> Apple said it would stop providing unit sales for iPhones, iPads, and Macs in fiscal 2019, a step toward becoming more of a services business. While some pundits praised the move as a way to highlight a potent new business model, many analysts complained it was an attempt to hide the pain of a stagnant smartphone market. Can companies just pull this sort of "yeah those numbers look bad, so we're not publishing them…
what regulation forces a company to report how much it sells of X? Most regulation requires reporting around revenue, not units. As the article notes, Apple was unique in reporting unit sales at all.
That's not what was asked. What was asked is if they can just change what they usually report because it looks bad.