Apple is now banned from selling its latest Apple Watches in the US::Apple can no longer sell the Apple Watch Ultra 2 and Watch Series 9 in the US. The International Trade Commission issued an import ban on the devices that took effect on December 26th, 2023.
Maybe the sales figures were less than expected and will use this as an excuse to the board.
Well, if I was on the board or a shareholder, I would be much more pissed about patent infringment that should have been easy to prevent and hints at incompetence over lower than expected sales which is just hard to predict.
If you were an invester or board member, you wouldn’t care about the patent infringement - Apple has historically done this and you wouldn’t invest in the first place if you weren’t okay with it. This one’s just getting more eyeballs and actual repurcussions but they’ve paid off and bought out multiple companies over stuff like this.
Not about infringement as much as getting caught and not being able to sell the watches that were surely expensive to develop.
If I were an investor I would be much more lenient with the excuse that the market is saturated than the excuse that we’re too incompetent to even maintain a presence in the market.
Investors are not fans. They’re not going to take the nice sounding option, just because it’s the nice option. They will demand competence at the top and they won’t pussy foot around the issue. Especially with the amount of money the CEO is paid.
If he’s getting 100 bazillion dollars a year he better damn well do something for it and one of those things is not getting the company involved in a stupid lawsuit which has prevented sales of a highly profitable product in a highly lucrative market, when making it go away would have cost about 1/1000 of 1% of the Apple’s net income.