“Last night, Apple reported a terrific end to 2016, breaking its record for quarterly revenue with a gargantuan $78.4 billion for the final three months of the year,” Vlad Savov reports for The Verge.
“The company also checked off record revenues from its iPhone, Mac, Apple Watch, and Services divisions,” Savov reports. “There’s no denying it has been a phenomenal success from a company that has repeatedly defied its critics. But there’s one little asterisk to the whole happy affair, and that’s the fact that Apple’s financial Q1 2017 stretched out to 14 weeks rather than the usual 13, owing to a calendar peculiarity.
Savov reports, “What it means now is that the company’s totals for the last three months of 2016 look better than they otherwise might have done, while its numbers for the first three months of 2017 are likely to look worse.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Good thing there will be a tenth anniversary iPhone to obliterate the tough compare.
In fact, maybe that’s why there were no new iPads for Christmas. Why set a bar so high you cannot clear it when you’re already likely to post all-time record earnings anyway, right?
It’s that time for the haters to claim from this day forward Apple can only go down in value. Apple is going to be the new UnderArmour. The iPhone X super-cycle is non-existent and NO ONE will be buying an AppleWatch because the Samsung Gear 3 is so much better in every way. Let’s face it. Apple just got LUCKY this quarter but Microsoft’s Surface Pro 5 will stop the lucky streak. Besides, Wall Street says any company without a cloud business is destined to fail because the cloud business has no limits. Sell all your Apple stock… NOW!
/s
This is important as Apple’s latest earnings may be misleading. They would have to comment by taking off 1 week of sales and then stating whether there was revenue and iPhone unit growth YOY or not.
Apple revenues and unit sales of iPhones may have DECLINED YOY.
Apple’s latest ended Q1 2017 has 1 full extra week of sales included compared to the same period last year. Because of this:
Q1 2017: $78,351 revenues
Q1 2016: $75,872 revenues
For Q1 2017, average revenues per week = $5.596 billion. Shaving off a week of sales ($78,351 billion – $5.596 billion) = $72,872 billion in revenues for Q1 2017. That’s a ~4% decline in revenues YOY comparing a 13 week period of sales for this latest Q1 2017 Q vs. 13 week period of sales for Q1 2016.
IPhone unit sales potential decline: 5.592 million units sold on average per week for Q1 2017. Applying this to 13 weeks = 72,697 million iPhone units. Compare to Q1 2016: 74,779 million units sold over 13 week period. This = ~2.8% unit sales decline YOY.
That’s a good point. That extra week of revenue will change the numbers if you’re not comparing the same number of weeks each year.
Good to see people are waking up to this.
Its not about hating people. Lets be very clear about this, it’s about saving the company we love.
Apple put out a press release claiming record revenue without the 14 week information and mislead the market. Thousands of websites including big websites read by millions of people have printed the press release without the 14 week information. the share price is up 40B because of it.
Thats fraud pure and simple and its not even hard to prove it. Its a terrible mistake.
So they’re holding back from progress in order to keep their earnings as low as possible so that they have a better shot at beating it next time? It sounds very lazy to me, and more like the market is forcing them to do things they shouldn’t be doing. If this is true, Apple needs to buy back shares with their cash hoard and go private.
That’s an ideal. But it would mean Apple would have to go into real, rather drastic debt. I’ll let others crunch the current numbers, if they’ve got all the data.
So let the 14 week passers and moaners put a little work into the deal and astound us with some facts rather than a sound byte.
Take the numbers, divide by 14 to get a weekly average subtract a week from the totals, and see hoe Apple would have faired in a ‘normal’ 13 week quarter.
Seems like 3 or 4 years ago the same analystas were kvetching how Apple beat the expectations in a 12 week quarter, because if those same numbers had been spread over 13 weeks it would have been lower and a disaster.
Here you go. Jeff Johnson has already done it Via John Gruber (Daring Fireball). John was also unaware of the 14 week quarter.
http://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/02/03/14-week-quarter
“Maestri notes that, while there was an extra week in the quarter this year from last, last year’s software and services revenue included a patent-infringement payment of ~$550 million, so that cancels out.”
Source: http://blogs.marketwatch.com/thetell/2017/01/31/apple-earnings-expected-to-rebound-thanks-to-iphone-7-live-blog/
I posted CFO Luca Maestri’s full quote regarding the 14th week below.
The full transcript of the call can be read at:
http://seekingalpha.com/article/4041266-apple-aapl-q1-2017-results-earnings-call-transcript
Savvy investors knew this and took advantage months ago. All my bets came in.
Apple addressed the 14th week effect in detail. Vlad Savov, who reports for The Verge, is spinning FUD. IASSOTS.
http://www.apple.com/investor/earnings-call/
Luca Maestri – Apple, Inc:
We had the benefit of a 14th week during the quarter this year, but this was offset by four factors. First, this year we grew China inventory significantly less than a year ago. Second, iPhone 7 launched earlier in the September quarter compared to the iPhone 6s launch the previous year, creating a more difficult comparison for the December quarter this year. Third, the stronger U.S. dollar affected total revenue growth this year by 100 basis points. And fourth, our year-ago revenue included the benefit of a one-off $548 million patent infringement payment. Also, strong customer interest left us in supply/demand imbalance for several of our products throughout the quarter this year.
IOW: There was little if any 14th week benefit effect. This will, however, cut into the income of the second quarter. But BFD seeing as the second quarter for Apple is always the worst due to the post-Christmas (aka ‘holiday’) effect. It’s the perfect quarter to take a hit. No one listens to the perennial doomsayers after the second quarter. 😛