Change in iPhone sales disclosure jars Apple investors

SAN FRANCISCO Apple’s faithful customers aren’t snapping up iPhones quite as enthusiastically as anticipated heading into the crucial holiday shopping season.

But the latest models costing $1,000 and more are popular enough to keep propelling profits ever higher for the world’s most prosperous company.

The mixed bag emerged in the quarterly results Apple released Thursday amid jitters about how the company and the rest of the technology industry will fare in the face of myriad threats to growth. Those include increased government regulation, the escalating U.S. trade war with China and the spectre of rising interest rates crimping economic growth.

Apple’s performance for the July-through-September period and its revenue outlook for holiday season evidently weren’t enough to ease investors’ concerns.

The Cupertino, California, company rattled Wall Street even more by unexpectedly announcing that it will no longer disclose the number of iPhones it sells each quarter, beginning with the current period ending in December.

“This is a bit of a gut punch for everyone used to more transparency,” said Wedbush Securities analyst Daniel Ives.

Apple’s stock dropped almost 7 per cent to $207.67 in extended trading after all the news came out.

Other major smartphone makers don’t reveal their quarterly shipments of their devices either, but Apple has broken down its iPhone numbers ever since the phone’s debut 11 years ago. The abrupt change in policy raised suspicions that management might be trying to mask a downturn in the popularity of the product that generates most of Apple’s profits.

The change apparently was triggered by Apple’s frustration with investors’ fixation on its iPhone sales while glossing over other key areas, such as the robust growth in its services division that collects commissions on app sales and handles subscriptions to its music-streaming service.