Now Apple is company who gives empty promises. I switched from iPhone X to Android device because of many reasons. One of them - broken promise to open NFC for developers. Other - useless of iOS Home screen interface. I can not keep my default Home screen with just few icons. So, Tim Cook done this - he has "succesfully" drived Apple to fate of NOKIA... arrogance - this is way to nowhere..
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Apple Faces Second Class Action Lawsuit Threat Over Failing to Warn Investors About Slowing iPhone Demand
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Google is the king of, ad selling I guess? That came long long before any data mining. I also believe it makes money from Android apps plus it’s other services.
Amazon I think is an amazing company, it’s iffering services people want and like, easy to use and work and offer good value, let alone its online shopping phenomenon. I don’t know what their earnings are but their market cap is higher then Apple currently.
Microsoft offers services too plus makes money from Xbox games, of which millions are sold along with its consoles, and then its software is the backbone of global industry along with its licensing programmes. It’s not hard to see how it can profit so much. Plus it’s actually managed to innovate in computers. Imagine if the Surface Studio was an Apple computer? People would be drooling over it..
It’s not hard to see why either of these giants is a giant. IMO. And it’s not hard to see them beaten Apples revenue one day, offering damn site better value in the process.
Their cloud platform is nearly as big a business as Office for them these days. Azure has seen 47% growth this year.
Stock-wise it's probably not that big a deal long-term but for Tim Cook himself it's very serious. His credibility has taken a major hit over this and it probably won't work out well for him.
Again, based on what? You must not own stocks or you just don’t understand how this works.
Companies disappoint investors all the time. They lower guidance, miss earnings, and do things investors don’t like. You mad? Sell the shares. They didn’t do anything even close to illegal. This is coming from a shareholder.
You think I was mad when Disney told me ESPN wasn’t doing as well as they’d like and they started losing subscribers? Of course, but I didn’t have a case to sue the company.
People get silly when they buy stocks and lose money. It’s never their fault, so they try to blame the company. Mark my words. ZERO impact to Apple.
Tim Cook gets points from me for getting in front of this IMMEDIATELY after the quarter ended and not just announcing a terrible number a month from now. Apple hoped Christmas would put them over the top. When you’re doing $1B in sales per day in a quarter, Apple can easily say they hoped the last 10 days of the quarter into Christmas would push them over the top. It didn’t, Cook told investors January 2. It happens. You move on. You sell the stock if you want. This is real money, not pretend trading. Invest at your own risk. Risks are disclosed in every earnings report, INCLUDING slowdowns in iPhones.
China was great 60 days ago. Now it’s not. Welcome to the real world.
They still did $84B in sales. $90B would have been better, sure, but it’s not like they are struggling for cash. The endless demand for growth on Wallstreet is a tough game.
Microsoft's main business now is the cloud. Everybody wants a taste of Azure. Office 365 is basically a service selling like hot cakes. No need for on-premise exchange servers when you can go o365. Windows OS still generates money but I feel like its slowly dying. Will take a decade or so but it's dying.
Someone on Twitter said Apple should stop showing the full price of the phone on their website or marketing materials. Only show monthly installment plan figures. That’s what the big 4 US carriers do though AT&T is the only one that makes you select a phone before you seen the full price. The others all show the full price in fine print. This is an interesting thought...back in the days of the so-called subsidies from carriers Apple only quoted the upfront price on stage (e.g. $199/$299). They never mentioned the full price of the phone. With the iPhone 7 the only price they showed on stage was iPhone upgrade program installment pricing. But for some reason starting with the 8 and the X Apple decided to show the full price on stage. Seems like an odd time to do it considering those were the most expensive iPhones. Saying you can get an XS staring at $33/mo isn’t the sticker shock of $999. I wonder why Apple went away from showing monthly pricing.
All true. Will add that Amazon’s earnings in its last fiscal year was about $3 billion. But it still seems to be growing massively. It is because of its growth, that Wall Street loves the stock and it’s market cap is huge compared to how relatively little profit it makes. Apple makes more profit in one month than Amazon makes in a year. But the thesis of Amazon is that eventually nearly all online sales will go through them and also online sales as a portion of the economy will continue to grow. This might turn out to be true.
MS certainly makes money off the XBox. And maybe that is something of scale that makes sense. But is XBox “bigger” than Nintendo? Because Nintendo’s market cap is $33 billion. That might be a way to estimate the scale of MS’s XBox division. The hardware part is innovative these days, but we know they don’t sell very many of those devices (they sell far less computers than Apple sells Macs) and we know MS doesn’t make a huge profit off of them because of that lack of scale. I don’t understand what else they do, but clearly they make massive amounts of money. Nearly $50 billion a year. Very comparable to Apple’s $80 billion. But it is always about growth. Wall Street thinks MS will grow and Apple will shrink.
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That is the part I don’t understand. But funny enough, I’m probably going to have my company start using those services. My company just has a few employees, so the yearly subscription for it is kind of meaningless in terms of total costs.
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Yep, I switched my company to O365. So we pay them a subscription. But it is so cheap per employee and IT is relatively simple. But not as simple or as cheap than if I could have moved everyone to Macs. If I were starting a company from scratch, I would still buy everyone Macs and use a collection of Apple and Google services and it would be even easier and cheaper.
Very nicely depicted!
Obviously, MS seems to have more balanced portfolio and most of the cloud offerings provide consistent risk mitigated returns and it can optimise its 'operations over a period to reduce cost. "Others" in the MS chart is rather big probably it may be it's services. Apple seems to be having high risk and high returns portfolio.
They did show the cost of the phone on stage at the iPhone 7 keynote. I dont remember a time when they didnt show the upfront cost of the device tbh. I dont think trying to deceive people as to the true cost of the phones would be a smart move.
Thank! I was wrong about Surface. They make far more money than I though with it. And far less with Windows than I thought. Office is still their strong suit. And I will reiterate, two very good programming shops (Google and Apple) have competing similar products that they give away for free. That seems like a dicey situation to be in.
Good thing I was here to warn people before Apple did 
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But China is a problem too. There's no way Apple will win there, but they think they can. The Chinese government will stop their progress easily. Europe would do the same if they had any competitors there.
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It's not just China. https://www.statista.com/statistics/276306/global-apple-iphone-sales-since-fiscal-year-2007/
But China is a problem too. There's no way Apple will win there, but they think they can. The Chinese government will stop their progress easily. Europe would do the same if they had any competitors there.
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It's a nice figure, but do they have it for profit?
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You think you're breaking news with unit sales data? I know those numbers without looking at the chart.Good thing I was here to warn people before Apple did
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It's not just China. https://www.statista.com/statistics/276306/global-apple-iphone-sales-since-fiscal-year-2007/
But China is a problem too. There's no way Apple will win there, but they think they can. The Chinese government will stop their progress easily. Europe would do the same if they had any competitors there.
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It's a nice figure, but do they have it for profit?
Flat unit sales for iPhone have been the norm and that would have been fine this quarter too. China stopped that.
Q4 numbers looked great. Things changed. Apple needs to address this, but it's not a referendum on their entire business or even their entire iPhone business. North America, Germany, Korea, etc all hit records. The trade war with China isn't helping the perception of American companies at the moment.
Profit is not broken out by product category, just a 38% overall GM is given. Services margin will be disclosed later this month, likely much more profitable than hardware sales anyway....and those are growing at 25%.
Also, slowing iPhone sales don't reduce the overall active users - a key in longer term services margin. The user base grew by 100M in just the last 12 months. That is important.
You're right, I put in the wrong stats for the context. But Tim Cook's letter mentions lower than expected iPhone sales in developed markets too. Even blamed the battery replacements. The flat sales I linked mean they were relying on China growth, which won't happen, trade war or not. It's wishful thinking from investors.
Yes, services are important. They're also fickle. People will switch around if they don't have a device or platform holding them on one.
Dude, you have to at least know your numbers to have an intelligent discussion with me.
The data shows people don't switch from Apple. Despite a revenue shortfall, Apple grew 100M active users during the last 12 months. Apple doesn't have "fickle" customers. Quite the opposite. This is one reason services are growing at 25% y/y. People don't switch just because they aren't upgrading. They are holding on to their iPhones for longer, but they aren't buying Android phones.
Battery replacements still were a minor impact. It was clear Cook was emphasizing the slowdown in China. In fact, he TOLD us to what extent with this quote:
"In fact, most of our revenue shortfall to our guidance, and over 100 percent of our year-over-year worldwide revenue decline, occurred in Greater China across iPhone, Mac and iPad."
Flatly, you're wrong about China, at least historically. It was growing nicely every quarter until this most recent guidance revision. As recently as the numbers reported in November of 2018, China revenue grew 19% sequentially and 16% y/y. I can understand why Apple was surprised, because China had performed so well even through the most recent quarter. China manufacturing numbers came out and they were terrible. China has slowed down significantly as of late and it happened very quickly.
This is a short term problem for Apple, but China has proven to be a very popular and high growth market for AAPL as I just pointed out with hard data.
I know the numbers that are available. Cook didn't give very many in his report that were meaningful. You're looking at whatever he cherrypicked for you in the press statement. There's also nothing you can say about AAPL valuation that isn't different from its current price if you only quote numbers.
Services: People aren't switching because Apple has competitive services at the moment. Any time that changes, they're gone before investors know it, since investors aren't in touch with that. It's unreasonable to rely on income from services if there's nothing locking users in, and they need excitement in iPhones for that.
You can't cite y/y growth on tiny sales to begin with in China and say that indicates China will play nicely with Apple threatening domestic competitors there. Once iPhone market share reaches a certain point, the government cracks down, regardless of how nicely the US treats them. That's how it's always worked. No American company has ever dominated a market in China that has competition there, and Apple isn't any more convincing than the rest.
How is saying that China was responsible for over 100% of the decline not meaningful? How is the growth that Apple put up in China that I posted not meaningful?
Tiny sales? China did $52B in sales in FY 2018, growing 16% y/y. You know how much $52B is? It's almost the same as ALL of Disney's 2018 revenue and 5X NFLX's total 2018 revenue. It's 50% of Google's annual TOTAL 2017 revenue.
China is almost as large of a market as ALL of Europe.
Your comments about services are unfounded. I just told you services grew 25% despite the iPhone shortfall. Consumer data shows over and over that Apple's consumers are the most loyal in the industry.
Apple doesn't need to "dominate" market share in China to be successful. They've already shown you that with $52B in sales there. I have no more words.
I think Apple was having problems for a couple years now. The first way they tried to address it was inflate the price of newer phones to offset the lower quantity being purchased. This got them by last year and Apple got too comfortable and did the same with iPads and such. Consumers recognized that the prices are a little out of control at this point and have refrained from buying their products. If Apple doesn't change course quickly, this problem will compound year over year.