Business

10 things you need to know about Apple (Q2 18 edition)

Apple's quarterly call to investors gives us an opportunity to get to know the company in much greater depth and to get hints as to where it is headed.

Written by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, Senior Contributing Editor May 2, 2018 at 2:45 a.m. PT

While Apple's earnings report is where we get the raw facts about how the company is doing, there can be some real nuggets of information buried in the follow-up conference call.

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#1: Wearables are up, in a big way (but I bet analysts wished Apple would just offer up sales figures rather than cherry pick data points).

"Our performance was broad-based, with iPhone revenue up 14 percent, services up 31 percent and wearables up almost 50 percent." - Tim Cook, Apple CEO

#2: The iPhone X is a hit (although by how much Apple isn't willing to tell).

"And customers chose iPhone X more than any other iPhone each week in the March quarter, just as they did following its launch in the December quarter." - Cook

#3: Apple is leveraging that massive hardware ecosystem to push enormous services growth.

"Across all our services, paid subscriptions surpassed 270 million, up over 100 million from a year ago and up $30 million in the last 90 days alone, contributing to the overall increase in services revenue." - Cook

#4: Did Cook mention that the Apple Watch is selling well?

"Apple Watch had another great quarter with revenue growing by strong double digits year-over-year to a new March quarter record." - Cook

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#5: While it's easy to think of tablets much in the same way as we think of MP3 players, Apple is commanding more and more of the remaining market.

"NPD indicates that iPad has 53 percent of the U.S. tablet market in the March quarter, up from 40 percent share a year ago." - Luca Maestri, Apple CFO

#6: Did Apple mention already how awesome the iPad is? How people and businesses still love it?

"And the most recent customer survey from 451 Research measured iPad customer satisfaction ratings of 95 percent and among business customers who plan to purchase tablets in the June quarter, 73 percent plan to purchase iPads." - Maestri

#7: The gamble that people would pay more for an iPhone, thus pushing up the ASP (Average Selling Price) to offset declining sales, worked.

"... our revenues are up 14 percent year-over-year on iPhone and that's a combination of single digit unit growth and ASP growth that is mainly driven by iPhone X." - Cook

#8: Take that, cheaper phones!

"... the iPhone was the top three selling phones in China." - Cook

#9: iPhone X features will be coming to cheaper iPhones real soon.

" We were surprised somewhat that through all of this period of time that the iPhone X winds up at the most selling, most popular for every week of the time since the launch. And so that's I think a powerful point. And it's number one in China, which is another powerful point. And so obviously at some point if those technologies move to lower price points and that there's probably more unit demand." - Cook

#10: Apple thinks that there's plenty of room for growth in the smartphone business. Is this a further hint that a true budget iPhone might be incoming?

"In terms of the market in general, if you look at last year, which is the last data point we have on the full market, there were still 0.5 billion feature phones sold in the world. And so many of those were sold into emerging markets, not all of them, but many of them. And we still believe that over time every phone sold will be a smartphone." - Cook