Neil Hughes
While a report about Apple supplier Pegatron this week claimed demand for the iPad mini has been softening, the company's CEO has revealed in a follow-up that he said nothing of the sort.
Philip Elmer-DeWitt of Apple 2.0 reached out to Pegatron Chief Executive Jason Cheng via e-mail after Bloomberg ran a report claiming demand for the iPad mini was falling. Cheng said after his company's Institutional Investors conference, one reporter from the publication approached him "trying to dig out detail numbers about some specific product."
"I clearly refused to comment on specific products, nor customers, even though he continued with other questions," Cheng said. "I did say those words that he quotes me in the article… but I did not say anything associated with any specific products."
The Pegatron CEO wrote off the piece by author Tim Culpan as "speculation," rather than based on anything he actually said.
The original Bloomberg story gained attention on Wednesday after it claimed that Pegatron said its revenues were negatively affected by waning demand for Apple's iPad mini. Pegatron's first-quarter profits were up more than 80 percent year over year, but Culpan's report focused on the fact that the supplier expects its second-quarter consumer electronics revenue to be down sequentially as much as 30 percent.
The media has been following Apple's key suppliers very closely in recent months as the company's growth has slowed. Market watchers pointed to weak results at companies like Cirrus Logic as negative signs for Apple.
Last month, Apple reported its first year over year profit decline in a decade, falling roughly 18 percent to $9.5 billion.
The intense focus on bits of information from Apple's supply chain led company CEO Tim Cook to warn investors in January that attempting to interpret such data is not a wise approach. Cook noted that the supply chain is complex, as Apple has multiple sources for various components, and that various factors — such as production yields and supplier performance — can skew the data.
"Even if a particular data point were factual, it would be impossible to interpret that data point as to what it meant for our business," he said.
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32 Comments
Does anyone seriously pay attention to this noise? It's become almost as bad as all the analyst fluff.
Wow, you just got love the media, they just make shit up as they go along (I'm referring to Bloomberg here).
So much negative press on Apple, and most of it must be either written by idiots or evil stock manipulators.
Like the report in the Wall St Journal in January, where the guy said "iPhone 5 orders in the Christmas quarter cut from 60 to 30 million" when nobody was expecting more than 30 million in the first place, they only sold 47 million total for all the iPhones.
http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/01/14/wsj-apple-cuts-iphone-5-component-orders-in-half-due-to-weak-demand
I am starting to move over to the conspiracy theory camp, I think that somebody was trying to manipulate the stock all spring, and despite the terrible job that they did the bovine investors trashed the stock price. Nice to see that the trend has changed though, I don't think that they can issue reports like this and still get any reaction.
[quote name="e1618978" url="/t/157444/pegatron-ceo-refutes-report-about-waning-demand-for-apples-ipad-mini#post_2324263"]So much negative press on Apple, and most of it must be either written by idiots or evil stock manipulators. [/quote] AppleInsider must share some of the blame, too. After all, there is such a thing as fact checking.
Didn't stop AI and others from reporting it and people commenting on it as though it was fact. I was always skeptical because Apple suppliers never mention Apple products by name. If they didn they probably wouldn't be suppliers for much longer. Clearly Bloomberg had a story they wanted to write (iPad demand slowing) and were trying to bait the Pegagtron CEO in to saying something that would fit their meme. He didn't do it, but they were able to twist his words to make it look like he did. Shameful. :no: