Tim Cook and John Ternus at Apple Park.
Courtesy: Apple
Hello, this is Hui Jie writing to you from Singapore. Welcome to another edition of CNBC’s Daily Open.
Apple is turning a page as CEO Tim Cook hands over the reins to successor John Ternus, marking only the second leadership transition since Steve Jobs.
Meanwhile, markets appear ready to move on from the Iran conflict. U.S. President Donald Trump, however, is not.
Read on!
What you need to know today
From flexing my first iPod nano (with the click wheel!) at gatherings in 2009 to today’s iPhone ecosystem, Apple’s evolution has spanned generations. Now, it is preparing for another shift at the top as the company names its eighth CEO.
Fifteen years after Tim Cook took the reins from Steve Jobs, Apple will see another transition: senior vice president of hardware engineering John Ternus will become CEO on Sept. 1, while Cook assumes the role of executive chairman.
To borrow from Isaac Newton — apple lore aside — Ternus will be standing on the shoulders of giants as he takes the helm.
Markets, meanwhile, showed signs of fatigue. Major U.S. indexes dipped, with the Nasdaq Composite snapping a 13-day winning streak.
While some might think this is due to the Iran war, David Wagner, head of equities and portfolio manager at Aptus Capital Advisors, suggested the war is “now in the rearview mirror for the market,” a view echoed by CNBC’s Jim Cramer.
But one person seems to still have the Iran war front and center in his mind: U.S. President Donald Trump.
Trump on Monday continued to threaten Iran, saying “lots of bombs [will] start going off” if no deal is reached before a shaky ceasefire with Tehran expires Tuesday evening.
That rhetoric comes as a U.S. delegation gears up to travel back to Pakistan for a potential second round of peace talks. The delegation “plans to travel to Islamabad soon,” a source familiar with the matter told CNBC.
Back at home, the U.S. president’s woes continue as his administration rolled out a tariff claims-filing portal tied to roughly $160 billion in refunds, after the Supreme Court struck down a cornerstone of Trump’s trade policy.
And finally…
Hormuz disruptions hit China’s Christmas capital — and holiday spending
Christmas is still eight months away, but Christmas decor makers in China are already worried about a bad holiday season due to the Iran war.
“Many customers … are holding off on orders,” an artificial tree maker told CNBC last Friday at her showroom at an international expo center in the city of Yiwu, known as China’s Christmas capital.
American shoppers will likely be stuck paying at least 15% more, she said. “The price of Christmas trees in the U.S. will definitely go up,” she said. “It is unavoidable.”