The technology giant is in crisis: Why is everything going wrong at Apple?

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Apple shares have been falling for several months. The stock has lost almost 6 percent of its value since the beginning of the year. On Tuesday, Apple hit a four-month low. The paper was currently trading at $175. At the same time, the Nasdaq technology stock market has gained 10 percent in value since the beginning of the year.

Why is a Silicon Valley company failing so much? There are several reasons for this:

Apple is now facing its first antitrust fine. The EU Commission imposed a competition fine of 1.8 billion euros on the company. The reason: Apple is said to have exploited its position of power and failed to inform its users about paying cheaper for integrated music subscription.

The company is said to have been collecting an additional 30 percent commission from its customers for almost a decade. The penalty is the result of an investigation launched following a complaint by Swedish streaming service Spotify.

This is the third largest fine ever imposed by the EU competition authority. The highest penalty was a $4.1 billion fine imposed on Google in 2018 for leveraging its market power in the Android operating system.

The iconic iPhone phone accounts for nearly half of Apple’s sales. In September last year, Apple launched the iPhone 15, the latest member of the series. Just a few days after launch, users complained about devices overheating; In some cases, the iPhone shut down on its own. Apple devices have this feature built-in to protect the mobile phone or tablet from damage caused by overheating.

The company announced in its fourth-quarter earnings call that iPhone 15 sales surpassed those of the iPhone 14 series last year. Sales still fell 1 percent to $89.5 billion in the latest quarter.

Finally, interest in the company is gradually decreasing as investors look for profitable business models. This includes projects that involve the use of artificial intelligence (AI).

You almost never hear from Apple in the AI ​​business, while competitors are already running various projects in this field. Microsoft has already integrated AI assistance Copilot into its Word, Powerpoint and Excel services, Google has launched a new chatbot with Gemini, and Facebook’s parent company Meta has not been idle with its Llama-2 language model. This means that investors are increasingly moving away from Apple and towards competition.

One of Apple’s hopes for artificial intelligence was to develop its own electric car. CEO Tim Cook once called it “the mother of all AI projects.” The Silicon Valley company recently had to announce that it was terminating the project.

Approximately 2,000 employees involved in the project will be newly integrated into the company’s artificial intelligence department. Apple invested in more than 30 AI start-ups last year and plans to introduce its new iOS 18 operating system in June.

The best hope for Apple now is VR glasses Apple Vision Pro, a portable computer that looks and wears like ski goggles (Blick tested it). According to analysts, more than 200,000 glasses were sold after just 10 days. The numbers show that Apple expected great interest: on the first day of sales, the company hired more staff.

Source :Blick