APPLE ON THE VERGE OF $2 TRILLION MILESTONE BIG TECH IS CAPITALIZING ON THE COVID-19 Spotlight on Innovation Head lines A pple is on the verge of becoming the first
WORKING REMOTELY IS HERE TO STAY Together, the four companies reported revenue of US $206 billion and net income of US $29 billion in the three months ending in late June. T he COVID-19 pandemic is driving compa- nies and organizations to move to the cloud faster than they planned and for some they simply weren’t ready to deal with the security challenges in part because they didn’t have a good understanding of their existing security requirements. B ig Tech earnings surge during pandemic while the rest of the economy slumps. Recent quarterly results from Apple Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc. show the industry is capitalizing on the crisis as locked-down consumers use tech gadgets and the internet for entertainment, social con- nection, shopping, learning and working from their homes. Organizations can’t just ask a cloud provider to put security around workloads, First they have to understand what they’re buying because there’s always a balance between the security the orga- nization gets and the costs. Second is how much sensitive data will move to the cloud and what controls are needed to make it secure. Because of the investment that organizations are having to make to ensure that staff who are off-premises plugging in along with their data are secure we do not see the trend going away in fact, we see it as becoming the new business
GOOGLING MIGHT START TO COST AUSTRALIANS If it reaches $2 trillion, Apple would be the only company other than Saudi Aramco, which is the world’s biggest oil company, to hit this amazing milestone. G oogle recently warned that the Australian government’s plans to make digital giants pay for news content threatens users’ free services in Australia and could hand users’ data to media organizations. $2 trillion American company. Even as other large tech firms have shot higher on robust demand during lockdowns, Apple has outpaced its rivals by delivering strong sales of gadgetry including wearables and tablets, along with new apps and services which have gained ground during the global pandemic. In the past quarter alone ending in June, Apple reported profits rose eight percent to US $11.2 billion and revenues jumped 11 percent to US$59.7 billion. The U.S.-based company’s warning contained what it called an “Open letter to Australians,” and comes a week before public consultations close on Australian draft laws that would make both Google and Facebook pay for news siphoned from commercial media companies. Both Google and Facebook have condemned the proposed legislation, which was released last month and aims to succeed where other coun- tries have failed in making them compensate media businesses for news content.
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JUNE 2020 • SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE
SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE • JUNE 2020
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