As always, the dumbest things about quarterly reports are the emphasis on two-data-point “trends” and comparison to analyst predictions.
Hehe, yeah. The headlines basically depict a horse race: "Apple Edges Out Wall Street", but there's literally no race going on. Apple isn't trying to do better than analyst projections. Not only that, the data is for the performance of the business that ended a month ago. How can you race, when the event is already done? It's like predicting which team won the football match that happened a month ago.
It's also a "race" where everyone is cheating. There are definitely side channels that big institutional buyers of company's stock get. They definitely leak out to analysts. Apple definitely plays the game of keeping the financials as predictable and slow+steady as possible. Apple also knows within the first month of a quarter how the financial projections for the quarter are going, and if things are worse or better than predicted, big investors will know about it, whether through side channels or direct announcement if they are really bad.
So is the AppStore. It's what allows Apple to cover losses on music and TV until they can be made profitable, assuming that's what Apple wants. Perhaps they mean for them to be loss leaders for competition reasons. Who knows for sure? What we DO know is the profit from "Services" is massive and allows Apple room to experiment.
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It's also a "race" where everyone is cheating. There are definitely side channels that big institutional buyers of company's stock get. They definitely leak out to analysts. Apple definitely plays the game of keeping the financials as predictable and slow+steady as possible. Apple also knows within the first month of a quarter how the financial projections for the quarter are going, and if things are worse or better than predicted, big investors will know about it, whether through side channels or direct announcement if they are really bad.