Shares in Samsung jumped today and other competitors also benefited as Apple chief Steve Jobs stepped down, with analysts seeing a window of opportunity for rivals of the trailblazing US firm. The cancer-stricken Jobs — the driving force behind iconic products such as the Mac computer, iPhone and iPad — said yesterday he would step down as chief executive and retreat to the back seat as chairman.
Apple, the world's second most valuable company by market capitalisation, said chief operating officer Tim Cook would succeed Jobs as chief executive. The announcement sent Apple shares tumbling by 5.3 per cent in after-hours US trade. But in Seoul, Apple's South Korean rivals rallied. Shares in Samsung Electronics, whose Galaxy tablet is sparring with the iPad, jumped by three per cent, while LG Electronics surged by four per cent.
Steven Paul 'Steve' Jobs (born on February 24, 1955) is an American business magnate and inventor. He is co-founder, chairman, and former CEO of Apple Inc. Jobs, who also previously served as chief executive of Pixar Animation Studios, became a member of the board of directors of The Walt Disney Company in 2006, following the acquisition of Pixar by Disney. He was born in San Francisco, California and was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs of Mountain View, California, who named him Steven Paul. Paul and Clara later adopted a daughter, whom they named Patti. Jobs' biological parents – Abdulfattah Jandali, a Syrian graduate student who later became a political science professor, and Joanne Simpson, an American graduate student, who went on to become a speech language pathologist – later married, giving birth to and raising Jobs' biological sister, the novelist Mona Simpson. Jobs attended Cupertino Junior High School and Homestead High School in Cupertino, California, and frequented after-school lectures at the Hewlett-Packard Company in Palo Alto, California. He was soon hired there and worked with Steve Wozniak as a summer employee. In 1972, Jobs graduated from high school and enrolled in Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Although he dropped out after only one semester, he continued auditing classes at Reed, such as one in calligraphy, while sleeping on the floor in friends' rooms, returning Coke bottles for food money, and getting weekly free meals at the local Hare Krishna temple. Ranked 43rd wealthiest American by Forbes magazine with an estimated net wealth at $5.1 billion in 2009 Jobs later said, "If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts." Even though Jobs earned only $1 a year as CEO of Apple, he holds 5.426 million Apple shares, as well as 138 million shares in Disney. — Agency
“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.” — Steve Jobs
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