订阅

多平台阅读

微信订阅

杂志

申请纸刊赠阅

订阅每日电邮

移动应用

专栏 - 苹果2_0

富士康只要一咳嗽,苹果铁定已感冒?

Philip Elmer-DeWitt 2013年05月30日

苹果(Apple)公司内部流传着一个老笑话,那就是史蒂夫·乔布斯周围是一片“现实扭曲力场”:你离他太近的话,就会相信他所说的话。苹果的数百万用户中已经有不少成了该公司的“信徒”,而很多苹果投资者也赚得盆满钵满。不过,Elmer-DeWitt认为,在报道苹果公司时有点怀疑精神不是坏事。听他的应该没错。要知道,他自从1982年就开始报道苹果、观察史蒂夫·乔布斯经营该公司。
人们习惯通过供应商的表现来反推苹果的状况。最近,富士康高管称订单不充足,需要扩大客户群,分析人士马上联想到了苹果,称苹果现状不佳。但事实上,富士康是全球最大的电子产品制造商,除了苹果,它还有大量其他的客户。它们的表现同样会影响富士康的业绩。

来源:Asymco.com

    如果你觉得周二《华尔街日报》(Wall Street Journal)刊登的洛莱恩•卢克的文章《苹果承压,鸿海寻求多样化》(As Apple Feels Bite, Hon Hai Looks to Diversify)听起来有些耳熟,可能是因为最近我们听到了太多类似的论调。

    过去三周,很多报道将一切都归咎于苹果(Apple)的发展失去了“动力”,无论是哈佛大学(Harvard)清盘数百股苹果股票,还是夏普(Sharp)的复兴计划框架。(参见《商业通讯社的新语言癔症》(The business wires' new verbal tic.)一文。)

    当然,人们都完全有理由这样写:苹果经历了异常长期的新品空档期;苹果利润率已较历史高位回调了不少;上个季度,苹果出现了2003年以来首次盈利同比下滑,而且本季可能还会延续。

    但苹果最重要的iOS发货量(如上图显示)仍然继续保持着良好的增势。

    如果将下面这位未署名鸿海(Hon Hai)高管的话……

    “我们的产能已扩大到这样的规模,现有大品牌客户提供的订单增长又有限,我们需要积极扩大客户群来推动产量增长。”

    ……视为是特指苹果(就像卢克在周二《华尔街日报》报道中所做的那样),等于是忽视了鸿海或更为人所熟知的富士康(Foxconn)还有其他大品牌客户这一事实,这些大客户目前同样处境困难。

    以惠普(Hewlett-Packard)和戴尔(Dell)为例,这两家Window系统个人电脑生产商将组装工作分包给富士康。这部分业务怎么样?请看下图:

    If something sounded familiar about Lorraine Luk's headline in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal -- As Apple Feels Bite, Hon Hai Looks to Diversify -- it may be because we've heard that tune a lot lately.

    Just in the past three weeks, journalists have attributed to Apple's (AAPL) loss of "steam" everything from Harvard's divestiture of a few hundred Apple shares to the structure of Sharp's survival plan. (See The business wires' new verbal tic.)

    To be sure, one can legitimately write that Apple has had an unusually long stretch without a product launch. Or that its profit margins have pulled back quite a bit from their historic highs. Or that its earnings fell year over year last quarter for the first time since 2003, and are likely to do it again this quarter.

    But Apple's all-important iOS shipments, as the chart above shows, are still growing nicely.

    So to interpret this quote from an unnamed Hon Hai executive ...

    "As our production capacity has grown to such a large scale and existing major-brand customers offer limited order growth, we need to actively expand our client base to help increase our manufacturing volume."

    ... as referring specifically to Apple -- as Luk did in Monday's Journal -- is to ignore the fact that Hon Hai, better known as Foxconn, has other major-brand clients, and that most of them are hurting.

    Take Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and Dell (DELL), two Window's PC vendors that subcontract their assembly work to Foxconn. How's that business doing? See chart below:

来源:IDC

1 2 下一页

我来点评

  最新文章

最新文章:

中国煤业大迁徙

500强情报中心

财富专栏