Mark Gongloff, Columnist

Apple Comes Clean, Leaves Investors Stuck in the Mud

It sure took a long time for a corporate icon to embrace transparency.

January 3, 2019 at 9:29 PM UTC

Mark Gongloff is a Bloomberg Opinion editor and columnist covering climate change. He previously worked for Fortune.com, the Huffington Post and the Wall Street Journal.

Back when Apple was looking up.
Photographer: Eric Thayer/Getty Images North America

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America’s corporate sweetheart had a bad day. Apple Inc. stock plunged 10 percent to early-2017 lows, shaving about 100 points off the Dow Jones Industrial Average all by itself. Live by the Apple, die by the Apple.

Last night, the company cut its revenue outlook, citing Chinese economic weakness, and CEO Tim Cook declared the smartphone market a shell of its former self. But none of this should have been such a shock to investors, writes Shira Ovide: China’s economy has been in trouble for a while, though Apple executives declared everything fine as recently as November. Yet Apple has been whistling past the smartphone-market graveyard for years, writes Shira, who has herself been warning of it all along, with charts like this one: