Despite tepid earnings, revenues mostly down
Stacey Vanek Smith: Shares of Ford Motor are down a half a percent. The carmaker saw profits fall by more than half in the second quarter. Shares of Apple are nearly 4 percent after profits came in lower than expected mostly due to slowing iPhone sales.
We’ve got Josh Brown with us he’s a financial advisor at Fusion Analytics. Good morning, Josh.
Josh Brown: Good morning.
Vanek Smith: Josh, a rare bad earnings report from Apple, what do you make of that?
Brown: Yes, I think it’s important to look beyond the headline. Obviously they didn’t make expectations, but expectations are just that — it’s an amalgam of what 30 or 40 analysts had expected. If you look beneath the surface though, what you see is number one, the stronger U.S. dollar had an impact, number two Europe obviously is a drag, but they really didn’t have any issues in the U.S. or China. And then there are some more technical issues — things like the mig shift changed, they sell more iPad 2’s versus iPad 3’s, in the education channel that is lower margine they sell less iPhones because as everyone knows there is an iPhone 5 coming shortly, and the Apple consumer is well educated, they check on stuff like that before they buy.
Vanek Smith: So Josh, we’ve got a lot of companies posting earnings this week. What are these earnings telling us about the economy?
Brown: Yeah, really the broader story is not a good one. You can do a lot of things to juice earnings and to keep earnings growth keep going up, like productivity, like layoffs, like buy-backs, etc. You can’t really fake revenue, and what we are seeing with the S&P 500 companies that have reported so far — we are about 75 percent of the way through — is about a 50 percent miss rate on revenue expectations. That is pretty significant and it’s really across the board, it’s almost every industry. So if you are going to worry about something, I think Apple is probably not the thing to focus on, it’s the fact that there’s slowing all over the world and here in the U.S.
Vanek Smith: Josh Brown with Fusion Analytics. Thank you, Josh.
Brown: Thank you.
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