Apple Services Hit $10 Billion

4th Quarter Revenue Totals $62.9 Billion

Apple had good news for Wall Street yesterday, when CEO Tim Cook announced fourth quarter results, with revenue of $62.9 billion, $10 billion of it from the company’s Services unit, which includes Apple Music, iTunes and Apple Pay.

The $62.9 billion figure represents a 20 percent increase over the same period last year, and beat analysts’ expectations (pegged at about $61.57 billion, according to Thomson Reuters). Quarterly earnings per diluted share of $2.91, were up 41 percent. International sales accounted for 61 percent of the quarter’s revenue.

The $10 billion in Services revenue represents an all-time high for the company. Excluding a one-time favorable adjustment of $640 million recognized in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2017, Services revenue grew from $7.9 billion in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2017 to $10 billion in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2018, an increase of 27 percent.

While services are a bright spot, and demonstrate Apple’s successful diversification as companies like Samsung eat into its territory on the hardware and challengers from Acer to Lenovo claim new turf, the devices that have been Apple’s mainstay are still performing strong.  Earnings from Apple’s iPhone increased a healthy 29 percent, to $37.2 billion. This despite the new iPhone models falling below expectations, 46.9 million iPhones sold for the quarter.

“We’re thrilled to report another record-breaking quarter that caps a tremendous fiscal 2018, the year in which we shipped our 2 billionth iOS device, celebrated the 10th anniversary of the App Store and achieved the strongest revenue and earnings in Apple’s history,” Cook said in making the announcement.  “Over the past two months, we’ve delivered huge advancements for our customers through new versions of iPhone, Apple Watch, iPad and Mac as well as our four operating systems, and we enter the holiday season with our strongest lineup of products and services ever.”

“We concluded a record year with our best September quarter ever, growing double digits in every geographic segment. We set September quarter revenue records for iPhone and Wearables and all-time quarterly records for Services and Mac,” Luca Maestri Apple CFO Luca Maestri said in the company’s earnings statement. “We generated $19.5 billion in operating cash flow and returned over $23 billion to shareholders in dividends and share repurchases in the September quarter, bringing total capital returned in fiscal 2018 to almost $90 billion.”
Looking ahead, Apple providing the following projections for its fiscal 2019 first quarter:
  • revenue between $89 billion and $93 billion
  • gross margin between 38 percent and 38.5 percent
  • operating expenses between $8.7 billion and $8.8 billion
  • other income/(expense) of $300 million
  • tax rate of approximately 16.5 percent before discrete items
Apple’s board of directors has declared a cash dividend of $0.73 per share of the Company’s common stock. The dividend is payable on November 15, 2018 to shareholders of record as of the close of business on November 12, 2018.
Apple will provide live streaming of its Q4 2018 financial results conference call beginning at 2:00 p.m. PDT on November 1, 2018 atwww.apple.com/investor/earnings-call/. This webcast will also be available for replay for approximately two weeks thereafter.

 

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