“Apple Inc stunned Wall Street with quarterly results that missed expectations for the first time in years as customers held off buying iPhones until the October launch of the latest version,” Poornima Gupta and Edwin Chan reports for Reuters.
“Shares of Apple fell 7 percent in extended trading on Tuesday, wiping some $27 billion off the value of the world’s largest technology company,” Gupta and Chan report. “It was Apple’s first quarterly earnings report under Chief Executive Tim Cook, who took over from Steve Jobs in August at a critical juncture for the company.”
Gupta and Chan report, “‘The iPhone is where the weakness was and it’s an explainable one. The strong demand for the iPhone 4S set up strong demand for the holiday season,’ said Channing Smith, co-manager at Capital Advisors Growth Fund, which holds Apple shares. Apple said it sold 17.07 million iPhones in its fiscal fourth quarter ended September 24 — well short of the roughly 20 million forecast by analysts.”
“Revenue rose 39 percent to $28.27 billion, lower than the average analyst estimate of $29.69 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S. It was the first time Apple missed revenue expectations since the fiscal fourth quarter of 2008,” Gupta and Chan report. “Net profit was $6.62 billion, or $7.05 a share. That fell shy of expectations for earnings of $7.39 per share. The last time Apple missed EPS estimates was in the first quarter of 2001, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.”
Read more in the full article here.
When Apple had revealed that they had sold over 4M iPhone 4S the day before reporting their quarterly results, I had made the silly assumption that the 4Q results must have been so spectacular that Apple didn’t feel the need to wait and combine the 4S results with the quarterly report.
Who know if I was the only one with those silly expectations; however, perhaps Mr. Cook could have waited an extra day to release the iPhone 4S’s record shattering success and dampen/offset some of the negativity hounds.
Who are these pinheaded analyst on Wall Street? Apple posts record quarterly sales and banks over $6 billion dollars in profit while greatly increasing their cash reserves but misses some silly sales target an analyst made up so to Wall Street that means sell your Apple stock. They are parasites making money on Apple’s successes, but they don’t understand Apple and they never will.
Totally agree.. Stock price no longer has anything to do with the value of the company, its just a tool to make people money pushing the value up and down.
Proof,,, the amatures make more accurate projections than the “professionals”…
Just a thought,
en
It strikes me that the avoidance of mention that Apple exceeded its own guidance is a deliberate attempt to manipulate stock prices. Set a the bar higher than Apple said it could meet, then watch the stock drop, scoop up a buy, then sell when the stock rebounds. Villains!
I’m hold AAPL stock. Apple needs to stop being so secretive. They do not need to answer every analyst, but those rumors do gain traction. Those rumors brought down the value of my stock from an all time high.