Apple’s earnings warning means CEO Tim Cook now has a major credibility problem

“Apple CEO Tim Cook and his management team should read the coverage of their mind-blowing warning to every investor on the planet on Apple News and then ask: ‘Should investors trust us right now? And, how can we regain that trust,'” Brian Sozzi writes for Yahoo Finance. “No doubt January 2, 2019 will go down as one of the worst days in Apple’s history… [it] amounts to a complete smashing down of the reset button on how Wall Street and the average investor views Apple.”
Cook and his management team “failed to keep it real with investors on what they were seeing in iPhone demand data late in 2018. Simply no longer providing unit sales data wasn’t enough of a signal to investors that something was wrong, bottom line,” Sozzi writes. “As a result, Apple’s stock could be ‘broken’ until credibility is restored.”
“Apple said in a filing released after market close Wednesday that it now sees first quarter revenue of about $84 billion. It previously anticipated $89 billion to $91 billion,” Sozzi writes. “But a little more than two months ago Cook and Apple Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri were singing from a different hymn sheet. Judging by their comments on Apple’s fourth fiscal quarter earnings call on November 1, Apple was in fine standing around the globe. Interest in new iPhones was running high.”
“The bottom line is that Cook & Co. temporarily must be viewed skeptically by Apple’s entire investor base. Stock analysts’s musings be damned. Cook & Co. must lay it all out on the table when the company officially reports earnings in coming weeks,” Sozzi writes. “If Cook & Co. don’t do these things, their new credibility problem will likely rage on for most of 2019.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Unfocused, hubristic mismanagement deserves comeuppance. Let’s hope the humiliation being heaped upon them today and in the days to come refocuses the minds in Apple’s C-suite as if Steve Jobs himself were once again standing before them demanding answers, excellence, and timely performance.
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