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My intuition is that this is a supply chain / inventory management closure, not a virus risk closure. They have 509 stores in 25 countries (incl China). I don't
by totalZero 7y ago
My intuition is that this is a supply chain / inventory management closure, not a virus risk closure. They have 509 stores in 25 countries (incl China). I don't believe that they would close over 90% of those stores simultaneously due simply to generalized viral transmission risk.
I find it guileful that they announced the closure in the middle of the night at the end of the week, a day after having announced the opening of their four remaining China stores to great fanfare from the equity market.
- jonknee 7y agoThey are providing inventory to a bunch of other retailers and are continuing online sales, this really sounds like they don't want people coming in and touching the same piece of glass.
- totalZero 7y agoInventory is a lot easier to manage when you don't have to send it to 500 different sites and predict demand. If you're coming up short on inventory, the reasonable choice is to put it into one central repository and ship from there. There are several different configurations for each type of device, varying based on color, memory, and carrier. If they were only concerned about the virus, they would take the display models out of the showroom and continue to process pick-up orders. And they wouldn't shut down stores worldwide (ex-China). No health body has recommended worldwide retail shutdowns, and no competing device vendor has closed all of its stores worldwide (ex-China). This is a ramification of the factory shutdowns we saw in China several weeks ago.