Apple announced the financial results for its fiscal third quarter of 2017 this afternoon, and the numbers for the 3-month period are outstanding. All metrics were up from the year-ago quarter, including a 7% increase in revenue and 2% increase in iPhone sales.
Following the release of its earnings, CEO Tim Cook and CFO Luca Maestri hopped on a conference call to talk about Apple’s performance over the last 3 months, and offer up some insights into its future. Here are some of the more interesting points from the call.
- Apple has 185 million paid subscriptions across all services.
- Apple services have added 20 million new subscribers over last 3 months.
- Walmart deploying 20K+ iPads to employees in the US.
- iPad sales grew in all geographical segments, with strong double-digit growth in the U.S. and Greater China.
- CFO Luca Maestri: iPhone channel inventory the lowest in 2.5 years.
- iPhone ASP (average selling price) at $606, up from $595 in the year-ago quarter.
- Tim Cook: 2/3 of Apple’s employees are in the United States. We’ll have more to say about that later in the year.
- Apple has new advanced $1 billion manufacturing fund for US companies. First $200 million goes to Corning Glass.
- Tim Cook: I think AR is big and profound. This is one of those things we’ll look back at and marvel at the start of it.
- Apple has brought in talent behind Breaking Bad and The Crown to help with content creation.
- Cook: In terms of autonomous systems, we’re very focused on it from a core tech point of view. We have a large project ongoing, and we’re making a big investment in this.
- Apple retail and online stores saw over 300 million visitors this quarter.
Apple’s stock is up 6% in after-hours trading on the back of today’s strong performance report. If you want to listen to today’s earnings call, a replay will be available here for a limited time.