Apple’s downwardly revised earnings projections for the first quarter of 2019 have reportedly forced the company to consider reducing new hiring. According to a Bloomberg report, Apple intends to “cut back on hiring for some divisions” after recent signs of saturation in the iPhone market.
This announcement was apparently made by CEO Tim Cook at a senior staff meeting earlier in January. Details are still sketchy, and Cook has reportedly not yet decided which divisions would be affected by hiring cutbacks.
However, he did hint at the meeting that divisions such as AI will continue to hire at a rapid pace. He also tried to soften the blow for others by saying that a division’s hiring rate was not an indication of its importance.
According to Bloomberg, the meeting was between selected senior VPs, VPs, senior directors and various other managers. The senior VPs tried to portray the current bleak situation as “an opportunity for new innovation.”
It has to be noted at this stage that no mention was made of layoffs at this meeting, and according to the same report, Apple still plans to grow service divisions such as Apple Music to third-party platforms.
As we reported a while ago, Apple recently opened up Apple Music to various Amazon devices, making it possible to directly stream media from iPads and iPhones to television sets and also announced an iTunes video streaming application for Samsung televisions.
At the start of January 2019, Apple downwardly revised its earnings projections for the first quarter. The firm originally projected revenue for this period to come in at between $89bn and $93bn, but the figure has now been reduced to around $84bn.
Cook said a while ago that Apple still has a culture of innovation, and that the firm has an exciting services and product pipeline.