When the iPX first launched the narrative was "holy shit this phone is flying off the shelves", since then OLED stock has been falling (really good time to buy tbh), apple cuts back production, and the narrative has gone sour.
What gives?
1. highest revenue ever from a new iPhone lineup
It's also the most expensive. Simply put, they could sell fewer iPhone Xs and still make more revenue simply because of the increased price.
So even with the highest revenue, it could still be lackluster in quantity sold, as well as what the profit is like.
2. [iPhone X] has been our top-selling iPhone every week since it shipped in November
It simply needs to sell more the other iPhones during the same time period. This makes sense, as it was released later than the iPhone 8. You could make the assumption that the majority of everyone that wanted an iPhone 8 would have bought one prior to the iPhone X being released.
For here, a better comparison would have been units sold of a new iPhone and if it beat that.
Again, I'm not suggesting it's a failure or a success, merely trying to look at the quote objectively and what it says, and what that really means.
As noted by @rjones [1], 2Q total units sold historically range between 50-52M.
If Apple had originally placed orders in Q218 for 40M iPhone Xs, then either a) iPhone X is 80% of all iPhone sales, which is hard to believe because of the current lineup diversity, or b) Apple expects total unit sales for 2Q18 to be above 80M, which is hard to believe because of 1Q18 guidance.
The better explanation is that Apple probably cut production for any number of reasons, but nowhere near as drastic as 50%. 20M is 40% of 51M, which would point to the iPhone X selling very well through 2Q18, and continuing to be the best-selling iPhone model.
Apple issued guidance for this quarter that they expected revenue to be $60-62b. Analysts expected revenue of $65.9b.
Stocks are priced on the expectation of the future, so the change in the expectation has probably had a negative effect on the price. As an individual investor (disclosure: I own a little AAPL) I think it is foolish to worry quarterly earnings and revenue forecasts. Yet it is what people write about. It is easier to write about quarterly earnings then it is to write about industry trends, in the same way it is easier to write about polls than it is to write about policy.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-01/apple-for...