“Apple’s iPhone product category has fundamentally reshaped the company over the past 11 years,” Ashraf Eassa writes for The Motley Fool. “Thanks in large part to this product franchise, Apple is the most valuable publicly-traded company in the world, commanding a market capitalization of roughly $1 trillion.”
“In fiscal year 2018, Apple’s iPhone business had its best year ever — at least in terms of the most important metric,” Eassa writes. “In its fiscal year 2018, Apple shipped 217.7 million iPhones, just a smidgen higher than what it shipped in fiscal year 2017 and almost 3% more than what it shipped in fiscal year 2016. You’ll note, though, that this is still below the unit shipments record that the company set during its fiscal year 2015 [231.2 million].”
“While Apple wasn’t able to top its fiscal-year 2015 iPhone shipments in its fiscal year 2018, it did manage to set an all-time record for iPhone revenue at $166.7 billion — up about 7.5% from the fiscal-year 2015 peak,” Eassa writes. “A significant increase in the company’s iPhone average selling price allowed Apple to do this without shipping a record number of units.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We’ll never know if Apple is able to eclipse 2015′ unit sales record with devices such as iPhone XR, but it really doesn’t matter. The unit sales are stable. Until the next groundbreaking product (vehicles, AR glasses, etc.), Apple’s Services business deserves to be the focus of analysts and investors.
SEE ALSO:
Why Apple’s unit sales reporting doesn’t matter anymore – November 2, 2018
The ‘smart money’ shrugs off Apple’s decision to no longer disclose unit sales – November 2, 2018
Apple rams their message home: Think ‘Apple as a Service’ – November 2, 2018
Investors bristle as Apple occludes iPhone unit sales data – November 2, 2018
Apple’s decision to stop reporting unit sales of iPhones, Macs, and iPads is a ‘defining moment’ – November 2, 2018
Apple to stop reporting iPhone, Mac, and iPad quarterly unit sales – November 1, 2018
Apple tumbles 7% after reporting record-breaking quarterly earnings – November 1, 2018
Apple beats Street with another record-breaking quarter – November 1, 2018
And it’s last confirmed one….
Best year ever and the stock took a $15 nosedive. I would have hated to see a poor year of iPhone sales. I’m not trying to be sarcastic, but I’m merely looking at the results. Weak guidance will usually pull down Apple stock as it’s happened a number of times before. Apple was correct to give conservative guidance for the next quarter. It doesn’t hurt long-term shareholders, at all. I’m just sick of those darn FANG stocks always getting Wall Street’s preference over Apple.
It was a good chance to buy some cheaper AAPL.
True. But it was an even better day to buy stock of Apple supplier Universal Display (OLED). OLED was down 20.5% on Friday, not due to poor performance but due to a change in accounting standards, and maybe also because Apple’s cautious guidance reflects poorly on its suppliers.
Idiots. Apple is aiming for longevity. Those ”second hands” in the family and those units that are sold in the second-hand market. Over 50% of the second-hand market is iPhones (Macs..etc).
100% in the family.
The jewel is the watch. When it can monitor blood pressure in real time, they’ll sell more watches than phones.
Apple of course know that the iPhone sales cannot ever sustain up, up in the way, along a straight up-curve. I suppose they already sensed that the phone sales were approaching the plateau a year or so ago, but kept its hype, i.e., milk us as much as they could while they could.
Tim Cook also made a huge mistake of possibly misinterpreting St.Jobs’ word of “post PC era” and tried to converge Mac and iOS, which he later admitted that “it was not what consumers wanted”. OK, good but a bit late.
So, now they are refocussing on Mac line of products (finally!). Apple announced a small incremental updating of MacBook Air and Mac Mini, that’s all for this year, responding to the outcry of the market and sooth them down. Fine, a small but a meaningful first step. But they are saving the major updates of Mac Pro, iMac, iMac Pro and perhaps others for the next year to compensate the downturn of iPhone sales. Apple have already announced that they would update Mac Pro sometime ago, but won’t launch it until next year. Hard to understand why 2019.
Now, it appears that they want to compensate anticipated downturn of the iPhone sales with that of major Mac updates next year. Combined it with stopping publicizing the unit sales, this strategy begins to make sense, and might even work well to avoid sudden collapse of the stock market.
Too much conspiracy theory? Perhaps, but I just cannot trust this CEO. He is too manipulative and money/profit hungery (in a bean counter way) at the sacrifice of people who pay so much for their gadgets, us!