Perhaps, James’ slip in Podcast 74 of calling Apple a “phone company” isn’t far from the truth when you study Apple’s latest revenue figures.
The Company sold 31.2 million iPhones, a record for the June quarter, compared to 26 million in the year-ago quarter. Apple also sold 14.6 million iPads during the quarter, compared to 17 million in the same period last year. However, the Company sold only 3.8 million Macs, compared to 4 million in the year-ago quarter.
Apple provided live streaming of its Q3 2013 financial results conference call…
“We are especially proud of our record June quarter iPhone sales of over 31 million and the strong growth in revenue from iTunes, Software and Services,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “We are really excited about the upcoming releases of iOS 7 and OS X Mavericks, and we are laser-focused and working hard on some amazing new products that we will introduce in the fall and across 2014.”
The call also covered discussions of the revenue generated by iTunes Store, App Store, and other services ($4.1 billion), through the number of movies and TV episodes downloaded (390 million movies and 1 billion TV episodes), to the amount of money paid out to developers ($11 billion, half of which has been paid out in the past year), Apple kept referring back to the importance of the ecosystem during the call. Apple TV came in for its share of attention as well, with a litany of the media services that have been added recently to the set-top box’s repertoire. Nor were cars left out: Tim Cook said that iOS in cars was “a key focus for us” and he regarded Apple’s automotive initiative as being comparable to other parts of the Apple ecosystem, such as Siri, Messages, and the app and media stores.
Another interesting fact came out that more of Apple’s revenue is coming from overseas — 57 percent in the third quarter, but that revenue from China was down 43 percent from Q2 2013, which might be explained in part by China’s cooling economy. However, Cook said that Apple is seeing double-digit growth in iPad revenue in China, Japan, Canada, Latin America, Russia, the Middle East, and India. The iPhone’s popularity has exploded in India, where iPhone sales are up 400 percent. Developing markets are gobbling up the iPhone as well, with sales in Turkey and Poland up 60 percent, and sales in the Philippines up 140 percent.
So Apple is clearly putting nearly all its eggs in the consumer market because that is where the revenue is coming from.