Bored of tech companies that spend amounts of money so big they’re meaningless to you, and doing so while talking like messiahs? Here’s a company that’s planning to rake in an unimaginable amount of money instead, but without so much fanfare: Apple. The world’s greatest quadrilateral prism manufacturer is expecting, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, to have its “first-ever $140 billion quarter” this holiday season.
This wasn’t one of Gurman’s trademarked leaks, but a closer analysis of something Apple Chief Financial Officer Kevan Parekh said while on a conference call last week that was mostly about tepid sales in China this past quarter: the company’s holiday bounce-back is expected to show sales growth of 10% to 12%. That’s perhaps twice the 6% growth Wall Street analysts had predicted, and would be Apple’s “best iPhone quarter ever.”
If you’re reading this and saying to yourself “I can barely pay my bills, and neither can anyone else I know. How is Apple going to make all this money?” here’s some context: Where the United States is concerned, this projection means rich people are going to be buying a lot of Apple products over the holidays. It’s always the case that consumers with disposable income spend more, but right now, with the majority cutting spending due to inflation and wage stagnation, places where people with normal incomes go in person to spend money—like Chipotle—are dying, and the strong consumer economy is propped up to an unusual degree by the spending habits of the rich.
Apple’s retail stores are decidedly not in the same category as Chipotle, and according to Gurman, Apple stores are “preparing for an ‘overnight’” starting on Nov. 11. An “overnight” is a bit of Apple-ese that means rearranging the gadgets and perhaps putting up new marketing materials. There isn’t some new Apple product dropping to go along with this overnight, so, Gurman notes, “it’s more likely related to setting up stores for the holiday season.”
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