Apple just ploughed $1bn into this Chinese taxi startup
So now we've found out exactly what Apple was planning to do with (some of) the vast amount of cash it has sloshing around its bank account.
Overnight Didi Chuxing, a Chinese rival to Uber, which describes itself as "the world's leading one-stop mobile transportation platform", issued a rather gleeful statement overnight saying it had made "progress in [its] current funding round".
It added rather coyly, somewhere towards the end of the first paragraph, that Apple had invested $1bn (£694.2m) in it – the "single largest investment the company has ever received". No kidding.
Apple joins Chinese tech giants Tencent and Alibaba as one of the company's largest investors.
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"The endorsement from Apple is an enormous encouragement and inspiration for our four-year-old company," said Cheng Wei, the company's founder and chief executive.
"Didi will work hard with our drivers, riders and global partners, to make available to every citizen flexible and reliable mobility choices, and help cities solve transportation, environmental and employment challenges."
Didi may not be a household name in the West, but in China it completes more than 11m rides a day, serving 300m users across 400 Chinese cities. It said it has 14m drivers, with an 87 per cent share in the private car hailing market and a 99 per cent share in the taxi-hailing market.
The investment may come as a blow to Uber – in February the US company's chief executive, Travis Kallanick, described Didi as a "fierce competitor", and admitted Uber is losing more than $1bn a year in China.
The news came as Apple once again lost its title as the world's most valuable company to Google parent Alphabet, after shares fell blow $90 for the first time since 2014.
Although Alphabet stock was also down, it left Google ahead with a market cap of $492.6bn (£340.8bn) while Apple was down to $492.2bn in early trading in New York.