Strategy in TECH...
Cupertino, CA-based Apple, Inc. announced its fiscal first quarter results yesterday and it wasn’t a pretty picture. And although Wall Street acted with shock, no one should have been surprised as Apple had warned this would be a tough quarter back in January. Apple remains a huge and cash-rich company, but the deeper you dig into this latest report, the more obvious it becomes that there is a legitimate cause for concern.
Apple, Inc. is starting to look brown, bruised, and past its prime in wake of the surprising quarterly results that showed growth in sales of their bellwether iPhone product to be the slowest since the company launched the product category in 2007. Not only that, but the company forecast an overall sales decline for the first quarter of 2016 – their first sales decline since 2003. Reaction from Wall Street was swift with the price of Apple stock down more than 6% in mid-afternoon trading.
Apple, Inc. held their regularly scheduled September event today to announce new products – this time to introduce: a minor new Watch update, a more significant new bigger iPad they call the iPad Pro, a new Apple TV with a revamped user interface, and finally the new interim smartphone update – the iPhone 6s & 6s Plus. Using lots of exciting & cool music, dramatic video segments, and massive colorful images on a huge screen – presenters worked hard to milk applause from the Apple friendly crowd. But for us, most of these “innovations” were “meh” – more evolutionary than revolutionary.
The Financial Times reported this morning that Apple, Inc. will announce a new software solution for the connected home market at the Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco next week. The move follows a lot of activity in the connected home channel recently including: Control4 going public, Google acquiring Nest, Philips launching Hue (app controlled lighting), Belkin launching WeMo, Harman acquiring AMX…and now Apple seeking to bring it all together in the home.
Taiwan’s Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. Ltd. reported today that sales for the first quarter had dropped by 19 percent from the same period last year. Hon Hai, better known by the name of a large division called Foxconn, is a key supplier to Apple, Inc. and analysts point to this as another indicator of Apple’s slipping dominance of the smartphone business.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting today that unnamed sources are telling it that Apple has built and is testing a large screen, high definition television that it has worked closely with Asian suppliers to create. Most notably, these sources say that Apple worked closely with Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. (Foxconn) – it’s leading iPhone/iPad supplier – and Sharp Corp. – the troubled Japanese television company.
<December 28, 2011> We now can predict with a reasonable level of certainty two huge technology stories coming up in 2012. They may in fact turn out to be the biggest stories of the entire year. One is the impending public offering of Facebook, a story that will likely mean the minting of yet another Forbes billionaire, Mark Zuckerberg. But the story that many feel will be the biggest of the big is the impending launch of Apple’s long-rumored iTV. [Read more…] about Of Two Big Tech Stories in 2012, This One Will Likely Be the Biggest…and Scariest
