Apple Is America’s Best-Managed Company

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Dec 9, 8:15AM EST

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Apple Is America’s Best-Managed Company — © Mario Tama / Getty Images News via Getty Images

This post may contain links from our sponsors and affiliates, and Flywheel Publishing may receive compensation for actions taken through them.

Key Points

Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL | AAPL Price Prediction) topped a new list of America’s best-managed companies.
However, the tech giant’s future is more cloudy than it has been in years.
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In a new list of Ameria’s 250 Best Managed Companies, Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) was at the top. Shockingly, deeply troubled Intel finished fourth, just behind Microsoft.

The ranking was based on several metrics: 1) customer satisfaction, 2) employee engagement and development, 3) innovation, 4) social responsibility, and 4) financial strength. The yardstick also included 35 data sets. Ratings from 16 third-party sources were included as well. Claremont Graduate University’s Drucker Institute created models to analyze the information. To get the final list, The Wall Street Journal reviewed 842 companies.

The study’s authors noted that “Tech companies were the clear winners in this year’s ranking, having emerged from a downturn that saw them laying off thousands of workers after a period of overhiring.” They added that employees should be treated like customers.

Apple’s run as one of the top tech companies in the world dates back at least to the launch of the iPhone in 2007. Across all its products, it has a global installed base of 2.2 billion. This figure is from Apple.

The huge hardware base allows Apple to drive its “Services” segment. In the most recent quarter, it had revenue of $25 billion, against Apple’s total of $94.9 billion. That makes it the second-place segment after the iPhone, with revenue of $46.2 billion. The Services segment includes, among other things, cloud products, advertising, Apple TV+, and Apple Pay

Apple’s future is more cloudy than it has been in years. The jury is still out on iPhone 16 sales, and unit sales in China, the world’s largest smartphone market, have been challenging. Investors also wonder if each iPhone generation is different enough from its predecessors.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.