This Thursday (02/02), Apple presented the financial report for the first fiscal quarter of 2023 (Q1 FY 2023), a period that corresponded to the fourth calendar quarter of 2022, covering the months of October to December. While Apple of Cupertino remains a giant and healthy company, it saw the biggest drop in revenue since 2016 and China led this disappointing result.
Apple Changsha, the first Apple Store in Hunan Province, China (credit: Apple) Let’s go global: APPLE FINANCIAL REPORT Period → Q1 FY 2022
(October to December 2021) Q1 FY 2023
(October to December 2022) Difference Revenue US$ 123.95 billion US$ 117.15 billion – 5.48% Profit US$ 34.63 billion US$ 29.998 billion – 13.38% Above we have an overview of the Apple of Cupertino, with the company’s key financial data for the three months ending December 31, 2022. Uncle Laguna celebrates that they have finally corrected the missing days to match the calendar quarter (I know). Anyway, we see a small 5.48% drop in revenue versus Q1 FY 2022 and a lady 13.38% drop in quarterly profit, which amounted to just under $30 billion in the 98 days of Q1 FY 2023 That’s a profit of $306.1 million per day, coming from an average global daily collection of just over $1 billion ($1.195 billion per day) over the 14 weeks that make up the reporting period! Who are responsible for this beautiful percentage drop in Apple’s first fiscal quarter revenue? To try to understand the composition of this more than billion daily revenue, let’s see how much each main line of Apple products raised: APPLE REVENUE SUMMARY Period → Revenue
Q1 FY 2022 Revenue
Q1 FY 2023 difference
about
Q1 FY 2022 iPhone $71.63 billion $65.78 billion – 8.17% Mac $10.85 billion $7.74 billion – 28.72% iPad $7.25 billion $9, 4 billion + 29.64% wearables and accessories $14.7 billion $13.48 billion – 8.29% subscriptions $19.52 billion $20.77 billion + 6.4% Revenue $123, 95 billion US$ 117.15 billion – 5.48% Apparently Apple prefers not to reveal how many units it sold of each piece of hardware, including the iPhone star, to prevent us from relating the fall in revenue in the best period of the year to lower sales. Although the company says there are 2 billion active iOS devices, while in January 2022 it said it had 1.8 billion. Therefore, we can only speculate that the iPhones 14 (and Plus / Pro / Max) were not as well received in civilization as they basically do not have any more novelties than the iPhone 13 and that justify an upgrade. What may have affected sales of MacBooks would be the expectation for the launch of Pro models with Apple M2. Although not the main star of collection, the company’s tablets achieved a significant growth of almost 30% in the collection of the segment thanks to the launch of iPads Pro with the Apple M2 processor. Available on the civilized market since October 26th, we can say that the new iPads did well but did not hold back the drop in Apple Cupertino revenue during Q1 FY 2023, including in China.
The sharp drop in China
APPLE’S REVENUE IN ASIA Period → Revenue
Q1 FY 2022 Revenue
Q1 FY 2023 difference
about
Q1 FY 2022 Mainland China $25.78 billion $23.91 billion – 7.28% Japan $7.11 billion $6.76 billion – 4.95% rest mainland $9.81 billion US $9.54 billion – 2.8%
TOTAL:
US$ 42.7 billion US$ 40.195 billion – 5.87% global share 34.45% 34.31% – 0.041% Despite being the third largest market in the world when we talk about Apple’s revenue, China was the one that had largest percentage drop from the prior-year quarter. With more than a 7% decline from Q1 FY 2022, the Middle Country beat the United States (–4.31%) and Europe (–6.95%) in this annual percentage decline. Why did China fall so low? The zero COVID policy, pure and simple: if there is a need for greater confinement, in theory, the population prefers to buy groceries over superfluous. The second richest country in the world doesn’t care if the economy slows down a bit, as long as the pandemic doesn’t spread to many more regions than full vaccination. Anyway, as the US$ 2.39 trillion Apple no longer discloses unit sales data for its products, much less how much they are selling in each region of the planet, we can only say that Apple had a disappointing quarter, especially in China. Sources: 9 to 5 Mac, Bloomberg and CNBC.