Updated: 9.15am
APPLE IPHONE SALES have fallen sharply for the second quarter in a row, but the company’s stock has risen after analysts were expecting a greater fall.
The tech giant sold 40.4 million iPhones in the quarter, down 15% compared to last year but more than the 39.9 million Wall Street experts had predicted.
Profit fell 27% to $7.8 billion, while revenue dropped 15% to $42.4 billion.
Apple also sold fewer iPads, Macs and smartwatches.
Overall the results were slightly better than forecast by Wall Street analysts, who said consumers just aren’t as excited about the newest iPhone models.
Apple stock was up by 4.5% on the news.
A bright spark for the company was the news that revenue at Apple’s segment that includes iTunes, Apple Music, and the App Store was up by 19%.
Chief financial officer Luca Maestri said online services are increasingly important to Apple, since their financial contribution is increasing.
Chief executive Tim Cook said the results showed,
Stronger customer demand and business performance than we anticipated at the start of the quarter.
The results related to released the results for the quarter ended 25 June.
Looking towards the long-term
During Apple’s earnings call, Cook addressed a number of topics including potential growth of Augmented Reality (AR) thanks to Pokémon Go.
While he called its success “incredible” and said how Apple is in the AR area for the long-run, he stopped short of calling it the next big thing.
I notice there are people that want to call it a new computer platform, and we’ll see,” said Cook. “I think there’s a tendency in this industry to call everything new the next computer platform. However, that said, I think AR can be huge so we’ll see whether it’s the next platform”.
It does also show… that AR can be really great, and we have been and continue to invest a lot in this. We are high on AR for the long run… and so we’re investing, and the number one thing is to make sure our products work well with other developers’ products like Pokémon.
Cook mentioned that growth of Apple Pay, which is only available in a few countries including the US, saw monthly active users up more than 450% year-on-year but later clarified that while ”the growth is astronomical, the base is very small”.
But the company does have plans for Apple TV with Cook hinting that the new updates, both to the product and software it runs, will be part of a much larger plan.
“The introduction of Apple TV and tvOS last October and the subsequent OS releases and what’s coming out this fall, think of that as building the foundation for what we believe can be a broader business over time”.
And so I don’t want to be more precise than that, but you shouldn’t look at what’s there today and think we’ve done what we want to do. We’ve built a foundation where we can do something bigger.
- With reporting from © – AFP, Business Insider, and Quinton O’Reilly
Originally published: 10.06pm 26/7/2016
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