Tim Cook is making his debut in Davos this week, as the Apple chief executive grapples with the growing geopolitical challenges facing his company and its Silicon Valley neighbours.
The backlash against “Big Tech” companies has been climbing up the agenda at the World Economic Forum in recent years, as political and business leaders fret about the outsized influence of Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Alphabet, who together command $3.5tn in market value.
Mr Cook was photographed in Davos on Tuesday night dining with Satya Nadella, chief executive of Microsoft, which recently overtook Apple as the world’s most valuable company, and the Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro. He was also pictured chatting with the Armenian prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan, and on Wednesday he is scheduled to meet Italian prime minister Giuseppe Conte.
Tech executives from Salesforce.com founder Marc Benioff to Facebook’s embattled operating chief Sheryl Sandberg have become a familiar sight at the World Economic Forum, but Apple has traditionally remained largely absent from such events.
Apple’s first appearance at the WEF comes after the iPhone maker’s tumultuous start to 2019. Apple said on January 2 that its revenues would miss Wall Street’s estimates, its first such warning since 2002, triggering its largest one-day share-price drop in five years.
Apple is now the world’s fourth most-valuable company, behind Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet.
Mr Cook pinned the blame for Apple’s sales shortfall squarely on China, where he said tensions over the trade war with the US had hit consumer spending. “While we anticipated some challenges in key emerging markets, we did not foresee the magnitude of the economic deceleration, particularly in Greater China,” Mr Cook said in a letter to investors.
Alongside trade, Mr Cook is likely to be discussing data protection — one of the tech industry’s most contentious topics following Facebook’s privacy scandals last year — as well as competition policy in Davos.
“One of the biggest challenges in protecting privacy is that many of the violations are invisible,” Mr Cook wrote in Time magazine last week, calling for the US Federal Trade Commission to establish a “data-broker clearinghouse”. “All of these secondary markets for your information exist in a shadow economy that’s largely unchecked — out of sight of consumers, regulators and lawmakers.”
Delegates at the Swiss resort have already been discussing issues such as the global governance of data, as local protections for privacy in Europe stand in contrast to increasing online surveillance in China. The impact of artificial intelligence on jobs and the expansion of 5G, a focus for national security concerns between the US and China, are also likely to be on the tech industry’s agenda in Davos.
While Apple has managed to avoid some of the more intense political pressure that US President Donald Trump has aimed at rivals such as Amazon and Facebook, Mr Cook’s diplomacy skills will be tested further in Switzerland. Tuesday night’s dinner saw Mr Cook, an openly gay executive who campaigns regularly for equality and human rights, sharing a dinner table with Mr Bolsonaro, who has been known for his homophobic, misogynist and occasionally racist comments.
As Mr Cook arrived in Switzerland this week, Apple pushed out a series of announcements, touting the translation of its iPad-based “Everyone Can Create” educational tools into German, French, Spanish and Italian, and pointing to $365m donated to charitable causes by the company and its employees over the past eight years under Apple’s Giving programme.
