Apple Dismisses Reports on Supplier Order Cuts as Meaningless

Apple CEO Tim Cook directly addressed recent rumors about supplier order cuts, dismissing them as meaningless during the company's earnings call today.

I know there's been a bunch of rumors about order cuts and so forth. So, let me just take a moment to make a comment on this. I don't want to comment on any particular rumor because then I would spend my life doing that. I would suggest it's good to question the accuracy of any kind of rumor about build plans and also stress that even if a particular data point were factual it would be impossible to accurately interpret the data point as to what it meant for our overall business because the supply chain is very complex and we obviously have multiple sources for things.

Yields might vary, the supplier performance can very, the beginning inventory position can vary. There is just an inordinate long list of things that would make any single data point not a great proxy for what's going on.


The specific rumor he is liking referring to is likely a report from the WSJ that said Apple's orders for iPhone 5 screens for the January-March quarter have dropped to roughly half of what the company had previously planned to order.