Turns out there’s an easy way to handle your company’s poor earnings report: Just blame Apple!
“JB Hi-Fi clobbered by a falling iPad” (no link but tip o’ the antlers to Gwilym Lucas).
Who is responsible for the 7 per cent fall in JB Hi-Fi’s share price? The real culprit is Apple.
Other things Apple is responsible for: slow lines at the post office, the inexplicably weak coffee at the donut place and, well, everything else.
More specifically, the fall in sales of Apple’s iPad is the single biggest reason that JB Hi-Fi’s revenue numbers were soft in the final quarter of 2014 and fell in July.
Really? It’s that dependent on iPad sales? Is that a great business model?
Those who keep a watch on Apple will have known already that their tablet sales were very sluggish.
JB Hi-Fi does not, apparently, keep a watch on Apple.
Stores like JB Hi-Fi rely on demand for innovative products to keep sales growth bubbling along but recently Apple’s tablet sales have been disappointing.
And since only Apple can provide innovative products … well, there you are. QED.
Look at the wearables market right now. All these companies are stumbling around like a drunk elk in a rowboat, waiting and hoping that Apple enters the market and shows them what they should be doing.
On Monday, JB Hi-Fi’s chief executive Richard Murray noted Apple’s latest quarterly figures showed revenue from iPads was down by 23 per cent.
From the previous quarter. It was down 7.6 percent from prior year, but when making excuses be sure to use the numbers that most favor you.
The trouble for JB Hi-Fi is that the slump in tablet sales (and iPad sales in particular) is largely responsible for a 3.2 per cent drop in sales revenue and 5.5 per cent fall in like-for-like sales in July 2014.
Oh, wait, is it a slump in “tablet sales” or iPads? Very confusing. The title says “iPad.” So, to be clear, JB Hi-Fi does sell other things than iPads, right? Actually, it sells all kinds of electronics. Including the Microsoft Surface, but that thing’s selling like hotcakes so there’s no point in mentioning that.
There are those that consider it highly sensitive to online disruptive players, given the company was traditionally heavily weighted towards CD and DVD sales.
And now its all-iPad lineup.
Then there are those that credit it with being one of the best-managed retail groups in the country. It is clearly working hard to adapt its product mix …
It now sells the iPad mini and the iPad Air!
Do lower sales of Apple products have downstream (and upstream) effects on other vendors? Sure. Is it fair to blame all of your problems on Apple? No.