Apple’s top retail executive to leave amid iPhone sales slowdown
- Angela Ahrendts, head of Apple’s retail and online stores, seeks ‘new personal and professional opportunities’
- The former CEO of British luxury fashion house Burberry joined Apple in 2014
Apple’s top retail executive is stepping down amid a slowdown in iPhone sales that has raised doubts about the technology giant’s future growth prospects.
The shake-up announced on Tuesday ends Angela Ahrendts’ five-year stint overseeing the company’s network of 506 Apple Stores and e-commerce operations. She will remain with Apple until April.
Apple did not give a reason for Ahrendts’ departure, saying only that she was leaving “for new personal and professional opportunities”.
She is being replaced by Deirdre O’Brien, a long-time Apple executive who also runs the company’s human resources department. During her 30 years at Apple, O’Brien also helped gauge product demand.
That issue has become a problem now that customers are holding onto their current iPhones longer instead of buying the latest models. It is one reason Apple posted disappointing iPhone sales during the past holiday shopping season.
Although Apple sells iPhones and other products, such as the iPad and Mac computer, through a wide variety of merchants, its own elegantly designed stores have become a pivotal outlet, especially during the first few weeks after a new device hits the market.
“It was clear that Apple needed new strategies and a potential change on this front to catalyse demand in and outside the all-important retail stores,” Wedbush Securities analyst Daniel Ives said.
Ahrendts, 58, joined Apple amid great fanfare in 2014 after chief executive Tim Cook persuaded her to leave a glamorous job running the fashion brand Burberry.
To lure her away, Apple gave Ahrendts company stock valued at US$70 million in 2014. In her last full year at Apple, she received a compensation package valued at US$26.5 million, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Ahrendts’ arrival at the Cupertino, California-based company coincided with the roll-out of the Apple Watch, which the company designed to be a fashion statement in addition to a wearable piece of technology.
While at Apple, Ahrendts engineered renovations of high-profiles stores in San Francisco, New York, Chicago and other cities in an attempt to transform them into hip places to hang out while shoppers checked out the company’s latest innovations. Her lofty description of the stores as the equivalent of “town squares” became the subject of derision among some analysts and media commentators.
