Political Factors Affecting Apple Inc

Apple Inc., an American multinational corporation was founded by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne on April 1, 197. The headquarters of Apple is located in Cupertino, California and it designs, manufactures and sells consumer electronics, computer software as well as personal computers. (Reference for Businesses) The company's wide range of products and services include the iPhone, iPad, Mac, iPod, Apple TV, a variety of consumer and professional software applications, both the iOS and OS X operating systems, iCloud and several other product accessories. Apple not only offers a variety of mobile communication, media devices and portable digital music players but they provide a variety of related software, services, networking solutions

The detailed analysis aims to find out the external factors that affect Apple, identify external factors that are subjected to change in the future and exploits the opportunities and defend against threats better than its competitors would. The P in PESTLE stands for the political factors, the E for the economic factors, the S for the social factors, the T for the technological factors, the E for the environmental factors, and lastly, the L for the legal factors. These are the six external factors that affect the Apple company. Looking at these six factors thoroughly and respectively, firstly, the political factors that affect Apple include the fact that more than half of the sales from their products originate from countries other than America and how Apple manufactures its products and various product parts from countries outside of America, for example, China, Korea, Ireland and the Czech Republic. Furthermore, the bad political relationship between America and other countries predict the bad outcome for the company. Next, the three crucial economic factors that affect the company include inflation, recession and currency. As Apple products are commonly viewed as luxury products, and with inflation and

Last but not least, in the case of legal factors, Apple Inc has been a part of various legal proceedings and claims since the company's operation. For example, in October 2009, the well-known Nokia Corporation sued Apple for Apple's infringement of Nokia's patents in relation to the wireless technology (BBC). Other lawsuits involving Apple include cases with competitors such as HTC and Samsung (Rogers, A).

Porter's Five Forces analysis is a model that is used for industry analysis. The Porter's Five Forces is one of the most recognized frameworks that is used to assess the ambitiousness and attractiveness of a company. The framework is designed to identify the opportunities and threats within an industry. The five forces are mainly the threat of new entry, supplier power, buyer power, threat of substitution and lastly, competitive rivalry. Apple portrays a significant role in four major businesses, more specifically, the “communication equipment industry, the music and video industry, the mobile phones industry and the personal computer industry” (UKEssays). In terms of