Apple stock has declined more than 17% since July 20. In fact, its share prices have gone down 9.36% since the beginning of this month. The shares have gone south in five of the last six months. As concerns mount over the iPhone sales, there is little reason the stock would go higher in 2016, says Mad Money host Jim Cramer. The Cupertino company doesn’t have large streams of high-margin, recurring revenues to offset a slowdown in iPhone sales.
If Jim Cramer were Apple CEO
Cramer says Tim Cook has been doing an incredible job. But if Cramer were in Tim Cook’s shoes, he would buy four companies to create a large stream of recurring revenues that may prop up its stock next year. “Honestly, it makes so much sense I can’t believe they haven’t thought of it themselves,” he said. The first company he would buy is Harman International Industries, which is the “brains of almost every major car brand on the road.”
Harman is currently valued at around $6 billion, which is “no longer expensive,” said Cramer. Apple’s CarPlay needs to partner with more companies. For less than $10 billion, Harman would give the Cupertino company the “biggest recurring revenue stream” in the Internet of Things (IoT) for the auto industry.
Pandora, Fitbit and Verifone on Cramer’s list
The second company Cramer says Tim Cook should buy is Pandora. For less than $4 billion, Apple could “own the music business” by acquiring Pandora. The third company in Cramer’s purchase list is Fitbit, which would be quite expensive. Apple may have to shell out $8 billion to acquire Fitbit. But then it will own the high-end smartwatch business as well as low-end health & fitness category.
The fourth company is San Jose-based electronic payment solutions firm VeriFone. The company reported an average quarterly result earlier this month, and is now “just sitting there waiting to be acquired.” Buying these four companies wouldn’t cost Apple more than $25 billion. That’s a small amount for a company sitting on $203 billion cash pile.
