by Power80770M
AAPL
People love to say that AAPL has $100B+ in cash, but they actually have $40B in cash equivalents, and $67B in “marketable securities.” What are “marketable securities”?
From their latest 10-Q:
The maturities of the Company’s non-current marketable debt securities generally range from one to five years.
Of this $67B in marketable securities, nearly $55B is non-current corporate debt (Source: “Note 3 – Financial Instruments”).
Is AAPL a Boeing debt holder? A GE debt holder? A United Airlines debt holder? We don’t know.
AMZN
From their latest 10-K, $36B in cash equivalents, plus $12B in “corporate debt securities.” We don’t know anything about the maturities of those corporate debt securities.
GOOG
From the latest 10-K: $18B in cash equivalents, $101B in marketable securities, $13B in non-marketable securities (investments in unicorns?) on the balance sheet.
What are “marketable securities”?
As we view these securities as available to support current operations, we classify highly liquid securities with maturities beyond 12 months as current assets under the caption marketable securities on the Consolidated Balance Sheets.
Cash equivalents and marketable securities are comprised of time deposits, money market funds, highly liquid government bonds, corporate debt securities, mortgage-backed and asset-backed securities and marketable equity securities.
No additional breakdown of the marketable securities is provided. Are they mostly corporate debt? Treasuries? We don’t know.
MSFT
Latest 10-Q seems rather tame: $8.9B in cash equivalents, $125B in short-term investments, $100B of which is Treasuries and $7B is corporate debt.
tl;dr – what do these big tech behemoths really have on their balance sheets?