Apple® today announced that this year is the last year the company will exhibit at Macworld Conference & Expo. The company also broke the news that Steve Jobs will not be presenting this year’s keynote. Instead, Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, will deliver the opening keynote for this year’s Macworld Conference & Expo, and it will be Apple’s last keynote at the show. The keynote address will be held at Moscone West on Tuesday, January 6, 2009 at 9:00 a.m. Macworld will be held at San Francisco’s Moscone Center January 5-9, 2009.
The company issued the following statement:
Apple is reaching more people in more ways than ever before, so like many companies, trade shows have become a very minor part of how Apple reaches its customers. The increasing popularity of Apple’s Retail Stores, which more than 3.5 million people visit every week, and the Apple.com website enable Apple to directly reach more than a hundred million customers around the world in innovative new ways.
Apple has been steadily scaling back on trade shows in recent years, including NAB, Macworld New York, Macworld Tokyo and Apple Expo in Paris.
Apple’s shares dropped more than 4% to $91 in after-hours trading following the announcement.
The news triggered fresh rumors about Jobs’ health; he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2003. It also sparked concern over the fate of Macworld, a show that attracted about 50,000 attendees this year in January. Jobs used that show to debut the MacBook Air, touted to be the thinnest laptop computer at the time.
“Their pulling out of Macworld is not a surprise,” said Tim Bajarin, principal analyst at Creative Strategies in Campbell, Calif. “They’ve been talking about it for two years. Trade shows do not deliver the same return on investment that they did in the past. And Apple is finding that their stores are much better at driving sales than a once-a-year shot at Macworld.”
Bajarin said the move put Macworld in a precarious position. “It’s going to make it much more difficult for Macworld to thrive without Apple as the anchor exhibitor,” he said.
Source: Apple.com
Source: latimesblogs.latimes.com – Alex Pham
Photo: AP/ Paul Sakuma
