During the quarter, Apple sold 77.3m iPhone smartphone devices, down from 78.2m last year, but still accounting for a bigger share of revenue of $61.5bn, compared with iPhone sales of $54.3bn during Q1 last year.
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Q4 2017 iPhone shipments were down 1% year-on-year, despite one of the most significant Apple product launches in years taking place just before the start of the quarter.
Apple’s strong growth in services, revenues from other devices, and its capital return to investors signal that the company can look past a weaker quarter of iPhone sales – which is still seen as Apple’s most prominent driver of revenue growth – and still deliver profits. Xiaomi, which is performing well in India and Russian Federation, acquired 7% market share, more than double of what it commanded a year ago.
“We’re thrilled to report the biggest quarter in Apple’s history, with broad-based growth that included the highest revenue ever from a new iPhone line-up”, said Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive (left). Analysts predict this figure could continue to grow in the light of Apple’s landmark figure of 1.3 billion active devices.
Well, while it’s concentrating on AR, it won’t be adding many new features to iOS 12, apparently: that next major release will be mainly stability fixes and bug squashing, and pushing back new shiny-shiny features.
On a related note, keep in mind that the iPhone X didn’t even launch until early November.
There are two points of less-bad news that should encourage investors – or at least leave them feeling the worst predictions won’t come to pass. Apple’s average sale price for each phone hit a record of US$796.
The demand for the higher priced iPhone X was not strong in both emerging and developed markets.
But the revenue outlook for the first three months of 2018 “was not as bad as some feared”, analysts said. According to preliminary data from IDC Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, Apple has overtaken Samsung in the global smartphone market in the fourth quarter of 2017. Going forward, the global smartphone market growth will be linked to the upgrade rate of users across different regions, says Shobhit Srivastava, research analyst for Counterpoint Research. This is lower than analysts’ expectations of Apple selling more than 80 million units in the three months ending on December 31. Apple’s pricy iPhone X also delivered the benefit of pushing Apple’s average iPhone selling price to $796, up nearly $100 from the same time a year ago, reports ReCode.
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Apple’s massive gamble with the iPhone X seems to have paid off well. Services are said to account for only about 5% of its revenue in India. So, how was Apple able to generate more revenue while selling fewer iPhones? The increase in revenue is due to iPhone X and its interesting.
