Wall Street's Apple Panic after expiry of Steve Jobs
Apple's first financial results since Steve Jobs's death are also the first to fall short of expectations in five years. But Dan Lyons says the big picture remains remarkably bright.
Steve Jobs might have believed in some kind of afterlife—he was a Buddhist,
after all. So if he’s out there somewhere, still watching, you have to
imagine that he’s not in a particularly good mood today. Either that, or
he’s just glad he got out right before the you-know-what hit the fan.
That’s a long way of saying
that for the first time in five years, Apple just reported financial
results that fell short of what Wall Street was expecting.
Wall Street expected revenues in
the September quarter would be $29.4 billion. Apple reported $28.3
billion. That’s not a big miss, except that everyone has grown
accustomed to having Apple blow way past whatever number Wall Street is
expecting. So to miss by even a little is just unheard of for Apple.
Earnings were a little short of expectations, too.
Is this what Apple is going to look
like in the post-Steve era? We all knew things would not be as special
without Jobs in charge. But the conventional wisdom was that it would be
a year or two before Apple would experience any problems. Instead, here
we are.
The official cause of the shortfall
was weak sales of the iPhone, probably due to the fact that people were
waiting for the new iPhone, the iPhone 4S, to come out in October.
Apple sold 17 million iPhones in the September quarter, which was a drop
from the previous quarter when Apple sold 20 million units. On a
conference call with analysts, Apple’s CFO Peter Oppenheimer blamed the
shortfall on “new-model speculation.”
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