Examining Apple's record-shattering $123.9B first quarter by the numbers

The quarter was "made possible by our most innovative lineup of products and services ever," according to Apple CEO Tim Cook in comments made on Thursday as the results were published. Its wide array of changes across its product catalog certainly helped motivate customers to upgrade and to switch to the ecosystem.

It also helped Apple achieve its highest install base ever with more than 1.8 billion active devices.

The giant figures are also a regular occurrence for the company since the first quarter is always its biggest of the financial year.

However, due to the continuing uncertainty caused by the ongoing pandemic, Apple is keeping up its policy of not providing a forecast for the upcoming quarter. The only clue offered was by CFO Luca Maestri, who said revenue growth is expected to accelerate year-on-year for the Q2 results.

What follows is a breakdown of Apple's reported figures, as well as comparisons to previous quarters over the last few years, to give more context to the latest report.

Revenue and Net Profit

In the quarter, Apple reported revenue of $123.9 billion, an 11.2% increase year-on-year from Q1 2021. This figure is truly massive and occurs while the company and the world continue to battle the COVID-19 pandemic.

The net profit of 34.6 billion is also the company's highest, soundly beating the $28 billion from one year prior by 20.4%.

The graph does show that the YoY growth in revenue and net profit isn't as high as one year ago, but bear in mind that the year-ago figures were themselves up considerably than Q1 2020's numbers. It's better interpreted as a continuation of growth following an unprecedented spike than a reduction in growth.

Gross Margin

The gross margin refers to the net sales minus the cost of goods sold, which makes it a pretty good indicator of how costly a year has been for Apple. The higher the percentage, the higher the proportional profit for Apple.

At 43.76%, Q1 2022's gross margin percentage is the highest in recent years, beating out the 43.29% from Q3 2021 and the 39.78% of Q1 2021. It's a continuing trend of a higher margin for Apple since around Q1 2021, but it remains to be seen if it will carry on at this height.

Gross margin generally follows Apple's revenue quite closely, but it is pretty easy to see in the YoY changes that Apple's increased it over the last few quarters.

Products

Historically, Apple has earned most of its revenue from the iPhone. For Q1 2022, there's no change here.

The iPhone still maintains its proportionate contribution to revenue at 57.8% of the total, followed by Services at 15.7%, then Wearables, Home, and Accessories at 11.9%, Mac at 8.8%, and iPad at 5.8%.

One year ago, iPad and Mac revenue were more proportionately similar.

Enjoying a full quarter of sales for the iPhone 13 range, the holiday period helped push iPhone revenue for the quarter to over $70 billion for the first time.

This quarter's figure is a 9.2% increase over the $65 billion one year ago. "This is the best iPhone lineup we've ever had and the reaction from the press and our users had been off the charts," said Cook on the analyst call.

At $7.2 billion, iPad revenue is 14.1% down from one year ago, but remember that Q1 2021's result was buoyed by work-from-home and social distancing initiatives.

Apple's continuing march of Apple Silicon led to the introduction of the 14-inch MacBook Pro and the 16-inch MacBook Pro. Evidently, this helped push revenue to $10.85 billion, a YoY increase of 25.1%, and the Mac unit's first peak into double-digit billions.

Apple's Wearables, Home, and Accessories unit has gone from strength to strength, increasing 13.3% year-on-year to reach a staggering $14.7 billion for the period. This unit includes the Apple Watch Series 7, third-generation AirPods, the new color options for the HomePod mini, and the infamous Apple Polishing Cloth.

We regularly call Apple's Services unit a reliable growth engine for the company, and the statement holds true for Q1 2022. Its revenue of $19.5 billion is a year-on-year growth of 23.8%, roughly where it usually is.

Operating Segments

On a territorial basis, Apple's revenue gains are spread out across the globe, though with one exception.

The Americas was Apple's largest source of revenue at $51.5 billion, up 11.2% YoY, followed by Europe at $29.7 billion, up 8.9%. Greater China is third at $25.8 billion, representing revenue growth of 21% YoY, then Rest of Asia Pacific is fourth with $9.8 billion, up 19.3%.

The outlier is Japan, which is the only territory to see a decline in the period, with its $7.1 billion down 14% from one year ago. Again, we are probably seeing a 2021 spike in action here since Q1 2021's figure was up 32.8% YoY.

Versus Wall Street

The predictions of financial analysts were soundly beaten by Apple's results. The Wall Street Consensus was that Apple would pull in $118.3 billion, a miss of around $5 billion.

A consensus gross margin forecast of 40.5% proved to be a little low. The earnings per share estimate of $1.89 was also a little off from reality, with Apple setting it at $2.10.