Oh, the stock market. Especially where Apple is concerned, the pundits and stock mavens behave like irrational children. They take rumor as fact, do little or no concrete research, and ignore common sense.
Today the stock of Apple and AT&T is down because AT&T reported that only 146,000 iPhones were activated in the first 24 hours of sales. One day. The phone went on sale at 6pm on Friday, June 29th. This means that every iPhone sold was sold after the close of business on Friday at the end of the quarter. All of those sales will end up being reported in the third quarter. But of course, the trigger-happy pundits want the sales information NOW. So, AT&T provides activation information, which does not equate to sales information. Most pundits think that more than a half million iPhones were sold that weekend, which spans two business quarters. This doesn’t mean that half a million iPhones were activated within minutes of purchase, since they were designed to be activated by the end user at home — and it doesn’t take into account the fact that AT&T’s systems were overloaded because of the massive activations.
So how investors and pundits have decided that it was all a flop and accordingly started selling shares makes no sense to me at all.
I expect that pundits and analysts will be breathlessly waiting for Apple’s quarterly results call tomorrow, but then will go crazy when Apple doesn’t provide a bunch of information about iPhone sales — which I don’t think they will do for two reasons: first, because the vast bulk of iPhone sales happened in the current quarter and thus won’t be included in the second quarter results; and second, because Apple has already stated that they are accounting for iPhone revenues over a period of two years rather than immediately.
We already know these facts, and yet the analysts and pundits will conveniently ignore them and lambast Apple for not selling enough. Mark my words.
