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Apple Says Profits Were Flat, Citing Slump In China (nytimes.com)
Due to an economic slowdown in China and diminishing demand for new iPhones, Apple's profits in its most recent quarter were flat compared with a year earlier. "The disappointing financial performance had been expected since Jan. 2, when Apple, for the first time in 16 years, revised its forecast for the quarter," reports The New York Times. "But the announcement on Tuesday indicates a difficult road head for Apple, which just five months ago became the first company to be worth more than $1 trillion. The company said it expected between $55 billion and $59 billion in revenue in the current quarter, just below analysts' expectations for $59 billion. Apple's earnings per share were $4.18, beating analysts' expectations by a penny."
In addition to the quarterly earnings, Apple reported revenue of $84.3 billion, a decline of 5 percent from one year ago. "Revenue from iPhone declined 15 percent from the prior year, while total revenue from all other products and services grew 19 percent," Apple said in a press release. Analysts had estimated revenue of $83.97 billion and earnings of $4.17 per share. "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," said Tim Cook. Apple's active install base of 1.4 billion is "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," Cook said. The Verge adds: "iPhones account for 900 million of those devices. iPad revenues were up 17 percent against the year-ago quarter; Mac was up 9 percent; and Wearables/Home/Accessories were up by 33 percent."
In addition to the quarterly earnings, Apple reported revenue of $84.3 billion, a decline of 5 percent from one year ago. "Revenue from iPhone declined 15 percent from the prior year, while total revenue from all other products and services grew 19 percent," Apple said in a press release. Analysts had estimated revenue of $83.97 billion and earnings of $4.17 per share. "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," said Tim Cook. Apple's active install base of 1.4 billion is "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," Cook said. The Verge adds: "iPhones account for 900 million of those devices. iPad revenues were up 17 percent against the year-ago quarter; Mac was up 9 percent; and Wearables/Home/Accessories were up by 33 percent."
Only 80 billion dollars in the months?
It's over.
I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.
Look, you set the price too high. Just shift the price lower on the curve, and you can maximize your profit.
In a time when you're flooding the market with $1000 phones, reconsider your original $500 price point. You'll see that unit sales of the $800 version are ok, and the $500 model is doing very well, so you know you need to fire your marketing and sales teams who skipped out on basic accounting and economics classes.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Definitely not. By focussing on privacy they are differentiating themselves from Google, Facebook, and all of the others.
What they need to do is stop the strong focus on the iPhone. They had a huge lead in certain markets such as graphics design with their computers but they've completely lost it by not updating their Mac Pro line in years. Apple needs to really focus on their computer lines again, especially the Pro desktop. It would be great if they did something unique such as using their own CPUs in a desktop. They have experience transitioning platforms pretty smoothly (from PowerPC to Intel) and they could easily do it again. People will come back if Apple shows that they will stay focussed on the line. It will also help balance the revenue and stop it being so dependent on one product.
The other big thing they need to do is to break the releases of the iPhone and iOS. It's creating a period of a few months each year where the developers are racing to fix bugs because iOS was released too early in order to meet the schedule of the iPhone. Apple should break out a small group from the iOS developers and have them implement the functionality required for the new phones. This would be released as an update to the current release. Then the next release of iOS would get released when it was ready to go out. It's better for the users and much better for the developers.