Role Of Board Of Directors In Apple Company

2.0 CORPORATE GOVERNANCE OF APPLE COMPANY

2.1 BOARD OF DIRECTORS

A board of directors is a group of individuals that are elected as representative of the stockholders to establish corporate management related policies and to make decisions on major company issues that might affect the long term performance of company.

The organization with the voting members usually chooses the members of the board. In a stock corporation, the board is elected by the shareholders and they have the highest authority in the management of the corporation. In a non-stock corporation with no general voting members, the board is the highest governing body of the institution; its members are sometimes chosen by the board itself.

There are several responsibilities

They are hold a specific executive power conferred onto them with and by authority of the board of directors and/or the shareholders and they also focus on managing the senior or executive management instead of the day-to-day activities of the business.

As we can see, the founder and former CEO late Steve Jobs had developed the organizational structure as hierarchical in Apple organizational in order to ensure the focused realization of his innovative ideas and clear vision for the business. When the leadership role changed to Tim Cook as CEO from Steve Jobs on August 2011, he has changed Apple organization structure to a certain modifications. Mr. Cook embraced the decentralization of decision making to a certain extent in order to encourage creativity and innovation at various levels. However, the structure remains to be largely hierarchical. The top management structure of Apple Company for high level:

NAME POSITION

TIM COOK CEO

ANGELA AHRENDTH Senior Vice President Retail and Online Stores

EDDY CUE Senior Vice President Internet Software and Services

CRAIG FEDERIGHI Senior Vice President Software Engineering

JONATHAN IVE Chief Design Officer

LUCA MAESTRI Senior Vice President and Chief Financial

Share ownership entitles a shareholder to certain rights, which usually include the following for a common stockholder:

i) To vote the board of directors of an organization. ii) To receive the dividends by the board of directors. iii) To receive the annual financial statements of the business when they are made available for issuance.

Shareholders buy shares in a business for wearing a profit either from dividend payments made by the company, of through an appreciation in the market price of the shares. They may also buy shares to gain control over a business.

As we can see from Apple Company, CEO Tim Cook said that the share split can make the stock more attractive to the investors at a lower price. Therefore, Apple enacted to a seven-to-one stock split in 2014 after the share price reached over $640. Moreover, Apple is a very popular stock in the market, with an average volume of 55 million shared traded a day. Many insiders at Apple own larges stakes in the company, along with institutional investors who have higher positions.

For Apple Company, there are five people that have the largest shares in that company. Their profiles are explained below:

1) TIM