Apple has presented its results, and they are quite mediocre by the standards of the Cupertino giant. The firm has beaten expectations in profits and income, but has disappointed in many segments and has confirmed a serious slowdown in its growth and, especially, in the iPhone, its star product. But the firm has made up for it with the announcement of the largest share buyback in history, of $110 billion, and a smaller than expected drop in China, two data that boost the firm’s shares by more than 6% in the after hours.
In hard and fast numbers, Apple has earned $23,636 million, 2.6% less than the previous year. This is equivalent to $1.53 per share, beating the $1.50 estimate. In revenue, it has signed 90,800 million, 4% less than the previous year, but beating the 90,100 that the market consensus anticipated. However, The biggest gap is in the iPhone: it has only earned 45,960 million, 10% less than the previous year and less than the 46,000 million anticipated.
Worse are the results of the iPad, which have fallen 16.6% year-on-year, to 5,560 million, very far from the 5,910 million that were estimated. The best news has been brought by the Mac, with an increase of 4%, to 7,450 million, easily beating the 6,860 million expected. Regarding the next quarter, Apple has not given specific expectations, but has calculated a growth at levels of “a single digit, small”, although that would be better than the current figures. The CEO of the firm, Tim Cook, explained that this quarter was going to be “difficult” because last year they achieved very important increases thanks to the normalization of the supply problems caused by covid. Without these extraordinary sales, it is justified, iPhone sales would have remained flatnot excessively positive data but much better than -10% of the final accounts. Their greatest hope is that sales in China had fallen only 8%, much better than the 14% decline that analysts expected. The hope is that demand is not shifting en masse to rival firms like Huawei, and that it is a temporary blip caused by pressure from the Chinese government. “I feel optimistic about China, thinking about the long term more than next week,” Cook said.
A year of ups and downs and doubts
The firm founded by Steve Jobs has had several quarters of disappointing results and has accumulated losses of 10% for the year, worse than its ‘Magnificent Seven’ sisters. In its latest accounts, the firm suffered a hard blow after announcing that its sales in China had fallen by 13%, after Xi Jinping’s government toughened its stance against one of the major representatives of American technology.
The result has been a slowdown in its sales that has led analysts to give it its worst buy recommendation in four years: only 57% recommend buying it and 11% recommend selling, something that has not been seen since 2019. The biggest fear is that it is not capable of repeating a discovery like that of the iPhone: the failed Apple Car, canceled just a few months ago, is an example of the difficulties in finding a new ‘goose that lays the golden eggs’ for the firm.
