“Apple Inc. will cut back on hiring for some divisions after selling fewer iPhones than expected and missing its revenue forecast for the holiday quarter, according to people familiar with the matter,” Mark Gurman reports for Bloomberg.
“Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive officer, made the disclosure to employees earlier this month in a meeting the day after he penned a letter to investors about the company’s recent struggles, particularly in China,” Gurman reports. “During the meeting, Cook was asked if the company would impose a hiring freeze in response. He said he didn’t believe that was the solution. Instead, Cook said some divisions would reduce hiring, according to the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private matters.”
“Cook said he is yet to fully determine which divisions would cut back on hiring, but said that key groups such as Apple’s artificial intelligence team would continue to add new employees at a strong pace. He also emphasized that a division’s importance to Apple’s future isn’t measured by hiring rates,” Gurman reports. “Following Cook’s talk with employees, some Apple senior vice presidents held separate meetings with vice presidents, senior directors and other managers in their groups to emphasize that the iPhone sales slowdown is an opportunity for new innovation, according to one of the people.”
“The missed iPhone sales and reduction in hiring come just months after the iPhone maker became the first U.S. publicly traded company to pass the $1 trillion market capitalization threshold,” Gurman reports. “Since then, Apple has lost almost $300 billion in value.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Good. Take some time to assess everything after years of rampant hiring and growth at such breakneck pace that important things sometimes fell through the cracks. It’s amazing there weren’t more screw ups, actually.
Less Cookish kumbayah and more Jobsian perform-or-pound-sand would be an excellent outcome from the bracing wake-up call Apple’s upper management has received in recent months.
SEE ALSO:
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If past performance is indicative of the future, Apple will likely reduce their hiring and efforts in Mac division.
Equilibrium…
Doomed, I say… doomed. Amazon is doubling down on hiring while Apple is running out of steam. Apple’s laser focus on iPhones will be their undoing. Not much point in designing a good product and then pricing it out of most consumers’ reach. Apparently, Tim Cook never heard of the WeChat app in China where a $200 Android smartphone is just as good to use as a $1000 iPhone. Tencent’s WeChat was the great equalizer and Apple has no viable solution apart from slashing iPhone prices.
If Apple had gone into the cloud business as an alternative means of gaining revenue, maybe this financial mess wouldn’t have happened. All the major tech companies with cloud businesses seem to be doing quite well while Apple is struggling to boost revenue. Oh, well. One weak financial quarter isn’t the end of the world for Apple, or at least it shouldn’t be.
“Apple Inc. will cut back on hiring for some divisions”
… and will be increasing recruitment in other divisions.
That’s how it has always been and how it will always be. Apple continually tweaks it’s balance of everything to better respond to the future. This seems to be another article taking a tiny nugget of routine information and extrapolating it into a much bigger story.
It’s also worth noting that this report comes from Bloomberg, who still haven’t either backed up of withdrawn their allegation that secret surveillance chips had been surreptitiously installed in equipment. I always take note of how accurate news sources have been in the past and apply a weighting factor to what they subsequently say. I pay particular attention to sources proven to be accurate and pay much less attention to unreliable sources.
I only got a spotify account a month ago because of my BigInternships (and my mp3 player only lasting through the bus travel before running out of battery… I need a new one) so it doesn’t know me well enough yet KJSHDKJLSF but my wild guess for my most played 2018 is Ayu