What to expect from Apple’s Q4 2015 earnings call

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LOVELOUD
Apple CEO Tim Cook will introduce the band Imagine Dragons Satuday at the LOVELOUD Festival in Utah.
Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac

Apple is scheduled to reveal its earnings for the final fiscal quarter of 2015 on Tuesday, October 27, and investors are expecting monstrous results.

Sales of the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus should boost revenues to new heights after Apple announced that it sold a record 13 million units of the new devices during launch weekend alone. Exactly how many iPhones Apple sold won’t be revealed until the bell closes, but Tim Cook seemed pretty optimistic in a recent interview.

Cook told The Wall Street Journal that Apple Watch shipped even more watches last quarter than in the first quarter. It’s unlikely Apple will give us the actual Apple Watch sales figures during the earnings call, but there should be a lot of juicy Apple bits.

Here’s everything to expect from Apple’s Q4 2015 earnings:

Record-breaking revenues

$51.07 billion in revenue is the consensus estimate on Wall Street, with an earnings of $1.88 per share. If Apple tops that number it will beat its own guidance of $49 billion to $51 billion in revenue, with a gross margin of 38.5 percent to 39.5 percent.

Huge iPhone sales

iPhone-sales

In a survey of Apple analysts by Fortune, experts predict iPhone sales will jump from 39.27 million last year to 48.72 million in Q4 2015. That would be about a 24 percent increase year-over-year, setting Apple up for even loftier expectations in the upcoming holiday quarter.

Watch out for China

China’s economy has started slumping lately. Cook defended the faltering economy this week, saying, “China is a superb place to be.” If China’s economy slips too much, it will be bad news for Apple, which is depending on the country to fuel most of its growth in iPhone sales now that the U.S. and European markets are saturated.

Improved Apple Watch sales

Apple Watch Time-Lapse

“This is competitive information,” Cook said recently when asked about Apple Watch sales figures. “I don’t want to help the competition. We shipped a lot the first quarter, then last quarter we shipped even more. I can predict this quarter we will ship even more.”

We’ll be able to get a gauge for how much “even more” means by looking at the Other Products category in the company’s report. Last quarter it jumped up nearly $1 billion. Cook told outsiders that revenues from the other products in the category are shrinking, so the wearable is doing better than early estimates suggested.

Mac sales might be down

The Mac has defied the personal computer market’s downward trajectory, but those good days might not be around much longer. Research firms Gartner and IDC both claim Mac sales have slowed to their lowest rate since late 2013, although they disagree about the extent. IDC says Mac sales have fallen 3.4 percent year-over-year, while Gartner thinks Apple saw a marginal increase of 1.5 percent.

Apple TV and iPad Pro

Preorders for the new Apple TV open up Monday, while the iPad Pro hits stores in November as part of Apple’s effort to prop up slumping iPad sales. Expect Cook to gush about how excited he is about both products, and then lace some superlatives around their new features.

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