Andrew O'Hara
During its quarterly conference call, Apple CFO Luca Maestri shared that the iPhone maker's wearables division continues to see strong growth and is now the size of a Fortune 140 company.
Despite a difficult quarter during the global COVID-19 pandemic, Apple's wearable division has continued to outperform expectations, Maestri said.
Wearables — AirPods, Apple Watch and Beats — has grown to the size of a Fortune 140 company. During the first quarter 2020 results Apple called out wearables as a Fortune 150 company. During the Q2 quarter, wearables earned $6.3 billion, up from $5.1 billion during the year ago quarter.
Driving the wearables increase is new customers to Apple Watch. According to Maestri, 75% of Apple Watch purchases during the quarter went to first-time buyers.
"Despite COVID-19's unprecedented global impact, we're proud to report that Apple grew for the quarter, driven by an all-time record in Services and a quarterly record for Wearables," said Apple CEO Tim Cook.
The wearables category has now surpassed both the Mac ($5.4 billion) as well as iPad ($4.4 billion) in terms of revenue during the quarter.
Maestri sees a slight downturn in wearables and iPhone for the coming June quarter, a traditionally soft period for those two segments.
"On iPhone and wearables, we expect a year over year revenue performance to worsen in the June quarter relative to the March quarter," Maestri said. "On iPad and Mac, we expect the year-over-year revenue performance to improve in the June quarter."
During the conference call, Cook was asked whether Apple plans to tailor its ECG technology to help detect or manage coronavirus symptoms. While he did not comment on specific plans, Cook said Apple is already working on Apple Watch enhancements that are at least tangential to the ongoing crisis.
"You can bet that we're looking at other areas in this. We were already doing that because we viewed that that area was a huge opportunity for the company and a way for us to help a lot of people," Cook said. "And so you will see us continue on that."
AppleInsider Staff
Andrew Orr
Amber Neely
William Gallagher
Christine McKee
6 Comments
So the largest company in the world has a division that makes a lot of money. You going to count it down 140 - 130 - 120 ... this is not a 2 man operation being run out of a garage anymore! You know that right? Right? AWS and Google’s Android, Microsoft Azure and Xbox, Facebook’s Instagram probably rank up there too. Big businesses have money to make this sort of thing happen. Unless you are surprised by this in which case, you shouldn’t be.
While it's exciting to hear there are new health features for the Apple Watch in the works, we still don't have ECG enabled in Australia. I'm sure this has more to do with our Government than with Apple. Would be good to know what Apple is doing to get this feature approved though. This doesn't seem like something they need to be secretive about. If some of the new features for the Series 6 are health related but not enabled in Australia it may affect the number of people that upgrade here.
The fortunes XXX numbers are getting ridiculous. At least they make it easy to know where Apples division ranks.