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2021-09-14

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Apple App Store: The Tide Is Turning

Summary A US Federal District Court judge has ruled mostly in Apple’s favor in their case with Epic

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·2021-09-14
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{"i18n":{"language":"en_US"},"data":{"magic":2,"id":886111372,"tweetId":"886111372","gmtCreate":1631574877196,"gmtModify":1676530576931,"author":{"id":3575098313311401,"idStr":"3575098313311401","authorId":3575098313311401,"authorIdStr":"3575098313311401","name":"auahau","avatar":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/51a7e0e9a14e5faa1ff39d0755eb5e92","vip":1,"userType":1,"introduction":"","boolIsFan":false,"boolIsHead":false,"crmLevel":2,"crmLevelSwitch":0,"individualDisplayBadges":[],"fanSize":20,"starInvestorFlag":false},"themes":[],"images":[],"coverImages":[],"extraTitle":"","html":"<html><head></head><body>wow</body></html>","htmlText":"<html><head></head><body>wow</body></html>","text":"wow","highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":4,"commentSize":1,"repostSize":0,"favoriteSize":0,"link":"https://ttm.financial/post/886111372","repostId":1171919128,"repostType":4,"repost":{"id":"1171919128","pubTimestamp":1631547161,"share":"https://www.laohu8.com/m/news/1171919128?lang=&edition=full","pubTime":"2021-09-13 23:32","market":"us","language":"en","title":"Apple App Store: The Tide Is Turning","url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=1171919128","media":"seekingalpha","summary":"Summary\n\nA US Federal District Court judge has ruled mostly in Apple’s favor in their case with Epic","content":"Summary\n<ul>\n <li>A US Federal District Court judge has ruled mostly in Apple’s favor in their case with Epic Games.</li>\n <li>Despite that, and in conjunction with a recent settlement with Japanese regulators, Apple will be getting rid of their anti-steering rule. This is a bigger change than people think.</li>\n <li>The threat to Apple doesn't end with the Epic trial. There are bigger threats coming from the executive and legislative branches in the US, and regulators in Europe and Asia.</li>\n</ul>\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/323e8503a813d4996ee819f5591992b8\" tg-width=\"1536\" tg-height=\"1024\" width=\"100%\" height=\"auto\">Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images News\nIt Does Not End Here\nFor&nbsp;some time now, I&nbsp;have been warning&nbsp;that&nbsp;antitrust law was about to change, and these changes would not be favorable to Apple(NASDAQ:AAPL), and that investors need to take these threats seriously. In every one of these attempts, I was rebuffed in the comments by many Apple shareholders telling me that these fears and warnings were overblown. “Long and strong AAPL!” cheerleading seems to be popular.Confirmation bias&nbsp;is a strong thing, and you should fight it every single day.\nMy last attempt was&nbsp;less than two weeks ago, and I was similarly dismissed, and even accused of being a short-selling tout to boot. That last suggestion is pretty funny to anyone who has had to listen to me drone on about Apple stock the last 16 years. The consequence of those 16 years is that I have a lot of Apple stock, so I take things like this very seriously.\nFriday’s decision in Epic v. Apple had one part very bad news for Apple, but mostly a rejection of Epic’s main claim — that iOS is a market unto itself. But the bigger threat continues to be from Congress, where they can change the law in a single session. The House has already passed several bipartisan bills through committee, and three of them seem to have pretty wide support with the rest of the House. A narrower, but just as damaging companion bill is about to start working its way through the Senate. Keep your eyes on Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Mike Lee of Utah.\nThen we have regulatory action in the EU, Apple’s second most important region, where antitrust enforcers are siding with Spotify(NYSE:SPOT)in their dispute over in-app payments. Apple has already settled with Japan over their anti-steering rules. South Korea is forcing Apple and Google(NASDAQ:GOOGL)(NASDAQ:GOOG)to allow third-party in-app payments. China is a black hole of regulatory mystery.\nThe tide is turning on Apple on this issue. If you think this begins and ends with the Epic case, you haven’t been paying attention.\nRight now the threat is confined to App Store, but this is the end of the beginning, not the beginning of the end. This new antitrust movement may come for other parts of Apple, like the other pillar of their fast-growing Services segment, AppleCare, and even dig deeper into the way Apple likes to do business.\nWhat The Ruling Says\nJudge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers hewed very closely to existing law, because that’s what usually happens in District Court, the lowest level of the federal system. She mostly had bad news for Epic, and targeted bad news for Apple.\nThe case rested on how the court defined the “relevant market” in question. Epic wanted it to be iOS, a market unto itself because of the high walls Apple builds around the ecosystem. Judge Rogers rejected that novel claim pretty handily. But she also rejected Apple’s definition: all gaming transactions, including PCs and consoles. She settled on mobile gaming transactions, so essentially the iOS-Android duopoly of mobile gaming transactions.\nHere is the meat of the decision that follows from that:\n<blockquote>\n Given the trial record, the Court cannot ultimately conclude that Apple is a monopolist under either federal or state antitrust laws. While the Court finds that Apple enjoys considerable market share of over 55% and extraordinarily high profit margins, these factors alone do not show antitrust conduct. Success is not illegal…\n</blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n Nonetheless, the trial did show that Apple is engaging in anticompetitive conduct under California’s competition laws. The Court concludes that Apple’s anti-steering provisions hide critical information from consumers and illegally stifle consumer choice. When coupled with Apple’s incipient antitrust violations, these anti-steering provisions are anticompetitive and a nationwide remedy to eliminate those provisions is warranted.\n</blockquote>\nThe most important thing to note here is that the problem for Apple is California law, not federal law. Federal law changing is where the real threat remains, and we are already well into that process.\nJudge Rogers ruled that Apple has to get rid of their anti-steering rules. App developers will now be allowed to inform users of less expensive options on their website, with a link. We’ll talk about the implications in a moment. Apple charges developers 30% for in-app payments, and the first year of in-app subscriptions (15% thereafter). In-app payments and subscriptions are substantially where all of App Store revenue comes from, about 28% of the Services segment and 5.4% of all revenue in calendar 2020.\nAlso, in the category of rounding errors, Epic has to pay Apple the $3.6 million they owe them when they breached their contract. That’s about 0.001% of Apple’s 2021 top line.\nEpic’s Game\nIf you read&nbsp;my first article&nbsp;about the trial from when the pre-trial filings dropped, you may notice that I was a bit confused about what precisely Epic’s game was here. The foundation of their entire argument — that iOS was a market unto itself — was novel, to say the least. At least one of their lawyers must have informed them of the low likelihood of success on their main claims. Moreover, they burned a lot of pages on arguments not central to their case, but seem more geared towards tarnishing Apple’s reputation.\nMy current understanding is that this case was a publicity stunt. What’s more, it worked. The point was to get this issue into the public conversation. Here I am writing about it, and here you are reading about it. But more importantly, the tide is turning in Washington, and I think the issues raised by this trial have accelerated that.\nThe Anti-Steering Rule\nLike many of the App Store rules, the anti-steering rule was part of a multi-year whack-a-mole process where developers tried to find ways to cut out Apple, and Apple closed those holes. Apple fought very hard to keep this rule, but now seems to be capitulating. They settled with Japanese regulators recently on the anti-steering rules as it applied to media subscription apps, and applied the settlement to the rest of the world as well, maybe in anticipation of this ruling. With the Epic ruling, the anti-steering rule is gone.\nWhen a game developer like Epic sells their virtual currency on the App Store, they have a 30% payment fee. When they make the same transaction on their website, it is probably under 3%. This was always what this was about. Epic wanted to have their own in-app payment system to supersede Apple’s, without the friction of sending people to the website. Judge Rogers rejected that, but gave Epic a partial victory by banning Apple’s anti-steering rules.\nThe anti-steering rules prevented app developers from having text and links to their own much less expensive in-app payments or subscriptions on their websites. This is a real loss for Apple, and puts the whole structure of the two most lucrative payment methods in the App Store at risk.\nLet’s say a gaming company pays a 2.5% processing fee on their website. That means they have 27.5 percentage points of marketing to play with. They could give that entire 27.5% to users in the form of a rebate or freebies. It certainly increases friction to have to leave a game you're having fun with, but if there is a big, friendly, dark-patterned button that says “Want free money?” I think a lot of people would tap that button. What’s more, they get to book the same amount in revenue, and stick the cost down in sales and marketing.\nThat’s just one example of how companies may decide to go with this. That’s a lot of margin to play with. The reason Apple had this rule in the first place is that they feared someone would find the magic formula that would provide more revenue by eschewing in-app payments altogether, and everyone else would copy them. They had fought very hard to keep this rule for a reason.\nJust after the news broke, a friend who knows&nbsp;I own both stocks&nbsp;trolled me with this Bloomberg Terminal screenshot:\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/78570d7ae73401a933b2359f3dcd47da\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"281\" width=\"100%\" height=\"auto\">\nRoblox(NYSE:RBLX)is a pure-play mobile gaming company. The vast majority of their revenues come from in-app payments from iOS and Android, the rest from their website sales. Their cost-of-revenues almost all goes to Apple and Google. In the TTM, they had a 74.4% gross margin. If they pay a 2.5% processing fee for website sales, that means 84% of their transaction value was through iOS and Android. If they could get that to 50-50, that would raise all their margins down to EBT by 10 percentage points. If they could get to 73% of sales on the website, they would have a 90% gross margin.\nThere is a lot of money at stake, and a huge incentive for gaming and subscription media companies to figure out how to thread this needle. And that’s all in the absence of further action by the other two branches of government.\nThe Executive Branch\nThis is a good place to discuss the theoretical underpinnings of the new antitrust movement, because two of its leaders now work in the Biden administration. The movement is sometimes referred to as the “neo-Brandeis” movement after Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, because it harkens back to a much earlier era of antitrust enforcement that drastically changed in the 1980s.\nIn 1978, Robert Bork (yes,that Robert Bork) wrote a very influential book called&nbsp;The Antitrust Paradox. His theory urged a refocusing of enforcement away from competition, and towards consumer benefit as the main test. He argued that antitrust enforcement was propping up smaller, less efficient companies to the detriment of the economy.\nThe 1982 AT&amp;T breakup consent decree became the prototype for the new enforcement. By controlling local and long distance telecommunication, as well as the equipment, AT&amp;T had been underinvesting and overcharging for decades. Their breakup brought an explosion of investment into telecommunications, and brought down prices quickly for landline service and equipment. That became the limit of antitrust enforcement.\nBut the focus on consumer benefit has affected competition, and that’s what the neo-Brandeis movement hopes to change. They want antitrust enforcement to return to the way it was a century ago, with more of a focus on how large companies affect competition. Lina Khan, a law professor at Columbia, now runs the FTC, the primary antitrust enforcer in the federal government. Her 2017 law review article, “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox” was the spark that lit this fire. Her colleague at Columbia Law, Tim Wu, is also one of the leaders of this movement. He is a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisors, and his fingerprints are all over&nbsp;the July competition executive order.\nThe order was very wide ranging, with 72 initiatives covering 14 departments and agencies. Most of it does not relate to Apple, but it gives you an idea of the wide breadth of the order. As it relates to Apple:\n<ul>\n <li>Right-to-repair is a huge threat to the other pillar of Services, AppleCare, which I estimate at 25%-30% of the segment. But more than that, it would change the way Apple makes devices. Apple squeezes out efficiency gains by attaching pooled memory directly to the main processor die, and by soldering storage into the motherboard. Both of these would likely be prohibited to them, and the devices would suffer.</li>\n <li>The FTC is two months into a yearlong frisk of the mobile app ecosystem. Based on previous writings, Lina Khan will likely recommend third party app stores, “sideloading” directly from the web, and an end to the in-app payments monopoly.</li>\n</ul>\nExecutive branch action is always subject to court challenges, and they can take very long to implement. But Congress can change the law in a single session. And they are already into that process.\nThe Legislative Branch\nSince there are two houses of Congress, this issue is off on two tracks. The House Judiciary Committee recently passed a suite of bipartisan bills. Of the ones that I think have a good likelihood of passing the full House, here’s how it affects Apple:\nThey would be required to allow third party app stores, sideloading, and third party payments in the Apple App Store.\nRestricting Apple’s ability to acquire smaller companies. In the past 6 years, Apple has bought around 100 companies, which works out to about one every three weeks on average. It looks like they had been accelerating since fiscal 2018, but then abruptly stopped in fiscal 2021. The reason is the new leader of the FTC.\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/a2fc9a2578663cc746fdb19ca19dea4c\" tg-width=\"635\" tg-height=\"417\" width=\"100%\" height=\"auto\">Data by YCharts\nThe big bulge you see there in 2014 is the Beats acquisition at $3 billion, which remains the exception. Otherwise, Apple buys very small companies for tens or hundreds of millions, usually shuts down any products they may have, and absorbs the talent and IP into Apple proper. Apple’s chip design unit, a cornerstone of their current success, began this way in 2008.\nNo more private APIs.This would mean everything, like the Apple Pay-enabling NFC chip, would be open to competitors.\nNo more discriminatory rules.Apple doesn’t force real-world product and service providers like Uber(NYSE:UBER)to use in-app payments. Apple would either have to try and get Uber to pay them 30%, or drop the requirement altogether.\nThe end of the Google search deal.Google currently pays Apple a purported $12 billion a year to make Google the default search engine on iOS. This cash goes directly to EBT.\nThey would have to expose more user data to developers.\nFormalizing the anti-steering decision.\nAnti-retaliation provision.If these bills were law, Epic would still be on the App Store while they sued Apple.\nAfter the House is done wrangling over budget reconciliation, I think these bills will hit the House floor this fall or winter, and I think that they have a high likelihood of passing in something like their current form.\nBut bills also have to clear the Senate, and they move slower. Things are just getting started there. The big movers in the Senate are Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Mike Lee of Utah. Klobuchar has&nbsp;written a long book&nbsp;on the subject, and it is not friendly towards Apple. She has also authored a new bill, Open App Markets Act. It is more narrow than the House suite, but not by much. It would still force Apple to allow third party app stores, sideloading, and third party in-app payments. They would also have to get rid of their private APIs. The bill is narrower than the House suite, and less of a threat to Apple, but still would mean the end of App Store as a driver of growth.The Senate bill is the better outcome for Apple, and it is still terrible.\nI believe that we will see something pass before the next Presidential election, or even in this Congressional session. The best Apple shareholders can hope for is that the final bill gets watered down considerably.\nOutside The US\nThis is in no way limited to the US. We already discussed the Japanese settlement, and South Korea is forcing Apple and Google to allow third party in-app payments. The case that is farthest along in the EU is Spotify’s, which would force Apple to not charge fees to competing services, so that means music, podcasts, games, video and fitness.\nThe Chinese Communist Party remains the&nbsp;second biggest tail risk in the world&nbsp;after climate change. Apple’s regulatory risk there is uniquely high, both on the supply and demand sides. Apple has already given into them by not providing their Chinese customers with the same level of privacy as everyone else. With the mood in China right now, who knows where that goes.\nWhat Losing Control Of App Store Looks Like\nStone Fox Capital here at Seeking Alpha is&nbsp;out with an article&nbsp;pivoting off Katy Huberty's estimation of a 2% earnings loss if the top 20 apps on the App Store were able to eschew in-app payments. Stone Fox would also like you to care about that seemingly small number:\n<blockquote>\n Apple won most of their legal case with Epic Games based on the ruling announced on September 10, but the tech giant lost the ultimate battle. The stock remains priced for perfection while the company continues to have growth paths chipped away from the business.\n</blockquote>\nMy last article on this subject was called “Chipping Away at App Store.” This is what is happening and the trend is now clear. There is a mood globally to take Apple down a peg, and it is happening too slowly for many people to realize it is happening.\nMy own way of modeling the worst case is through my DCF model. It’s modeled as a 25% hit to Services in the first year, with services gross margin reduced from 68% to 65%, followed by a slightly increased growth rate in the segment because of composition effects — the rest of Services grows faster than App Store. I used to model that happening in fiscal 2024, but I have moved that up to fiscal 2023, beginning less than 13 months from now.\nHere is the effect on fair value on my base case:\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/94b635fe7a2473aafe36bd095a1206b6\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"352\" width=\"100%\" height=\"auto\">\nEven with the very slow start for the reason Stone Fox says — the share price has gotten way out ahead of cash flows — my base case still shows an 11% CAGR in fair value through the end of fiscal 2025. The App Store collapse takes that down to an 8% CAGR, 12% lower by 2025.\nCircling back, Stone Fox puts a button on this more succinctly than I can:\n<blockquote>\n The key investor takeaway is that Apple has a bright future. The company will continue generating profits with operating cash flows topping $100 billion annually, but the tech giant will struggle to generate the growth needed to warrant the current stock price. The 2% hit to earnings might not seem meaningful, but the amount is very harmful to a stock priced for perfection.\n</blockquote>\nHow To Take This Seriously\nIn my last article on this subject, someone cheekily replied in the comments, “‘Please take this seriously.’ What does that even mean?” That’s a good question. The first part of the answer is to stop pretending it’s not happening.\n“If your time horizon is short, now is a good time to take profits.” I have been using that phrase frequently since Apple hit $140. The last chart just formalizes it with math, but my opinion is that Apple will remain range-bound for some time, between $125 and $155, roughly. I still mean it: if your time horizon is short, now is a good time to take profits.\nBut I also believe that no other company is as prepared for the future of technology, regardless of what that brings. That is a&nbsp;far longer discussion. I have been buying Apple shares on the dip since 2005, which is two splits ago. My last buy was in January 2019, when Apple reported that they would miss guidance for the first time in many years. At the time, the commentariat was telling me that Apple’s best days were behind them. I tried to explain that Apple was in a transitional phase, part of a strategy they launched around 2015 to focus more on the growth of the iPhone user base than sales. The strategy would pay off soon, I predicted, and it did in fiscal 2021. That seems like a very long time ago now.\nA consequence of buying the dip from 2005 to 2019 is that I own way too many Apple shares that I could never bring myself to sell. I am massively overweight Apple. There is a “What To Do With The Apple Shares” clause in my will. It is our largest asset, worth more than the house. That has not made me nervous until the last few months, when the tide seemed to start turning on Apple on this issue. I also used to be someone who did not take this threat seriously. I am going to start shaving my position as opportunities present themselves, and one may happen this week with the iPhone launch on Tuesday.\nTo be clear, I will remain overweight Apple, just less so, and I remain bullish in the long term. But I no longer feel the safety I once did with this wildly overweight position.\nIn contrast, if you are a long term investor who does not have a massively overweight position, watch, wait and fight confirmation bias every day. If you think this begins and ends with Epic, you haven’t been paying attention.\nPlease take this seriously.\nI will be back in a few days with hopefully happier news from the iPhone launch on Tuesday. The big question is whether Apple can begin shipping iPhone before the quarter is out.","collect":0,"html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>Apple App Store: The Tide Is Turning</title>\n<style type=\"text/css\">\na,abbr,acronym,address,applet,article,aside,audio,b,big,blockquote,body,canvas,caption,center,cite,code,dd,del,details,dfn,div,dl,dt,\nem,embed,fieldset,figcaption,figure,footer,form,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,header,hgroup,html,i,iframe,img,ins,kbd,label,legend,li,mark,menu,nav,\nobject,ol,output,p,pre,q,ruby,s,samp,section,small,span,strike,strong,sub,summary,sup,table,tbody,td,tfoot,th,thead,time,tr,tt,u,ul,var,video{ font:inherit;margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;border:0 }\nbody{ font-size:16px; line-height:1.5; color:#999; background:transparent; }\n.wrapper{ overflow:hidden;word-break:break-all;padding:10px; }\nh1,h2{ font-weight:normal; line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:.6em; }\nh3,h4,h5,h6{ line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:1em; }\nh1{ font-size:24px; }\nh2{ font-size:20px; }\nh3{ font-size:18px; }\nh4{ font-size:16px; }\nh5{ font-size:14px; }\nh6{ font-size:12px; }\np,ul,ol,blockquote,dl,table{ margin:1.2em 0; }\nul,ol{ margin-left:2em; }\nul{ list-style:disc; }\nol{ list-style:decimal; }\nli,li p{ margin:10px 0;}\nimg{ max-width:100%;display:block;margin:0 auto 1em; }\nblockquote{ color:#B5B2B1; border-left:3px solid #aaa; padding:1em; }\nstrong,b{font-weight:bold;}\nem,i{font-style:italic;}\ntable{ width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:1px;margin:1em 0;font-size:.9em; }\nth,td{ padding:5px;text-align:left;border:1px solid #aaa; }\nth{ font-weight:bold;background:#5d5d5d; }\n.symbol-link{font-weight:bold;}\n/* header{ border-bottom:1px solid #494756; } */\n.title{ margin:0 0 8px;line-height:1.3;color:#ddd; }\n.meta {color:#5e5c6d;font-size:13px;margin:0 0 .5em; }\na{text-decoration:none; color:#2a4b87;}\n.meta .head { display: inline-block; overflow: hidden}\n.head .h-thumb { width: 30px; height: 30px; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-radius: 50%; float: left;}\n.head .h-content { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; float: left;}\n.head .h-name {font-size: 13px; color: #eee; margin: 0;}\n.head .h-time {font-size: 11px; color: #7E829C; margin: 0;line-height: 11px;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nApple App Store: The Tide Is Turning\n</h2>\n\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n\n\n2021-09-13 23:32 GMT+8&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href=https://seekingalpha.com/article/4454891-apple-app-store-the-tide-is-turning>seekingalpha</a>\n\n\n</h4>\n\n</header>\n<article>\n<div>\nSummary\n\nA US Federal District Court judge has ruled mostly in Apple’s favor in their case with Epic Games.\nDespite that, and in conjunction with a recent settlement with Japanese regulators, Apple ...\n\n<a href=\"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4454891-apple-app-store-the-tide-is-turning\">Web Link</a>\n\n</div>\n\n\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","type":0,"thumbnail":"","relate_stocks":{"AAPL":"苹果"},"source_url":"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4454891-apple-app-store-the-tide-is-turning","is_english":true,"share_image_url":"https://static.laohu8.com/e9f99090a1c2ed51c021029395664489","article_id":"1171919128","content_text":"Summary\n\nA US Federal District Court judge has ruled mostly in Apple’s favor in their case with Epic Games.\nDespite that, and in conjunction with a recent settlement with Japanese regulators, Apple will be getting rid of their anti-steering rule. This is a bigger change than people think.\nThe threat to Apple doesn't end with the Epic trial. There are bigger threats coming from the executive and legislative branches in the US, and regulators in Europe and Asia.\n\nChip Somodevilla/Getty Images News\nIt Does Not End Here\nFor some time now, I have been warning that antitrust law was about to change, and these changes would not be favorable to Apple(NASDAQ:AAPL), and that investors need to take these threats seriously. In every one of these attempts, I was rebuffed in the comments by many Apple shareholders telling me that these fears and warnings were overblown. “Long and strong AAPL!” cheerleading seems to be popular.Confirmation bias is a strong thing, and you should fight it every single day.\nMy last attempt was less than two weeks ago, and I was similarly dismissed, and even accused of being a short-selling tout to boot. That last suggestion is pretty funny to anyone who has had to listen to me drone on about Apple stock the last 16 years. The consequence of those 16 years is that I have a lot of Apple stock, so I take things like this very seriously.\nFriday’s decision in Epic v. Apple had one part very bad news for Apple, but mostly a rejection of Epic’s main claim — that iOS is a market unto itself. But the bigger threat continues to be from Congress, where they can change the law in a single session. The House has already passed several bipartisan bills through committee, and three of them seem to have pretty wide support with the rest of the House. A narrower, but just as damaging companion bill is about to start working its way through the Senate. Keep your eyes on Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Mike Lee of Utah.\nThen we have regulatory action in the EU, Apple’s second most important region, where antitrust enforcers are siding with Spotify(NYSE:SPOT)in their dispute over in-app payments. Apple has already settled with Japan over their anti-steering rules. South Korea is forcing Apple and Google(NASDAQ:GOOGL)(NASDAQ:GOOG)to allow third-party in-app payments. China is a black hole of regulatory mystery.\nThe tide is turning on Apple on this issue. If you think this begins and ends with the Epic case, you haven’t been paying attention.\nRight now the threat is confined to App Store, but this is the end of the beginning, not the beginning of the end. This new antitrust movement may come for other parts of Apple, like the other pillar of their fast-growing Services segment, AppleCare, and even dig deeper into the way Apple likes to do business.\nWhat The Ruling Says\nJudge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers hewed very closely to existing law, because that’s what usually happens in District Court, the lowest level of the federal system. She mostly had bad news for Epic, and targeted bad news for Apple.\nThe case rested on how the court defined the “relevant market” in question. Epic wanted it to be iOS, a market unto itself because of the high walls Apple builds around the ecosystem. Judge Rogers rejected that novel claim pretty handily. But she also rejected Apple’s definition: all gaming transactions, including PCs and consoles. She settled on mobile gaming transactions, so essentially the iOS-Android duopoly of mobile gaming transactions.\nHere is the meat of the decision that follows from that:\n\n Given the trial record, the Court cannot ultimately conclude that Apple is a monopolist under either federal or state antitrust laws. While the Court finds that Apple enjoys considerable market share of over 55% and extraordinarily high profit margins, these factors alone do not show antitrust conduct. Success is not illegal…\n\n\n Nonetheless, the trial did show that Apple is engaging in anticompetitive conduct under California’s competition laws. The Court concludes that Apple’s anti-steering provisions hide critical information from consumers and illegally stifle consumer choice. When coupled with Apple’s incipient antitrust violations, these anti-steering provisions are anticompetitive and a nationwide remedy to eliminate those provisions is warranted.\n\nThe most important thing to note here is that the problem for Apple is California law, not federal law. Federal law changing is where the real threat remains, and we are already well into that process.\nJudge Rogers ruled that Apple has to get rid of their anti-steering rules. App developers will now be allowed to inform users of less expensive options on their website, with a link. We’ll talk about the implications in a moment. Apple charges developers 30% for in-app payments, and the first year of in-app subscriptions (15% thereafter). In-app payments and subscriptions are substantially where all of App Store revenue comes from, about 28% of the Services segment and 5.4% of all revenue in calendar 2020.\nAlso, in the category of rounding errors, Epic has to pay Apple the $3.6 million they owe them when they breached their contract. That’s about 0.001% of Apple’s 2021 top line.\nEpic’s Game\nIf you read my first article about the trial from when the pre-trial filings dropped, you may notice that I was a bit confused about what precisely Epic’s game was here. The foundation of their entire argument — that iOS was a market unto itself — was novel, to say the least. At least one of their lawyers must have informed them of the low likelihood of success on their main claims. Moreover, they burned a lot of pages on arguments not central to their case, but seem more geared towards tarnishing Apple’s reputation.\nMy current understanding is that this case was a publicity stunt. What’s more, it worked. The point was to get this issue into the public conversation. Here I am writing about it, and here you are reading about it. But more importantly, the tide is turning in Washington, and I think the issues raised by this trial have accelerated that.\nThe Anti-Steering Rule\nLike many of the App Store rules, the anti-steering rule was part of a multi-year whack-a-mole process where developers tried to find ways to cut out Apple, and Apple closed those holes. Apple fought very hard to keep this rule, but now seems to be capitulating. They settled with Japanese regulators recently on the anti-steering rules as it applied to media subscription apps, and applied the settlement to the rest of the world as well, maybe in anticipation of this ruling. With the Epic ruling, the anti-steering rule is gone.\nWhen a game developer like Epic sells their virtual currency on the App Store, they have a 30% payment fee. When they make the same transaction on their website, it is probably under 3%. This was always what this was about. Epic wanted to have their own in-app payment system to supersede Apple’s, without the friction of sending people to the website. Judge Rogers rejected that, but gave Epic a partial victory by banning Apple’s anti-steering rules.\nThe anti-steering rules prevented app developers from having text and links to their own much less expensive in-app payments or subscriptions on their websites. This is a real loss for Apple, and puts the whole structure of the two most lucrative payment methods in the App Store at risk.\nLet’s say a gaming company pays a 2.5% processing fee on their website. That means they have 27.5 percentage points of marketing to play with. They could give that entire 27.5% to users in the form of a rebate or freebies. It certainly increases friction to have to leave a game you're having fun with, but if there is a big, friendly, dark-patterned button that says “Want free money?” I think a lot of people would tap that button. What’s more, they get to book the same amount in revenue, and stick the cost down in sales and marketing.\nThat’s just one example of how companies may decide to go with this. That’s a lot of margin to play with. The reason Apple had this rule in the first place is that they feared someone would find the magic formula that would provide more revenue by eschewing in-app payments altogether, and everyone else would copy them. They had fought very hard to keep this rule for a reason.\nJust after the news broke, a friend who knows I own both stocks trolled me with this Bloomberg Terminal screenshot:\n\nRoblox(NYSE:RBLX)is a pure-play mobile gaming company. The vast majority of their revenues come from in-app payments from iOS and Android, the rest from their website sales. Their cost-of-revenues almost all goes to Apple and Google. In the TTM, they had a 74.4% gross margin. If they pay a 2.5% processing fee for website sales, that means 84% of their transaction value was through iOS and Android. If they could get that to 50-50, that would raise all their margins down to EBT by 10 percentage points. If they could get to 73% of sales on the website, they would have a 90% gross margin.\nThere is a lot of money at stake, and a huge incentive for gaming and subscription media companies to figure out how to thread this needle. And that’s all in the absence of further action by the other two branches of government.\nThe Executive Branch\nThis is a good place to discuss the theoretical underpinnings of the new antitrust movement, because two of its leaders now work in the Biden administration. The movement is sometimes referred to as the “neo-Brandeis” movement after Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, because it harkens back to a much earlier era of antitrust enforcement that drastically changed in the 1980s.\nIn 1978, Robert Bork (yes,that Robert Bork) wrote a very influential book called The Antitrust Paradox. His theory urged a refocusing of enforcement away from competition, and towards consumer benefit as the main test. He argued that antitrust enforcement was propping up smaller, less efficient companies to the detriment of the economy.\nThe 1982 AT&T breakup consent decree became the prototype for the new enforcement. By controlling local and long distance telecommunication, as well as the equipment, AT&T had been underinvesting and overcharging for decades. Their breakup brought an explosion of investment into telecommunications, and brought down prices quickly for landline service and equipment. That became the limit of antitrust enforcement.\nBut the focus on consumer benefit has affected competition, and that’s what the neo-Brandeis movement hopes to change. They want antitrust enforcement to return to the way it was a century ago, with more of a focus on how large companies affect competition. Lina Khan, a law professor at Columbia, now runs the FTC, the primary antitrust enforcer in the federal government. Her 2017 law review article, “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox” was the spark that lit this fire. Her colleague at Columbia Law, Tim Wu, is also one of the leaders of this movement. He is a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisors, and his fingerprints are all over the July competition executive order.\nThe order was very wide ranging, with 72 initiatives covering 14 departments and agencies. Most of it does not relate to Apple, but it gives you an idea of the wide breadth of the order. As it relates to Apple:\n\nRight-to-repair is a huge threat to the other pillar of Services, AppleCare, which I estimate at 25%-30% of the segment. But more than that, it would change the way Apple makes devices. Apple squeezes out efficiency gains by attaching pooled memory directly to the main processor die, and by soldering storage into the motherboard. Both of these would likely be prohibited to them, and the devices would suffer.\nThe FTC is two months into a yearlong frisk of the mobile app ecosystem. Based on previous writings, Lina Khan will likely recommend third party app stores, “sideloading” directly from the web, and an end to the in-app payments monopoly.\n\nExecutive branch action is always subject to court challenges, and they can take very long to implement. But Congress can change the law in a single session. And they are already into that process.\nThe Legislative Branch\nSince there are two houses of Congress, this issue is off on two tracks. The House Judiciary Committee recently passed a suite of bipartisan bills. Of the ones that I think have a good likelihood of passing the full House, here’s how it affects Apple:\nThey would be required to allow third party app stores, sideloading, and third party payments in the Apple App Store.\nRestricting Apple’s ability to acquire smaller companies. In the past 6 years, Apple has bought around 100 companies, which works out to about one every three weeks on average. It looks like they had been accelerating since fiscal 2018, but then abruptly stopped in fiscal 2021. The reason is the new leader of the FTC.\nData by YCharts\nThe big bulge you see there in 2014 is the Beats acquisition at $3 billion, which remains the exception. Otherwise, Apple buys very small companies for tens or hundreds of millions, usually shuts down any products they may have, and absorbs the talent and IP into Apple proper. Apple’s chip design unit, a cornerstone of their current success, began this way in 2008.\nNo more private APIs.This would mean everything, like the Apple Pay-enabling NFC chip, would be open to competitors.\nNo more discriminatory rules.Apple doesn’t force real-world product and service providers like Uber(NYSE:UBER)to use in-app payments. Apple would either have to try and get Uber to pay them 30%, or drop the requirement altogether.\nThe end of the Google search deal.Google currently pays Apple a purported $12 billion a year to make Google the default search engine on iOS. This cash goes directly to EBT.\nThey would have to expose more user data to developers.\nFormalizing the anti-steering decision.\nAnti-retaliation provision.If these bills were law, Epic would still be on the App Store while they sued Apple.\nAfter the House is done wrangling over budget reconciliation, I think these bills will hit the House floor this fall or winter, and I think that they have a high likelihood of passing in something like their current form.\nBut bills also have to clear the Senate, and they move slower. Things are just getting started there. The big movers in the Senate are Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Mike Lee of Utah. Klobuchar has written a long book on the subject, and it is not friendly towards Apple. She has also authored a new bill, Open App Markets Act. It is more narrow than the House suite, but not by much. It would still force Apple to allow third party app stores, sideloading, and third party in-app payments. They would also have to get rid of their private APIs. The bill is narrower than the House suite, and less of a threat to Apple, but still would mean the end of App Store as a driver of growth.The Senate bill is the better outcome for Apple, and it is still terrible.\nI believe that we will see something pass before the next Presidential election, or even in this Congressional session. The best Apple shareholders can hope for is that the final bill gets watered down considerably.\nOutside The US\nThis is in no way limited to the US. We already discussed the Japanese settlement, and South Korea is forcing Apple and Google to allow third party in-app payments. The case that is farthest along in the EU is Spotify’s, which would force Apple to not charge fees to competing services, so that means music, podcasts, games, video and fitness.\nThe Chinese Communist Party remains the second biggest tail risk in the world after climate change. Apple’s regulatory risk there is uniquely high, both on the supply and demand sides. Apple has already given into them by not providing their Chinese customers with the same level of privacy as everyone else. With the mood in China right now, who knows where that goes.\nWhat Losing Control Of App Store Looks Like\nStone Fox Capital here at Seeking Alpha is out with an article pivoting off Katy Huberty's estimation of a 2% earnings loss if the top 20 apps on the App Store were able to eschew in-app payments. Stone Fox would also like you to care about that seemingly small number:\n\n Apple won most of their legal case with Epic Games based on the ruling announced on September 10, but the tech giant lost the ultimate battle. The stock remains priced for perfection while the company continues to have growth paths chipped away from the business.\n\nMy last article on this subject was called “Chipping Away at App Store.” This is what is happening and the trend is now clear. There is a mood globally to take Apple down a peg, and it is happening too slowly for many people to realize it is happening.\nMy own way of modeling the worst case is through my DCF model. It’s modeled as a 25% hit to Services in the first year, with services gross margin reduced from 68% to 65%, followed by a slightly increased growth rate in the segment because of composition effects — the rest of Services grows faster than App Store. I used to model that happening in fiscal 2024, but I have moved that up to fiscal 2023, beginning less than 13 months from now.\nHere is the effect on fair value on my base case:\n\nEven with the very slow start for the reason Stone Fox says — the share price has gotten way out ahead of cash flows — my base case still shows an 11% CAGR in fair value through the end of fiscal 2025. The App Store collapse takes that down to an 8% CAGR, 12% lower by 2025.\nCircling back, Stone Fox puts a button on this more succinctly than I can:\n\n The key investor takeaway is that Apple has a bright future. The company will continue generating profits with operating cash flows topping $100 billion annually, but the tech giant will struggle to generate the growth needed to warrant the current stock price. The 2% hit to earnings might not seem meaningful, but the amount is very harmful to a stock priced for perfection.\n\nHow To Take This Seriously\nIn my last article on this subject, someone cheekily replied in the comments, “‘Please take this seriously.’ What does that even mean?” That’s a good question. The first part of the answer is to stop pretending it’s not happening.\n“If your time horizon is short, now is a good time to take profits.” I have been using that phrase frequently since Apple hit $140. The last chart just formalizes it with math, but my opinion is that Apple will remain range-bound for some time, between $125 and $155, roughly. I still mean it: if your time horizon is short, now is a good time to take profits.\nBut I also believe that no other company is as prepared for the future of technology, regardless of what that brings. That is a far longer discussion. I have been buying Apple shares on the dip since 2005, which is two splits ago. My last buy was in January 2019, when Apple reported that they would miss guidance for the first time in many years. At the time, the commentariat was telling me that Apple’s best days were behind them. I tried to explain that Apple was in a transitional phase, part of a strategy they launched around 2015 to focus more on the growth of the iPhone user base than sales. The strategy would pay off soon, I predicted, and it did in fiscal 2021. That seems like a very long time ago now.\nA consequence of buying the dip from 2005 to 2019 is that I own way too many Apple shares that I could never bring myself to sell. I am massively overweight Apple. There is a “What To Do With The Apple Shares” clause in my will. It is our largest asset, worth more than the house. That has not made me nervous until the last few months, when the tide seemed to start turning on Apple on this issue. I also used to be someone who did not take this threat seriously. I am going to start shaving my position as opportunities present themselves, and one may happen this week with the iPhone launch on Tuesday.\nTo be clear, I will remain overweight Apple, just less so, and I remain bullish in the long term. But I no longer feel the safety I once did with this wildly overweight position.\nIn contrast, if you are a long term investor who does not have a massively overweight position, watch, wait and fight confirmation bias every day. If you think this begins and ends with Epic, you haven’t been paying attention.\nPlease take this seriously.\nI will be back in a few days with hopefully happier news from the iPhone launch on Tuesday. 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