Apple, in a statement to CNBC, disputed the negative call by Goldman Sachs’ analyst Rod Hall who this morning claimed, erroneously, that the one-year free trial of the Apple TV+ service would have a “material negative impact” on earnings by showing lower hardware profit margins.
“We do not expect the introduction of Apple TV+, including the accounting treatment for the service, to have a material impact on our financial results,” the company said in a statement to CNBC.
Apple shares – which fell as much as 2.6% on Friday – finished trading down 1.9% at $218.75 a share.
Goldman predicted a slide greater than 25% in the stock over the next 12 months. The firm cut its 12-month price target on the company to $165 from $187. The move made Goldman’s target the lowest of the major Wall Street banks…
MacDailyNews Take: The U.S. SEC should get up off its fat collective ass and ask why an analyst for a major bank cannot manage to call Apple and ask for clarification before negatively hitting the company’s stock price with unsubstantiated FUD that could have been cleared up in a 30-second phone call to Apple CFO Luca Maestri’s assistant’s assistant.
Furthermore, if he hasn’t already, Apple CEO Tim Cook should get Goldman Sachs’ CEO David M. Solomon on the phone and ask him why, if he likes all of the business Apple is funneling to his company with Apple Card, is he employing an abject moron to analyze Apple? After he sputters nonsense, ask him if he’d like to continue to enjoy all of the business Apple is funneling to his company with Apple Card. Our suggested closing line: “Enough is enough, David.” (click)
Hey, did Goldman hold a massive short position on AAPL? Does Goldman hold Netflix shares? If so, how many? What are Hall’s personal holdings, if any? Those are some other interesting questions among many that the SEC might want to look into as well.
Is Goldman Sachs’ analyst Rod Hall just a wildly overpaid incompetent cretin or is something else going on here with his serial negative calls on Apple that turn out to be quite wrong? Is Hall just stupid or is he stupid like a fox?
As we wrote back in July when Hall claimed – erroneously again – that Apple’s App Store growth was slowing dramatically (Apple revealed less than two weeks later that the company had actually achieved a new third quarter revenue record for the App Store; Apple was especially pleased with a double-digit increase in services driven by strong growth from the App Store in China):
Given his limited reasoning capabilities, we doubt that, if pressed, Rod Hall would be able to analyze his way out of a wet paper bag. — MacDailyNews, July 17, 2019
[Thanks to MacDailyNews readers too numerous to mention individually for the heads up.]