“Apple reports earnings next Tuesday after the close, and naturally the market will be watching to see what the Mac maker has in store,” Evan Niu writes for The Motley Fool. “Of course, the iPhone’s performance will be the most financially important to the company.”
“At the same time, investors are going to want to hear how the Apple Watch fared during its launch quarter, because the new wearable device represents the first new product category that Apple has entered in five years,” Niu writes. “The company has already braced investors for some opacity, saying last October that it would include Apple Watch sales in its “Other Products” category. Apple simplified its reporting for fiscal 2015, and doesn’t intend to break out Apple Watch performance explicitly.”
MacDailyNews Note: Last October, Apple stated that they would not be reporting Apple Watch sales figures:
We’ll be creating a new reporting category called other products. This will encompass everything we report in the accessories category today, including Beats headphones and speakers, Apple TV, and peripherals and accessories for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and iPod. In addition, we’ll begin to include iPod sales in the other products category, and we will also reflect sales of Apple Watch in this line item once it begins shipping in early calendar 2015. — Nancy Paxton, Apple’s Senior Director of Investor Relations
I’m not very anxious in reporting a lot of numbers on Apple Watch… because our competitors are looking for it. – Apple CEO Tim Cook
“But realistically, Apple can’t remain completely mum about Apple Watch’s performance,” Niu writes. “There simply will be too much interest for Apple to ignore, and Tim Cook will inevitably be grilled by Wall Street analysts to spill the beans. Disclosing absolutely nothing would be a mistake, because investors would assume the worst, and Apple doesn’t want that.”
“The last thing that Apple wants is for investors to believe absurd headlines like, “Apple Watch Sales Plunge 90%,” and succumb to the ensuing hysteria,” Niu writes. “Apple will want to change that narrative as soon as possible, and the easiest way to do that is to provide a nugget or two of data… What I believe is most likely is that Apple will casually provide some approximate figure of unit volumes without disclosing a precise revenue figure. Perhaps something like, ‘more than 5 million units,’ which would be vague enough to achieve Cook’s stated strategic disclosure goals while also allaying fears about weak demand.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Here’s a little something that Brett Arends, the MarketWatch hit-whore who started this “Apple Watch Sales Plunge 90%” hysteria scribbled for MarketWatch back in January 2011:
Here’s how it’s going to go down: First, scammers will go into the derivatives market and buy a bunch of put options on Apple shares. Puts are effectively a bet that a stock will drop quickly. Then they’ll send out word that Steve Jobs is terminally ill with cancer and isn’t expected to return to work. Simple. Easy. Free money.
(Above, substitute “Steve Jobs is terminally ill with cancer and isn’t expected to return to work” with “Apple Watch sales plunge 90%.” – MDN Ed.)
The stock will plummet. Nervous investors will bail in panic. The put options will balloon in value… The scam artists will cash out, and walk away What makes this possible is Apple’s refusal to say anything whatsoever about Jobs’s illness or his absence… Nature abhors a vacuum. And if Apple won’t offer details, that leaves the door wide open for others.
Arends saw the door wide open, an information vacuum into which he happily took a dump.
A little bit of real data – doesn’t have to be the hardest data, just enough to mollify the analysts – from Apple on Tuesday will obliterate tripe of the sort peddled by hacks like MarketWatch‘s Brett Arends.