2023-05-05 02:18:56
Apple has suffered a drop in sales for the second consecutive year. But the electronics group exceeded expectations with its quarterly results presented on Thursday after the market closed. And with the iPhone, by far his most important product, he surprisingly returned to growth. With its solid figures, Apple joins a series of encouraging quarterly reports from the American technology industry. The stock market reacted positively to the numbers, the share price rose by almost 2 percent in after-hours trading. Apple stock has gained about a third in value since the beginning of the year.
Overall, Apple reported a 3 percent drop in sales to $94.8 billion for the past fiscal quarter. That was an improvement from the previous quarter, when it was down 5 percent. Analysts had expected an average of just under $ 93 billion. Net income also fell 3 percent to $24.2 billion. Earnings per share of $1.52 were 9 cents better than expected.
iPhone sales rose nearly 2 percent to $51.3 billion. Many analysts had expected another decline, in the previous quarter there had been a minus of 8 percent. At that time, Apple felt production interruptions in China, which led to delivery bottlenecks, especially for the premium model iPhone 14 Pro. CEO Tim Cook explained the recovery in the business in a conference call, among other things, that part of the sales that had failed at the time due to bottlenecks had been postponed to the most recent quarter.
Excellent results in India
Apple also benefited from a particularly good development in emerging markets around the world. In India, for example, sales have doubled. Apple opened its first store here a few weeks ago. In China, there was another decline in sales, but it was lower than in the previous quarter.
Development in the rest of the range was very mixed. The service business performed best, which is now the second largest division after the iPhone, which includes the App Store, the payment service Apple Pay and the streaming platform Apple TV +. Here sales increased by 5 percent to 20.9 billion dollars.
Sales fell in all other divisions. The Macintosh computer business was the worst, with sales plummeting 31 percent to $7.2 billion. The iPad was down 13 percent to $6.7 billion, while sales in the division with products such as the Apple Watch digital clock and Airpod headphones fell by one percent to $8.8 billion.
For the coming quarter, CFO Luca Maestri predicted a similar sales development as in the previous reporting period, assuming that the economic environment does not deteriorate. Again, negative currency effects would make themselves felt.
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