Apple’s glass supplier Corning warns that sales of smartphones and tablets have fallen | Tech Reddy

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When heated to high temperatures and then cooled, the new chemical composition can change the behavior of the glass. For Gorilla Glass, Corning narrows the number of compositions down to a few dozen, melts more, then selects two or three candidates for testing. It can take anywhere from one to three years of testing to arrive at a composition that will go into the next generation of Corning Gorilla Glass.

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grinding The stock fell 4% on Tuesday morning after the company blamed slower sales of smartphone glass and reported worse-than-expected sales for the current quarter.

Corning makes a variety of components and supplies many leading electronics companies, including Samsung and Apple, which report earnings this week amid concerns about slowing consumer electronics sales. But there’s optimism that the slowdown in electronics sales won’t hurt the high end of the market as much as it does low-end devices.

Corning said it expects fourth-quarter sales of $3.55 billion, missing the FactSet analyst consensus of $3.75 billion.

The company said it would wait for positive signs before telling investors about future business recovery.

In the quarter ending in September, Corning’s smartphone sales fell 14% year over year, while demand for tablets and laptops fell 17%, Corning CEO Wendell Weeks said in an earnings call. He added that annual automobile production is also lagging behind previously expected pace.

– So, now the question arises: when will the glass market recover? asked Apta. “My response is that we would like to see further positive evidence before pointing to a strong recovery in glass demand.”

Corning’s largest business, making cables and components for fiber-optic systems, grew 16% to $1.31 billion in the quarter.

But the company’s display technology division, which makes glass for smartphones and other computer displays, saw sales fall 28% year over year to $686 million in the quarter.

And the consumer electronics slowdown doesn’t appear to have improved this year, Weeks said.

“We now expect smartphones to decline by about 12% year-over-year, while we expect laptop and tablet demand to decline by 15%,” Weeks said. “We expect year-over-year declines in smartphones, laptops and tablets to be larger in the second half than in the first half.”

Corning reported third-quarter sales of $3.49 billion, beating the FactSet consensus estimate of $3.66 billion, and earnings per share of 51 cents, in line with expectations.

An exclusive first look at Corning's new pharmaceutical vial factory

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