1. Introduction

Apple Inc., is known to be one of the world’s most valuable companies. It is a multi-national company with a worldwide presence; approximately 72,800 employees and total net sales of $156 billion in the year 2012 (Apple annual report, 2012). Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, both college dropouts, founded this corporation in 1976 - “Steve Jobs, helped to transform the way in which the computer is used today through his creation of the first computer processing unit and his creative product innovations.” (Gupta and Prinzinger 2013). This paper will analyse the external environment, using the PESTEL model. The external environment incorporates all the factors that a company has no influence over and is only able to adapt to …show more content…

However, Apple’s assembly method has shamed them as well. Apple is known, like other major companies, to assemble their products in China with a company called Foxconn. “In the last several years Foxconn's operations have been under scrutiny for violation of Chinese domestic employment law” (Josephs, 2013) This has received major criticism due to the poor working conditions the company offers its employees, and the outsourcing of local jobs for cheap labour. It is seen as unethical but unchanged since it increases profit.

f. Legal: Legal factors are concerned with governmental laws on issues such as price fixing, as well as patents on innovative ideas. An example of this came in 2012 when Apple and Samsung had a court battle over Samsung infringing certain patents of Apple. However Apple won most of its legal battles with Samsung even though not all of them and had already received financial compensation. “The company won a $1 billion patent infringement judgment against Samsung.” (Duhigg and Lohr 2012) Apple did well with protecting its products, and innovative ideas in order to stay on top of competition.

3. Conclusions & Recommendations: In conclusion, Apple Inc has a very good stand on its Political factor, as it has not broken any law or regulation in the political field. On its Economic factors, it is recovering from the stock market crash. Apple’s dependence on the society plays a prominent role in its success. This