CEO Tim Cook Remains Optimistic About Apple’s Future in Company-Wide Meeting

Apple CEO Tim Cook held a company-wide virtual meeting Thursday during which he discussed the coronavirus pandemic, and how it could affect employees and products in the future, reads a new report from Bloomberg, which spoke with several employees who were in attendance.

 

“I won’t tell you Apple won’t be impacted,” Cook said, acknowledging that the company — which has some 25,000 employees in Silicon Valley and 137,000 worldwide — would feel the sting from the coronavirus. Apple “isn’t immune to worldwide economic trends,” he explained, while emphasizing the company’s strong balance sheet.

Cook reportedly remained positive about the future of the company, saying that some of Apple’s greatest moments came after times of extreme hardship.

“He said when he first joined Apple in 1998, the company responded to financial challenges with the release of the original iMac,” said one of the employees in attendance. “He noted that Apple rolled out the first iPad in 2010, right after the Great Recession, and said that Apple’s plan is to come out of the COVID-19 pandemic in a similar fashion.”

Cook stated that Apple was in a good financial position going into the crisis, and will continue investing in research and development during it. Apple will also continue to launch new products — as evidenced by Wednesday’s iPhone SE launch.

The executive’s comments come amid Apple’s increasing efforts to help in the fight against the coronavirus. Though the company’s offices are largely empty, its employees are working remotely and most of its retail locations have closed, Apple has attempted to use its power as one of the largest and most highly valued companies in the world to manufacture millions of protective face shields for medical workers as well as to create a new contact tracing technology to help alert people who may have come in contact with someone but didn’t yet know it.

Cook touted some of those initiatives during his talk with employees, reportedly saying that if the company keeps investing in employees and their work, he doesn’t “see any reason to be anything but optimistic.”

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