Apple Investor Weekly works to curate some of the more relevant articles and information related to the company’s financial outlook.
This week it contains information iPhone 6 sales being halted in Beijing, what announcements at WWDC are financially important, an update on the App Store vs. Google Play and two analysts expressing concerns about the iPhone.
With Friday’s closing price of $95.33 the shares were down for the week ($3.50 or 3.5%) and underperformed the S&P 500 which was down (1.2)% and the NASDAQ’s decline of (1.9)%.
Maybe Carl Icahn was right
Carl Icahn announced that he had sold his Apple stock on April 28 due to concerns about China and two days after the company announced its March quarter results. While China had recently forced Apple to shut down iTunes Movies and iBooks these were very small portions of the company’s business.
However this past Friday it came to light that the Beijing Intellectual Property Office in Beijing had ruled that Apple had to stop selling the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus in Beijing which led to the stock being down $2.22 or over 2% on Friday.
Apple told multiple news organizations that “The reports aren’t accurate. Here’s our comment: iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus as well as iPhone 6s, iPhone 6s Plus and iPhone SE models are all available for sale today in China. We appealed an administrative order from a regional patent tribunal in Beijing last month and as a result the order has been stayed pending review by the Beijing IP Court.”
While it appears that iPhone sales shouldn’t be impacted it does reinforce the concern that various China government agencies could change the rules that Apple has to play by. But keep in mind that since Apple’s suppliers have tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of employees if the government were to significantly decrease the company’s sales it would directly affect its citizens.
WWDC hit its low expectations
Apple held its annual Worldwide Developers and there weren’t many surprises. Here is a link to The Next Web’s overview of the conference. Probably the biggest announcement from a financial perspective is that Apple Pay will be on the desktop with OS X Sierra. Additionally the company announced that it was making Siri, iMessage and Maps open to third party developers.
Apple’s App Store generating almost twice as much as Google Play
App Annie released an analysis that Apple’s App Store generates 90% more revenue than Alphabet’s Google Play even though Google Play had twice as many downloads in the March quarter. App Annie also calculated that time spent on Apps worldwide has more than doubled since the March 2014 quarter.
By: Chuck Jones (Forbes).
Photo: Investors.com
Review: Emerging Market Formulations & Research Unit, FLAGSHIP RECORDS.
For The #FacebookTeam