“Apple on Monday announced first weekend sales of the iPhone 5S and 5C. They ‘topped’ 9 million. Wall Street was expecting 5 to 6 million,” Philip Elmer-DeWitt reports for Fortune. “Big surprise, egg on faces. Estimates revised. Price points raised.”
“Then the second-guessing began [from analysts who were way, way off: Jeffries Peter Misek and Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster]. How solid, some analysts asked, were those 9 million sales?” P.E.D. reports. “Coming to Apple’s defense was Goldman Sach’s Bill Shope… Apple this year used the same sales recognition rules it has always used. From an accounting perspective, this year’s 9 million is directly comparable to last year’s 5 million… The Core’s Matt Lew points out that Apple’s 9 million figure does not include any of the iPhones — tens of millions of them, he estimates — that were ordered online but have not yet been delivered.”
“Here’s what’s strikes me as strange about all this: No other smartphone manufacturer’s sales figures are subjected to this kind of scrutiny,” P.E.D. reports. “Samsung doesn’t get this kind of scrutiny because it doesn’t tell anybody — not analysts, not investors, not the SEC — how many smartphones it sells.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Listen, Gene, Misek, et al., you blew it. It’s not the first time; it won’t be the last. Stop trying to cover it with mealy-mouthed excuses and own it.
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