“Apple Inc. is changing, and everyone knows it except Apple itself,” Shira Ovide writes for Bloomberg Gadfly. “Apple executives consistently fail to be straightforward about significant technology trends and how they affect the company. The biggest of the big trends: Growth in the smartphone market is gone, at least for now. The likeliest buyers now own at least one of the devices. Smartphone owners are holding onto their devices for longer than they used to before buying newer models.”
“The result is that sales of new smartphones have ground to a halt globally, and Apple isn’t immune,” Ovide writes. “Analysts on average expect Apple to sell 3 percent more smartphones in the current fiscal year than it did in 2017, and they’re forecasting a 1 percent bump in fiscal 2019. That slow growth isn’t great for Apple’s business, although the company’s revenue is expected to grow more quickly this year thanks to price increases and new products.”
MacDailyNews Take: Analysts’ consensus expectations for iPhone unit sales aren’t worth a bucket of warm spit.
“The reality is that the easy growth is over for the iPhone, which generates the majority of Apple’s revenue,” Ovide writes. “In an August conference call with stock analysts, one of them asked Apple CEO Tim Cook whether the company could continue to sell more iPhones in a few years in light of the smartphone market’s stagnation. Cook said he thought Apple could sell more phones to people who already own iPhones, to those who have competing devices and to people who have never owned a smartphone before. It was an answer straight out of 2015, when everything Cook said was true.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple knows their iPhone business, at least, inside and out.
Apple’s forgotten more about their iPhone business than Shira Ovide will ever know about Apple’s iPhone business.
We’ll see what iPhone lineup Apple brings to market later this year. Apple success at growing iPhone sales despite “the smartphone market’s stagnation” may surprise the naysayers.
And, by the way, Apple’s installed base is huge, with an active installed base of devices reaching 1.3 billion in January, which is an increase of 30% in just two years.