Apple published its latest quarterly financials last night and – no surprises here – it’s still making plenty of money.
The company’s revenues were up 7.2% year-on-year to $45.4bn in the second quarter (Apple’s fiscal Q3) while its net profit grew by 11.8% to $8.7bn.
Or, to put it another way: Apple’s quarterly revenues were nearly 15 times Spotify’s turnover for the whole of 2017. An unfair comparison, but a useful one to remember when thinking about the scale of the competitive challenge for a pureplay like Spotify.
Apple didn’t announce any new figures for Apple Music in its earnings call last night, with CEO Tim Cook merely telling analysts that “revenue from our Apple Music streaming service and from iCloud storage also grew very strongly”.
This was part of a wider point though: Apple’s services division saw its revenues climb 22% year-on-year to $7.3bn, and while the App Store is still a major driver here, Apple Music is also playing a role.
Across its various services offerings, Apple now has 185 million paid subscriptions: “An increase of almost 20 million in the last 90 days alone,” according to Cook.
Otherwise, there wasn’t much to say about music, although Apple may be keeping some powder dry for its next iPhone launch event this autumn.
Talking of iPhones, Apple sold just over 41m of them in the last quarter, up 2% year-on-year. The company also saw its tablets business return to growth, with iPad sales up 15% to 11.4m units – although lower prices played a role in that, with iPad revenues up 2%.
In the scheme of things, Services is now Apple’s second-biggest revenue generator behind only iPhone ($24.8bn last quarter) but ahead of Macs ($5.6bn), iPads ($5bn) and ‘other products’ including Apple Watch and Apple TV ($2.7bn).
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