radical capitalism of the 1990s. The company of the moment for most of this century has been Apple. The iPhone, a lucrative gateway to the all-consuming app economy, has been as inspiring to the zeitgeist as big hair was to the 1980s. Similarly, Apple has embraced globalization and especially China as a place to first manufacture gadgets and then sell them.

Tim Cook has been leading this symbol of the digital age and free trade for the last 15 years. His great predecessor Steve Jobs may have dreamed up the iPhone, but it was Mr. Cook who put an iPhone in the pockets of 1.5 billion people, making the Apple logo ubiquitous from San Francisco to Seoul. Apple’s market value has increased 11 times under Mr. Cook’s watch, taking everything into account including dividends, he has put approximately $4.6 trillion in the pockets of Apple shareholders. That’s more than $850 million for each day of his long tenure.

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On April 20, Apple said that this tenure would end in September. Mr Cook’s successor, John Ternes, will have to decide whether this winning formula – smartphones + global supply chains = $1 trillion in cumulative net profit over 15 years – needs to be updated for the age of artificial intelligence (AI) and geopolitical fracture. It’s a tough call. And this matters beyond Apple.

When Mr Cook took over, his strategy was to bet on the future: on technology and the global economy. Technologically, Apple gambled that, as Jobs had envisioned, smartphones would be the dominant interface between people and the digital world. He was proved right. As a result, Mr. Cook himself did not oversee the launch of any products as transformative as the iPhone. AirPods are popular and Apple sells more watches than Switzerland, but these are only smartphone accessories. ICAR’s ambitious idea was quietly scrapped. Who remembers anything about the Vision Pro, other than the $3,500 price tag? But by continually improving the iPhone, expanding the range of phones and selling them in more places, Mr Cook built an empire.

Apple’s dual economic bet on global supply chains and China shows the limits of globalization. By the 2010s, most goods-trade barriers had been removed. Each year countries were exchanging products and services worth about 60% of world GDP, up from about 40% in the 1990s. China went from 10% to 17% of the global economy in 2011, transitioned from tech supporter to consistent leader, and went from four Apple Stores to 50.

Mr. Ternes, an Apple insider for many years, seems intent on sticking to the same approach. The danger is that AI and trade wars will force Apple to bet on the past. It will flourish if building AI models is less lucrative than selling AI applications and the hardware they run on; If trade barriers reconfigure cross-border supply chains rather than destroy them; And if relations between China and the West are strained but not broken.

At present, conservatism is bearing fruit. iPhones can still be “designed by Apple in California – assembled in China” or, increasingly, “in India”. Apple needs to get its AI work together, but avoiding model-building has kept it mostly out of the $3 trillion data-center, which could result in huge losses. Its market cap is not far from its all-time high of $4.2 trillion. It’s easier than ever to see how this could all change. But many elements of the globalized, consumer-centric world that Mr. Cook’s Apple helped create are worth preserving. With luck, they will endure.

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