The fact that iPhone sales were down in the first three months of the year is no secret, but new information shows that the decline wasn’t isolated to one or two areas. No, Apple admitted that iOS handset sales dropped in every region of the world.
Apple will pay Qualcomm a lump sum of $4.5 billion to $4.7 billion as part of as legal settlement the two companies recently reached.
This is almost as much as Qualcomm’s entire revenue for its current quarter, showing Apple’s importance to the chipmaker.
Taking a close look at Apple’s financial results during the first three months of this year in hard numbers shows how the company is changing. Services are getting more important to its bottom line, and so are iPads. While iPhone is still a big part of Apple’s business, it’s not as significant as it used to be.
Check out these charts that demonstrate with a glance how the changes play out.
February 18, 2004: Steve Jobs sends an internal memo to Apple employees revealing that the company is, for the first time in years, totally debt-free.
“Today is a historic day of sorts for our company,” he writes. It marks a big turnaround from the bad old days of the 1990s, when Apple carried more than $1 billion in debt — and faced the danger of bankruptcy.
Apple’s spending on research and development of new products keeps growing. The company’s R&D spending increased by hundreds of millions in the second quarter of this year, totaling more than ever before.
But where is all this money going? Some of its R&D projected are obvious, but others the company tries to keep secret.
Apple stockpiled $252.3 billion overseas, but it’s bringing that money back to America. A market analysts predicts the company will spend $100 billion of it on its stock buyback and dividend program. This will directly benefit those with Apple shares.
The company decided to bring the money home from foreign banks after the new GOP tax law gave companies a limited time for cash repatriations at lower rates, possibly just 8 percent.
Buyers just aren’t going for the latest iPhone models. An industry analyst says nearly half the handsets Apple shipped last quarter were older devices, not the company’s latest.
Even worse, the Apple reportedly sold about 45 million devices, down about 13 percent from the same quarter a year ago.
Apple earnings calls are usually a time for celebration and gloating, but for the first time in over a decade the company is poised to post declining profits.
Tim Cook warned Wall Street that this would likely happen due to declining iPhone sales. Have we really reached “peak iPhone”?
Analysts and reporters will be grilling Cook and Apple CFO Luca Maestri during today’s Q2 2016 earnings call. Investors will be looking for signs that Apple still has room to grow. And Cult of Mac will be right here, liveblogging the entire Apple earnings call — and translating the financial gibberish — when the big event starts at 2 p.m. Pacific.
Get in on the action below:
As a tech fan, there are plenty of times — particularly when you hear about billionaire investors and record-breaking stock prices — when you wonder whether you would have had the foresight to predict things turning out the way they have.
Would you have bet big on Apple around the time of its 1980 IPO? Was it obvious that Steve Jobs was going to turn around the company in 1997? Or would you have been the equivalent of folks calling the Titanic an unsinkable ship, and pouring your life savings into pre-crash dot-com companies?
An amazing new data-viz shows how the returns on a $1,000 investment made in Apple, Microsoft and IBM would have fared over the next 20 years following January 1, 1996. Check it out below:
The holidays were great for me, but they were probably even better for Apple. Fiscal Q1 is when Apple always has record-breaking sales numbers, and this year will probably be no different.
Apple has announced that they will release their first quarter earning report and call on Wednesday, January 23, 2012 at 2:00pm PT.
