Apple Insider’s Daniel Eran Dilger writes:
Every January, Japan’s Nikkei newspaper unloads a report suggesting that Apple is scrambling to slash production of its newest iPhone because of disappointing sales. Every year that report has been false, and every year the tech media falls for it.
Nikkei is notorious in the investing community, it’s about time they were called out on their iPhone reporting.
Another Nikkei iPhone related botch: independent (former Nikkei) reporter Tsutsumu Ishikawa broke the iPhone 7/Apple Pay Japan story in the JP press via Nikkei August 20, 2016. His story was later picked up in the English press by Bloomberg, without credit I might add.
What’s interesting is that Nikkei internal reporters then published their own story saying that Apple Pay Japan would not arrive until iPhone 8 due in ‘spring 2017’ which was blown out of the water at Apple’s iPhone 7 announcement. Of course that article no longer appears on any searchable Nikkei site but a post dated 9/7/2017 on LiveDoor News refers to it.
If you want to think the worst, you can see the Nikkei ‘fake news’ as pure market manipulation. More than one Nikkei reporter has been caught on insider trading so it’s not far-fetched.
But there is a much darker side. In December a former Nikkei newspaper delivery subcontractor ‘committed suicide’ in a men’s room at Nikkei Headquarters. The police reports said he doused himself with kerosene and set himself on fire.
This event by itself is odd and disturbing but there are several hush-hush low-level law suits going on between newspaper delivery subcontractors and large newspaper companies. The basic story on that is Nikkei and Asahi are accused of dumping newspapers on subcontractors to inflate delivery numbers (which are declining) to keep newspaper advertising rates from falling.
In that context the Nikkei building suicide sounds like something out of a Martin Scorsese directed Yakuza movie.
It’s probably not far-fetched either.
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