Apple’s quarterly conference calls with Wall Street analysts can be tepid affairs, with little news or excitement. But that wasn’t the case on Thursday evening, as CEO Tim Cook and CFO Luca Maestri dropped a bit of a bombshell on the investment community. The surprise spooked shareholders and briefly pushed the Apple’s stock market value below $1 trillion for the first time since it crossed that symbolic threshold in August.
Initially on Thursday, Apple reported yet another quarter of strong financial results, though its warning that holiday season sales wouldn’t be as strong as Wall Street hoped disappointed investors.
That disappointment was magnified an hour or so later when CFO Luca Maestri dropped the bombshell. Reading off a list of reporting and accounting changes Apple would make in its next quarterly report, Maestri dryly added that the company had decided to stop disclosing exactly how many iPhones, iPads, and Mac computers it sold every quarter.
“As we have stated many times, our objective is to make great products and services that enrich people’s lives and to provide an unparalleled customer experience so that our users are highly satisfied, loyal and engaged,” he told the analysts, reading from the script. “As we accomplish these objectives, strong financial results follow. As demonstrated by our financial performance in recent years, the number of units sold in any 90-day period is not necessarily representative of the underlying strength of our business.”
Apple’s stock price, which had already slipped about 3% on the weak forecast in after-hours trading, quickly dropped as much as 7.5% on concern over what the reduced disclosure might signal. Though later, the drop moderated a bit and Apple’s value was sitting just above $1 trillion.
Analysts sounded less than pleased, saying investors may see the policy change as a way to avoid admitting that fewer iPhones are being sold. “You know, there will probably be a lot of pushback about not giving iPhone unit data,” Citigroup analyst Jim Suva said to Cook and Maestri on the call. “It sounds like you’re still going to give revenue data, but some people might fear that this now means that the iPhone units are going to start going negative year over year.”
Cook and Maestri pushed back, but ended the call somewhat abruptly after giving their responses to Suva. “This is a little bit like if you go to the market and you push your cart up to the cashier and she or he says ‘how many units you have in there,'” Cook explained. “It doesn’t matter a lot how many units there are in there in terms of the overall value of what’s in the cart.”