Apple recently announced its fiscal fourth quarter earnings, but while the company had the best September quarter ever, those results had very, very little to do with the iPhone 11 or iPhone 11 Pro.
Earnings
Apple Card will offer 0% financing on iPhone purchases ‘later this year’
Earlier this year, Apple officially launched the Apple Card, the company's first credit card in a partnership with Goldman Sachs.
Apple’s Services revenue reaches new all-time high of $12.5 billion
Earlier today, Apple officially announced its fiscal fourth quarterly earnings, revealing another strong three month stretch for the company.
Apple reports Q4 2019 revenue of $64 billion
It has been three months since Apple last reported a quarterly earnings, so here we are again just as expected, with the company revealing fiscal fourth quarter results for this year.
Apple reports Q3 2019 revenue of $53.8 billion
Keeping up with tradition, Apple has officially announced the latest quarterly earnings, revealing how well the company has been doing over the last few months.
Qualcomm got $4.7 billion as part of its legal settlement with Apple
The iPhone maker Apple and the chip maker Qualcomm have recently settled their long-running intellectual-property quarrel over cellular technologies, which includes a payment from the former to the latter, and we now have our first look at the size of the legal agreement.
Apple earnings tidbits: record $11.5B in services revenue, 390 million total paid subscriptions, and more
Following the release of its [fiscal] Q2 2019 financial results, Apple's CEO Tim Cook and CFO Luca Maestri hopped on a conference call to talk about the company's performance over the past 3 months. As usual, we've rounded up some of the more interesting points from the call below.
Apple reports Q2 2019 revenue of $58 billion
Apple on Tuesday disclosed its [fiscal] Q2 2019 earnings report, offering a look at its performance over the past 3 months. During the quarter, the company says it raked in $58 billion. That's a hair over the $57.5 billion Wall Street analysts expected, and about 5% less than the $61.1 billion it reported in Q2 last year.
Samsung reports weakest profits in two years
Samsung today announced its 2019 first-quarter earnings and the numbers don't look good: operating profits fell to $5.4 billion, a 60 percent decline marking the weakest results since late 2016 and a far cry from the $13.4 billion in operating profits it captured in the year-ago quarter.
Spotify: 30% earnings growth, 96 million paid subscribers, two podcast-related acquisitions
Spotify today announced that its 2018 holiday quarter earnings grew by thirty percent while giving investors a few newsworthy updates about the scope and breadth of its business.
Cook: iPhone sales slowed due to higher prices, death of subsidies & less frequent upgrades
Apple's boss Tim Cook has admitted in yesterday's conference call following the latest quarterly earnings report that—aside from China—other factors such as higher prices, death of subsidies in many countries and customers holding on to their handset a bit longer than usual have all contributed to a decline in iPhone upgrades.
Jason Snell has transcribed Apple’s earnings call on Six Colors, here's what Cook said when an analyst pressed him on Apple's pricing strategy (emphasis mine):
Steve Milunovich, Wolfe Research: Some have the perception that you priced the new products, the new iPhones, too high. What have you learned about price elasticity and do you feel that perhaps you pushed the envelope a little bit too far and might have to bring that down in the future?
Tim Cook: Steve, it’s Tim. If you look at what we did this past year, we priced iPhone XS in the US the same as we’d priced iPhone X a year ago. iPhone XS Max, which was new, was a hundred dollars more than the XS, and then we priced the XR right in the middle of where the entry iPhone 8 and entry iPhone 8 Plus had been priced. So it’s actually a pretty small difference in the United States compared to last year.
He continued:
However, the foreign exchange issue that Luca spoke of in the call amplified that difference in international markets, in particular the emerging markets, which tended to move much more significantly versus the dollar.
And so what we have done in January in some locations and some products is essentially absorb part or all of the foreign currency move as compared to last year and therefore get close or perhaps right on the local price from a year ago.
So yes, I do think the price is a factor.
I remember Apple executives arguing in the past that iPhones weren't just for the rich people. But I digress, here's what Cook had to say about the death of the smartphone subsidy.
Secondly, in some markets, as I had talked about in my prepared remarks, the subsidy is probably the bigger of the issues in the developed markets.
I had mentioned Japan, but also even in this country, even though the subsidy has gone away for a period of time, if you’re a customer that your last purchase was a 6S or a 6 or in some cases even a 7, you may have paid 199 dollars for it. And now, in the unbundled world it’s obviously much more than that.
Cook says they have a number of actions to address the decline in iPhone upgrade rates, including the aggressive trade-in offers and and installment payments.
The Apple story is shifting from iPhone units to ecosystems and services.The CEO concluded:
So where it goes in the future, I don't know. But I am convinced that making a great product that is high quality, that is the best thing for the customer. We work for the user and so that's the way that we look at it.
In the press release announcing quarterly earnings, Cook praised other aspects of Apple's business that have experienced healthy growth.
While it was disappointing to miss our revenue guidance, we manage Apple for the long term, and this quarter’s results demonstrate that the underlying strength of our business runs deep and wide.
Our active installed base of devices reached an all-time high of 1.4 billion in the first quarter, growing in each of our geographic segments. That’s a great testament to the satisfaction and loyalty of our customers, and it’s driving our Services business to new records thanks to our large and fast-growing ecosystem.
Apple no longer reports units sales for iPhone and other products, robbing investors of the most important metric as the company transitions its story from one heavily dependent on iPhone to a combined products + services business.
During the holiday quarter, the Cupertino company pulled in $84.3 billion in revenue, a decline of 5% from the year-ago quarter. Strategy Analytics estimates that 65.9 million iPhones were shipped during the quarter, or 11.4 million fewer handsets versus the year-ago quarter.
Apple earnings tidbits: 50M Apple Music subscribers, 85M monthly News users & more
Following the release of its [fiscal] Q1 2019 financial results, Apple's CEO Tim Cook and CFO Luca Maestri hopped on a conference call to talk about the company's performance over the past 3 months. As usual, we've rounded up some of the more interesting points for you below.