Malcolm Owen
Apple's third-quarter financial results have improved considerably compared to 2023, with sales figures across every aspect of the company beating Wall Street expectations.
Apple has disclosed its quarterly financial results for Q3 2024, and it has beaten expectations by a considerable margin. Typically the quietest quarter in the year, the figures have been buoyed by the prospect of Apple Intelligence, among other inbound changes this fall.
The figures landed ahead of the usual conference call with investors and analysts, hosted by CEO Tim Cook and CFO Luca Maestri. The pair are anticipated to offer more detail about the numbers and its global business.
For the third quarter, Apple's revenue hit $85.78 billion, up from the $81.80 billion it reported for the same quarter one year ago in Q3 2023 and beating Wall Street expectations of $84.54 billion. The earnings per share of $1.40 is up from the year-ago $1.26.
In the quarter, iPhone brought in $39.3 billion, down from $39.67 billion this time last year,, but beating Wall Street's guess of $38.81 billion. Meanwhile iPad at $7.16 billion is up from $5.79 billion one year ago, as well as Wall Street's $6.61 billion forecast.
Mac revenue moved from $6.84 billion in Q3 2023 to $7.01 billion, narrowly short of Wall Street's oddly close $7.02 billion estimate.
Wearables, Home, and Accessories saw a shift down from $8.28 billion in the year-ago quarter to $8.09 billion. Services continued its growth, moving to $24.2 billion from $21.21 billion in Q3 2023, also beating Wall Street's $24.01 billion estimate.
"During the quarter, we were excited to announce incredible updates to our software platforms at our Worldwide Developers Conference, including Apple Intelligence, a breakthrough personal intelligence system that puts powerful, private generative AI models at the core of iPhone, iPad, and Mac.," said Tim Cook.
He continued "We very much look forward to sharing these tools with our users, and we continue to invest significantly in the innovations that will enrich our customers' lives, while leading with the values that drive our work."
Apple's board of directors has declared a cash dividend of $0.25 per share of the Company's common stock.
Christine McKee
AppleInsider Staff
Chip Loder
William Gallagher
7 Comments
The time is right Microsoft/CrowdStrike, Recall, and Windows/Qualcomm on Arm floundering, Apple should be looking at disrupting the Microsoft Azure inertia throne, the Microsoft CrowdStrike fiasco means its time or at least getting close to leveraging Apple Silicon computers in small and medium sized businesses in some of the back of house computing solutions.
Microsoft Amy Hood confirmed some of the problems in the Earnings call
https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/microsoft-reports-dollar647-billion-fy24-q4-revenue-the-seventh-consecutive-surface-decline-and-big-jumps-for-xbox-and-cloud
"Though most of the report is positive, it does show a sizable 42% reduction in Xbox hardware revenue, indicating that Microsoft's Xbox Series X|S console sales have slowed. There's also an 11% decline for devices revenue, which encompasses Microsoft's Surface products. Notably, this is the seventh consecutive quarter in which devices revenue has fallen, signaling that the company is struggling to grow its Surface user-base."
Microsoft needs to fix their OS kernel, AI and the Surface need to take a back seat Nadella is caught between three rocks.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/microsoft-says-that-a-cyberattack-triggered-the-hours-long-outage-impacting-azure-customers/ar-BB1qXMMz
In AI Apple doesn't appear to be behind, in fact in most of the important computing areas today Apple is ahead or right on time.
Right on cue, APPLE stock drops. No good deed goes unpunished on Wall Street.
New iPads couldn't bring sales back to 2021 or 2022. Increased sales and new keyboard sizes did however improve sales of accessories.
The fact that Mac is below 2022 is OK as the MBA M2 and MBP M2 were launched in 2022 Q3. That is hard to beat for MBA M3.
And iPhone... no SE, no new color, and only 15 Pro is AI-ready (if consumers are aware).
Seems services is once again the winner. Guess $1.5b is Music. No wonder Apple is worried about DOJ, EU, and others demanding changes to app-distribution. It is for now the only major source of growth at Apple.