Tim Cook to hold an all-hands meeting with troops following bombshell profit warning

After slashing Apple’s revenue guidance for the important holiday quarter by a whopping $7 billion amid a slowdown in China and iPhone sales deceleration, Tim Cook will hold an all-hands meeting with workers today to assuage any concerns they may have about the situation.

Mark Gurman, writing for Bloomberg:

Cook plans to address Apple staff about the situation on Thursday at an all-hands meeting where he will take questions from workers, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Apple must now look beyond the super-profitable iPhone because iPhone sales have peaked in a saturated smartphone market, but Gurman insists that the company shouldn’t rely on AirPods and Apple Watch because those products require an iPhone to function.

Apple needs to look beyond its core product. Smartphone sales have stagnated and are virtually unchanged worldwide the past two years. Under Cook, Apple has launched a few new types of products, including AirPods and Apple Watch. Both, however, are glued to the iPhone.

The company has talked about its services business as a significant new source of revenue—Cook said sales increased to $10.8 billion in the holiday quarter—but those are best used on an iPhone. Wholly new categories like self-driving car technology and augmented reality glasses still appear years away, while a major new iPhone for fifth-generation networks isn’t expected until 2020.

Quite the contrary, I think the Cupertino firm should double-down on its most popular iPhone-only accessories like AirPods and Apple Watch and make them work with Windows PCs and Android devices. Making iTunes compatible with Windows surely did the trick back in the iPod days, basically unlocking the 95 percent of the market for Apple.

Apple issued a revised revenue forecast due to a multitude of factors, including a broad slowdown in China, unfavorable foreign exchange rates, lack of carrier subsidies, the discounted iPhone battery replacement program and trade tensions between the US and China.

Apple will report earnings for the December 2018 quarter on Tuesday, January 29, at 2:00pm PT / 5:00pm ET. The company will hold a conference call with Wall Street analysts and investors on the same day (anyone can listen to the audio stream).

Given the gravity of the situation, iDownloadBlog anticipates this is going to one of the most interesting conference calls in recent Apple history.