Pulling a Daisuke Wakabayashi ⇥ blogs.wsj.com

Daisuke Wakabayashi in a post for the Wall Street Journal’s Digits blog titled “Glimmers Emerge on Apple Watch Sales, and They’re Not Pretty”, July 31:

Mark Li, an analyst at Bernstein Research, said an ASE subsidiary told investors on a conference call that it didn’t reach its “break-even volume” of two million units per month in the second quarter. The ASE unit also said it didn’t expect to reach that level during the third quarter – a busy production period before the holiday sales season – and wouldn’t commit to reaching it during the fourth quarter either, according to Mr. Li.

“The shortfall of Apple Watch is a disappointment,” Mr. Li wrote in a note to clients. “We came in with a low expectation but below break-even still surprised us.” […]

ASE’s numbers suggest that the watch is not selling nearly as well as some analysts expected.

Daisuke Wakabayashi in a post today:

Apple Inc. sold more watches in their first quarter of availability than it did iPads or iPhones. So why are people eager to call it a bust?

I don’t know why, but it should be pointed out that Wakabayashi is in control of that. He can choose to not drive the narrative that it isn’t selling very well. But he won’t, just like he blamed “the story line” for his series of articles that drove the narrative of Samsung dominating Apple, only to have to recant on that narrative shortly thereafter.