Santa didn’t deliver as many iPhones as Apple shareholders would’ve liked this year.
That’s according to Sinolink Securities analyst Zhang Bin, who said in a Monday note to clients Apple might sell “only” 35 million iPhones in its first quarter of next year — which would come in nearly 12 million devices below Q4 shipments. In his note picked up by Bloomberg, Bin pointed to iPhone X’s $999 price tag as a reason for diminishing sales.
“After the first wave of demand has been fulfilled, the market now worries that the high price of the iPhone X may weaken demand in the first quarter,” said Bin.
It wasn’t just the Chinese firm forecasting a rough holiday season for Apple, either. U.S.-based JL Warren Capital is pegging sales at 25 million devices for the quarter, according to CNBC, with the firm saying iPhone X’s “high price point and a lack of interesting innovations” will do little to drive adoption. (Apparently the iPhone X’s facial recognition software, animated emojis, and its augmented reality-enabled apps aren’t exciting to JL Warren.)
The lowered expectations have spooked Wall Street on Tuesday, with shares of Apple trading down more than 2.5 percent to about $170.50. Still, even with the hit, the world’s biggest tech company has been on a strong run in 2017; shares of AAPL have jumped 47 percent since last Christmas.
6 Tech Giants Shaking Up News, From Jeff Bezos to Laurene Powell Jobs (Photos)
Tech leaders are increasingly intertwined with the news business. While some want to support old properties, one set out to destroy a new one. Here they are.
Jeff Bezos – Washington Post
The Amazon founder purchased the Washington Post in 2013 for $250 million in cash. President Trump has called the paper the “Amazon Washington Post.”
The Facebook co-founder purchased The New Republic in 2012, becoming executive chairman and publisher. However, he sold the venerable political magazine to Win McCormack in 2016, saying he "underestimated the difficulty of transitioning an old and traditional institution into a digital media company in today’s quickly evolving climate."
The eBay founder is a well-known philanthropist who created First Look Media, a journalism venture behind The Intercept. Inspired by Edward Snowden's leaks. Omidyar teamed up with journalists Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill and Laura Poitras to launch the website “dedicated to the kind of reporting those disclosures required: fearless, adversarial journalism.”
The PayPal co-founder doesn’t own a news organization, but he makes this list because he essentially ended one -- Gawker -- proving once again the power of an angry billionaire. Thiel secretly bankrolled Hulk Hogan’s sex-tape lawsuit against Gawker Media because he was upset that the website once outed him as gay. Hogan won the defamation lawsuit against the site that sent its parent company into bankruptcy, and Gawker.com is no longer operating.
OK, so Facebook isn’t technically a news organization… yet. However, the company is preparing to launch its much-anticipated lineup of original content later this summer, and there are also signs that it's on the verge of becoming an even bigger media platform.
Campbell Brown, Head of News Partnerships at Facebook, confirmed last week it’s developing a subscription service for publishers willing to post articles directly to Facebook Instant Articles, rather than their native websites.
Tech is increasingly intertwined with news, for better or worse
Tech leaders are increasingly intertwined with the news business. While some want to support old properties, one set out to destroy a new one. Here they are.
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