Apple has announced record iPhone sales of 74.8 million in its first quarter of 2016, a very slight increase on the 74.5 million in the same period previous year.
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“In Q2 past year, the company recorded $58 billion in revenue – meaning Apple’s upcoming quarter could be the first negative growth quarter in recent memory”, TechCrunch noted.
No doubt, Apple has shown better-than-expected numbers in the first quarter recording the largest ever profit for any company despite the iPhone sales missing the expected number by few hundreds short.
CEO Tim Cook pointed to “the growth of our Services business”, which brought in $6bn over the quarter, and the company’s “major milestone of 1bn active devices” (across all of its products) as two highlights of the quarter. The figure is based on the number of iPhone, iPad, Mac, iPod Touch, Mac, Apple TV and Apple Watch engaged with Apple’s service in the past 90 days.
The technology giant’s revenue in China surged 14 percent to a record of $18.40 billion.
Analysts had expected Apple to report earnings of about $3.23 a share on $76.54 billion in revenue, according to a consensus estimate from Thomson Reuters.
Apple set a quarterly record for Apple Watch sales and expanded distribution to 12,000 locations.
Meanwhiles, investors not only worry about a slowdown in iPhone sales, but whether Apple can pull off similar magic with a new consumer device. Over the past several years, Apple could be relied upon to post massive iPhone sales that passed the preceding year’s handily. Revenue for that region jumped 14 per cent year-on-year – though this is considerably lower than the 70 per cent year-on-year revenue increase that Apple posted in Q1 2015.
It was also a huge drop when compared to the 46 per cent growth in sales reported for the same quarter, last year.
Analysts were hoping for sales of 17.3 million iPads, and 5.8 million Macs.
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In constant currency, this prediction would indicate a 5%-10% drop in revenue, explained Apple CFO Luca Maestri.
