1-3-19

Is Trump under a witches spell, some sort of mind control? Have you noticed that he doesn’t even look the same lately. Why does he have to delete tweets due to misspellings then re-do his tweets? What is going on?

PLUS

Auto sales have been declining for a while, they used channel stuffing to hide the fact that they weren’t selling cars, now it is completely noticeable so the automakers will no longer report monthly sales.

Construction workers are being let go.

Manufacturing is declining along with the stock market.

Apple declines and many other companies will decline. Trump used the Tariffs to bring revenue,even the playing field and have companies stock up on supplies.

The Fed is trying to save face by saying they might not raise rates in 2019. The Fed is the target and the MSM is trying to convince everyone that the Fed needs to be independent.

AND

Tech giant Apple is set for its worst day in over sixteen years as its stock dropped over 9% due to what CEO Tim Cook blames as poor iPhone sales in China. Correspondingly, the plunge caused the DOW to drop 500 points, prompting expectations of a slowing global economy. Also, #Democrats intensified their “resistance” movement against President Trump on their first day back in Congress while Nancy #Pelosi’s daughter warned that her mother is able to cut the head off of her opponents. 

Did You Miss It, Trump Just Telegraphed A Message To [DS] & Anons 

X22Report

Do You See What Is Happening, If Not You Need To Get Prepared

X22Report

Apple blames China for lower revenue

RT   #Apple is cutting revenue expectations for the first time in 16 years. The tech giant says slowing sales in China are to blame, the news almost immediately affected the markets in Europe and Asia. On #WallStreet dipping apple shares weighed heavy on many other tech stocks. Former CFTC commissioner Bart Chilton, host of “Boom Bust” joins Steve Malzberg to share his insights.

QAnon: They Want Us DIVIDED

People cleaner

Trump Twitter Storm

SpaceShot76

#Amazon, Apple need to participate for #technology to keep leading this market higher: Market analyst

Fox Business   Disruptive Tech Research founder Lou Basenese and Altium Wealth Portfolio Manager Michael Lee on the outlook for Apple and the state of the overall tech sector.

Apple sales alert: Should tech giant have seen it coming?

Problems in China have taken a bite out of Apple’s expected revenues – but could the company’s wider business be turning sour?

Apple’s shock cut to its sales forecast is a dramatic move that has raised more questions than answers.

One is whether the problems in China cited by Apple are going to hurt other companies doing business there.

Another is whether Wall Street, which marked the shares down by 7.7% in after-hours trading, should have seen this coming.

The biggest, though, is whether the Californian tech giant is trying to use problems in China as an excuse for a wider downturn in its fortunes.

On the face of it, Apple’s failure to hit the sales it had earlier predicted are entirely down to the situation in China, with Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, noting that “most of our revenue shortfall to our guidance and over 100% of our year-on-year worldwide revenue decline, occurred in Greater China across iPhone, Mac and iPad”.

Mr Cook further noted that sales during the quarter in a number of countries, including the US, Canada, Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and South Korea, hit record levels.

Yet this warning will merely emphasise to the company’s critics that Apple has been overly dependent on the iPhone for years.

Image:Apple phones are more expensive than many rival handsets

Apple became the world’s first company to enjoy a stock market valuation of more than $1tn in August last year but, since the shares peaked on October 3, they have lost almost a third of their value.

That decline, arguably, was exacerbated when, in November, the company said that it would stop reporting how many iPhones, iPads and Macs it has sold on a quarterly basis.

Arguing that the number of units sold in any 90-day period was not necessarily representative of how strong the business was on an underlying basis, Mr Cook told analysts: “If you go to the market and push your cart up to the cashier…it doesn’t matter a lot how many units are in there, in terms of the overall value of what’s in the cart.”

That was a tacit recognition that, for some time now, Apple has been compensating for slower sales of iPhones, in particular, by raising prices.

Investors now fear that the new policy of non-disclosure will disguise the extent to which this has been going on and particularly in view of the fact that, as its products are some of the highest on the market, Apple does appear exposed should consumers start drawing in their horns.

There are also wider issues with the smartphone market that appear to be hurting Apple.

Consumers in developed economies are holding onto their existing phones for longer and putting off upgrading them because mobile phone operators are not subsidising the price of handsets to the extent that once they did.

Another factor is that, last year, Apple cut battery replacement charges following damaging revelations that it had been slowing down processor speeds in some older iPhone models.

Image:China’s Huawei has leapfrogged Apple in the smartphone market

That resulted in a number of customers opting to replace their battery rather than upgrade their iPhone to a newer version.

In China, specifically, other factors have wounded Apple – and not just the trade war with the US that Mr Cook cited in his letter to investors.

Chinese consumers have been opting in increasing numbers for smartphones made by local rivals, such as Huawei, which in July last year leapfrogged Apple to become the world’s second-largest smartphone provider after Samsung.

Some of that may reflect Chinese consumers turning on Apple, as a prominent American brand, because of the trade war.

Crucially, though, this slowdown represents the continuation of a trend that began some time ago.

Apple’s phones are not only more expensive than a lot of local rivals, in some cases, nearly three times as costly.

Huawei phones, in particular, are proving more popular because they are perceived as enjoying better connectivity.

Nor is it only Huawei which has been taking market share in China from Apple: the company has also been outflanked by Vivo, Oppo and Xiaomi, the latter of which, on a global scale, is now breathing down Apple’s neck as the world’s fourth-largest player.

And there is also evidence to suggest that Chinese smartphone consumers are less loyal to the brands of handset makers than those elsewhere.

American and European consumers, when replacing their iPhone, tend to opt for another iPhone.

In China, the vast popularity and near ubiquity of WeChat – a messaging, social media and payments app – means it is less traumatic to switch from one operating system like Apple’s iOS to the likes of Google’s Android, which is widely used in rival handsets such as those made by Samsung.

All of this means that from 2015, when it was the third largest player in the Chinese market with a share of 12.5%, Apple fell to fifth place, with a share of just 7.8%, during the first nine months of 2018.

This may have repercussions for other companies selling to Chinese customers.

There is a growing body of evidence to suggest that, as the quality of local Chinese brands improves, they are growing sales more rapidly than their more established US and European counterparts across a range of products and services, whether that is food and drink, smartphones or even films.

But Apple does appear to have some very specific local market difficulties in China.

As to whether Wall Street should have seen this coming – well, with the shares having fallen by a third since the start of October, arguably it did.

Much of what was in Mr Cook’s letter to investors – the impact of the strong US dollar, the impact of constraints in its supply chain and tough year-on-year comparisons with the final three months of 2017, when the iPhone X was launched – was already factored in.

What did come as new news was the extent to which sales had slowed down in China.

The bigger point is not whether Wall Street should have seen this coming, but whether Apple itself should have.

It is all very well selling smartphones at $1,000 to comparatively wealthy consumers in the US and Europe, but consumers in emerging markets like China do not, for the most part, have that kind of money.

There was always going to be a day when iPhone sales stalled.

SKY NEWS

#X22Report #economy #Qanon #geopolitical #politics

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