Apple’s iPhones may be on the decline with respect to sales but I tell you this, the company is doing just fine. They released their last quarter financials and it showed a record $78.4b in revenue for the first quarter of 2017 versus $75.9b in the same period last year.
“Our outstanding business performance resulted in a new all-time record for earnings per share, and over $27 billion in operating cash flow,” said Luca Maestri, Apple’s CFO. “We returned nearly $15 billion to investors through share repurchases and dividends during the quarter, bringing cumulative payments through our capital return program to over $200 billion.”
Now international sales of the iPhone remained strong accounting for 64 percent of revenue. That said, it looks like the iPhone sales went up defying projections of a sluggish sale. Apple actually recorded an eight percent increase in sales year over year. Whether the uptick sales is due to the vacuum created Apple is yet to be seen but we may know that later this year or even next year. In the midst of the negative projections, Apple fortified sales of its services like the App Store, Music, iTunes, and iCloud among others. Apple CEO Tim Cook says “Revenue from Services grew strongly over last year, led by record customer activity on the App Store, and we are very excited about the products in our pipeline.” In the quarter before this one, revenue from Apple services stood at $6.33b
Apple is providing the following guidance for its fiscal 2017 second quarter:
revenue between $51.5 billion and $53.5 billion
gross margin between 38 percent and 39 percent
operating expenses between $6.5 billion and $6.6 billion
other income/(expense) of $400 million
tax rate of 26 percent
If you think this might be a onetime thing then you might want to consider that the iPhone is due for a dramatic change this year and it is already been dubbed the biggest change to the device ever.
