Remember how earlier this month a series of rumors about order cuts on Apple products caused AAPL to drop into a tailspin? During yesterday’s quarterly earnings call, Tim Cook took the time to address those rumors. Macworld has put together an excellent transcription of all of his comments, but I’ll just pull out the relevant bit:
Let me make one additional point on this: I know there’s been lots of rumors about order cuts and so forth, and so let me just take a moment to make a comment on these. I don’t want to comment on any particular rumor, because I would spend my life doing that, but I would suggest it’s good to question the accuracy of any kind of rumor about build plans. And I’d also stress that even if a particular data point were factual, it would be impossible to accurately interpret the data point as to what it meant for our overall business, because the supply chain is very complex, and we obviously have multiple sources for things. Yields might vary, supplier performance can vary, the beginning inventory positions can vary, I mean there’s just an inordinately long list of things that would make any single data point not a great proxy for what’s going on.
In other words, even if the rumors were true they were a single, isolated data point, presented without context. And that was enough to cause a major drop in Apple’s share prices. If that isn’t ludicrous, then I don’t know what is.
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