William Gallagher
After Apple's warning in November about COVID issues, CEO Tim Cook still mainly blames manufacturing problems in China for why Apple sold "significantly less" of the iPhone 14 range than expected.
Speaking in an earnings call that revealed Apple missed its expected revenue target for the first time in four years, Cook blamed COVID for most of Apple's problems in the quarter.
"COVID-19 related challenges... significantly impacted the supply of iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max," said Cook, "[which] lasted through most of December."
"Because of these constraints, we had significantly less iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max supply than we planned," he continued, "causing ship times to extend far beyond what we had anticipated."
He also said that Apple's results were also affected by foreign currency exchange rates spawned by a strong dollar, and an overall challenging economy.
Cook says that if it were not for foreign exchange headwinds, the company "would have grown in the vast majority of the markets we track."
However, following defining why Apple had a tough iPhone quarter, Cook also said that "production is now back where we want it to be."
That production is chiefly at Foxconn's plant in Shenzhen, China, where COVID lockdowns drastically affected the company.
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8 Comments
China made 180 degree turn on zero Covid policy in early December. Pandemic followed and peaked in late December and early January. At the end of January pandemic has dropped to less than 10% of the peak.
Why do they call it "earnings miss" or "failed to meet expectations"?
Apple is just working on doing what they do, making great devices and providing innovative services.
Call it what it is. The prognosticators are pretty lame at making predictions.
Maybe a better benchmark would be how many (or few) employees were laid off?
There are literally many articles citing that Apple has having delays with iPhones due to COVID policies.
That's expected.
But if people gonna poke fun of Apple and exclaimed, "Apple is doomed!" they're idiots.