Investors bristle while Apple's iPhone data go in the direction of its headphone jacks

(Reuters) – The first Apple Inc. company took away the headphone jack of its iPhones. Then he removed the home button.

And now, he has removed a closely monitored performance metric that has been disclosed to investors for 20 years.

The Californian company based in Cupertino, California, announced Thursday that it will no longer report unit sales data for its iPhone, iPad and Mac computer products, the latter being distributed since 1998. Analysts and investors these figures to calculate the average selling price. price of Apple devices and evaluate the health of the company.

According to Apple, the data is less relevant to the strength of its business, as customers offer bundled deals, such as an iPhone paired with its AirPods wireless headphones, as well as paid subscription services such as & nbsp; Apple Music for listening to songs and iCloud storage for photos. Analysts were skeptical.

"Typically, companies stop reporting metrics as soon as they are about to turn. It's not a good idea for Apple, "said analyst Walter Piecyk of BTIG Research.

This operation was expensive for Apple, which allowed to send shares down about 7% in transactions after normal business hours. They then moved to $ 207.81, about 6.5% lower than their previous closing.

"Apple is a complex business with many moving parts," said analyst Ivan Fienseth of Tigress. "I think they have to give more transparency to their shareholders and not less."

But now, Apple will provide cost of sales data for its product and service activities, which will allow investors to assess a gross margin for both. In the past, Apple only gave an overall gross margin figure for the company.

The new numbers are important for two reasons. First, they will show how much Apple's hardware business is really lucrative. More importantly, they provide for the first time information on the margins of Apple's Services business, which reached $ 10 billion in the fourth quarter of its fiscal year, up 17%.

Most of the fastest growing Apple companies use a subscription, like its Apple Music service at $ 9.99 a month. And investors tend to value underwriting activities by combining their revenue growth rate and margins – information that will now be available to Apple's investors, said Tien Tzuo, managing director of Zuora Inc., a company that helps underwriting companies track their finances.

But a problem that Apple investors will face is the fact of not knowing what is the composition of the margins in the service sector. Some items, such as iCloud storage, are probably lucrative, but others, such as Apple Music, are probably less so because Apple has to pay the cost of music licenses and competes with its competitor Spotify Technology SA.

"You would give greater importance to the music industry with a multiple (business figure) closer to Spotify, and to the cloud sector with a multiple (subscription software)," Tzuo said. "It would be nice to have an idea of ​​the rapid growth of business."