FORTUNE -- If something sounded familiar about Lorraine Luk's headline in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal -- As Apple Feels Bite, Hon Hai Looks to Diversify -- it may be because we've heard that tune a lot lately.
Just in the past three weeks, journalists have attributed to Apple's (AAPL) loss of "steam" everything from Harvard's divestiture of a few hundred Apple shares to the structure of Sharp's survival plan. (See The business wires' new verbal tic.)
To be sure, one can legitimately write that Apple has had an unusually long stretch without a product launch. Or that its profit margins have pulled back quite a bit from their historic highs. Or that its earnings fell year over year last quarter for the first time since 2003, and are likely to do it again this quarter.
But Apple's all-important iOS shipments, as the chart above shows, are still growing nicely.
So to interpret this quote from an unnamed Hon Hai executive ...
"As our production capacity has grown to such a large scale and existing major-brand customers offer limited order growth, we need to actively expand our client base to help increase our manufacturing volume."
... as referring specifically to Apple -- as Luk did in Monday's Journal -- is to ignore the fact that Hon Hai, better known as Foxconn, has other major-brand clients, and that most of them are hurting.
Take Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and Dell (DELL), two Window's PC vendors that subcontract their assembly work to Foxconn. How's that business doing? See chart below:
What about Nintendo, Sony (SNE) and Microsoft (MSFT)? Their game consoles are also assembled in Foxconn's factories:
How about Amazon's (AMZN) Kindle readers? Foxconn builds those things too:
I suspect most of Foxconn's other clients would happy to switch places with a company whose sales can produce a growth chart like the one at the top of this page.
So if Foxconn is feeling "pain" -- as Luk writes in her lead paragraph -- perhaps a little more reporting would turn up better reasons than the "competition ... biting into Apple's market share."
Flush with $15 million from Nvidia and Kleiner Perkins, the $99 Kickstarter success story keeps making waves -- and it's not even out yet. Julie Uhrman talks to Fortune about fast-tracking Ouya, those harsh early reviews, and a rumored mobile device.
Still, when early units began shipping to some Kickstarter backers this past March -- just nine months after raising money on the site -- several tech blogs got their hands MORE
JP Mangalindan, Writer - May 9, 2013 7:04 AM ET
Households with broadband Internet access are increasingly piping Internet video to their TV sets, through a variety of devices.
FORTUNE -- We can examine the strategies of Netflix (NFLX) and Comcast (CMCSA) all we like, but the speed at which television moves off of cable and onto the Internet will be determined largely by what people decide to do in their living rooms. Now that they have the hardware and software MORE
Dan Mitchell, contributor - May 3, 2013 6:36 AM ET
Chipmaker AMD hasn't had it easy. Now three of tech's most powerful companies have embraced it for the long-term.
FORTUNE -- With its processors in 83% of PCs, Intel (INTC) overwhelmingly dominates traditional personal computing. But there's one area where the chip giant won't be winning any time soon: game consoles. If reports prove correct, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) could manage what its competitor hasn't: getting its chips into all three of MORE
JP Mangalindan, Writer - Apr 11, 2013 7:14 AM ET
With profits down, the company that spawned Mario desperately needs a hit. But is the Wii U it?
FORTUNE -- Can Nintendo do with the Wii U what it did with the Wii? When Nintendo launched that console in 2006, the oddly named system changed the way millions of players interacted with games with a controller that recognized gestures. This time, Nintendo aims to repeat that success, this time by including a MORE
JP Mangalindan, Writer - Nov 20, 2012 5:00 AM ET
Also: How Microsoft may be risking an $18 billion empire on Windows 8; Zynga's shares pop.
Nintendo slashes profit outlook [THE WALL STREET JOURNAL]
The Wii U, an overhaul of Nintendo's popular but aging Wii game machine, will test whether traditional videogame consoles can still prosper amid a technological shift that is providing consumers with vast options for games ranging from online personal-computer titles to free-to-play social games on smartphones. Not only is MORE
JP Mangalindan, Writer - Oct 25, 2012 12:35 PM ET
Nintendo has been trying to nose its way into the profitable digital format business. Will the traditional gaming firm be able to make the jump?
By Chip Lebovitz
FORTUNE –The gem of the video game industry these days is digital format sales -- games you can directly download from the web. After all, downloading is convenient and eliminates packaging and shipping costs that hurt profit margins. But if there's money to MORE
Oct 22, 2012 5:00 AM ETCompanies like Apple, IBM and Microsoft once stood in the shadow of much larger and more powerful Japanese electronics giants. Those days are long gone -- and, lately, it looks like they may never come back.
By Kevin Kelleher, contributor
"This country is in a war and some people understand it and some people are siding with the enemy."
FORTUNE -- Believe it or not, someone once wrote those paranoid words about MORE
May 25, 2012 10:40 AM ET
Fortune's curated selection of tech stories from the last 24 hours. Sign up to get the round-up delivered to you each and every day.
* Yesterday, Google (GOOG) announced changes to search engine results that will pull and promote content from its social network, Google+. Techcrunch columnist MG Siegler believes the move isn't completely unlike when Microsoft (MSFT) bundled Internet Explorer with Windows and argues it could be cause for antitrust concerns. (parislemon)
* Facebook began MORE
JP Mangalindan, Writer - Jan 11, 2012 3:30 AM ET
Fortune's curated selection of weekend tech stories. Sign up to get the round-up delivered to you each and every day.
"Yeah, Google's a great company, and I think we want to look at and learn from everything that they do. But at the same time, people have shared a lot on Facebook and have already told a lot of their life story on Facebook. And we think that we have MORE
JP Mangalindan, Writer - Dec 5, 2011 1:19 AM ET