Photo courtesy of CNBC.com
Apple announced in November that it will no longer disclose the number of iPhones sold in its quarterly reports. After the company’s growth was analyzed at 0 percent by CNBC, CEO Tim Cook made the decision to withhold earnings from all Apple products. The new policy was revealed at a quarterly conference call at the end of the fourth quarter in 2018.
"This is a little bit like if you go to the market and you push your cart up to the cashier, and she says, or he says, 'How many units you have in there?' It doesn't matter a lot how many units there are in there in terms of the overall value of the cart,” Cook said in a statement.
By no longer reporting the number of units sold the company may be able to stay out the headlines and the media.
Even though, in August 2018, Apple became the first American public company to be valued at one trillion dollars, according to CNN BUSINESS, in reality the company is actually selling fewer and fewer iPhones every year. In fact, since its last November peak, the company has since crashed another 35 percent.
Taking a closer look its evident the company is not producing steady revenue. The market value might suggest the company is thriving, but truthfully, despite price increases and profitable unit sales, the company has sold 14 million fewer iPhones since 2015, according to Forbes.
Tanisha Hardy, a FAMU graduate who currently owns an iPhone 8 plus, said, “Apple is a great company. When I was 13 I purchased my first cellphone, an iPhone 4. To be honest they’ve made a lot of improvements and every year they upgrade the iPhone. I even have the Apple Watch and iPad. I don’t think they’ll ever go out of business because every one I know has an iPhone.”
In 2011 the average price of an iPhone was $600. Today, a brand new iPhone X sells for $1,149, and that’s the cheapest model available. According to Forbes, that is a 500 percent increase from what the company was charging before the death of its co-founder Steve Jobs.
Jobs, known as Apple’s visionary leader, died from pancreatic cancer in 2011. One of the last major projects he was working on was the iPhone 4s design. Since his death the company is experiencing a global market slow-down in smartphone sales.
In recent years Apple has raised the prices on iPhones while selling fewer of them. According to fortune.com,the average selling price per phone had jumped from $618 to $793 in just a few short quarters. This probably explains why Apple decided to stop sharing its quarterly earnings. Investors were not happy with this new policy, the stock instantly plunged 7 percent hours after the announcement.
Cincinnati-based tech analyst Jim Suva told CNBC, “Some people may fear that this now means that the iPhone units are going to start going negative year over year because it’s easier to talk about great things and not show the details of things that aren’t great.”