Apple Inc on Tuesday said that surging iPhone sales helped propel a sharp rise in quarterly profits, as the tech giant delivered a record 48 million of the smartphones.
Profits rose 31 percent to US$11.1 billion, while revenues jumped 22 percent from the previous year to US$51.5 billion, Apple said.
The California tech giant, which last month unveiled revamped versions of the iPhone, said the number of units sold jumped 22 percent from last year while revenues lifted 36 percent.
Photo: Reuters
Apple, the world’s biggest company by market value, gave back early after-hours gains and dipped 0.2 percent to US$114.30 on the results.
Chief executive officer Tim Cook said Apple closed the books on its fiscal year, calling it “Apple’s most successful year ever,” following strong iPhone sales and a range of new or upgraded devices.
“We are heading into the holidays with our strongest product lineup yet, including iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus, Apple Watch with an expanded lineup of cases and bands, the new iPad Pro and the all-new Apple TV, which begins shipping this week,” Cook said in a statement.
For the full fiscal year ending last month, Apple booked a whopping US$53.4 billion profit, up 35 percent, while revenues rose 28 percent to US$233.7 billion.
About US$12.5 billion in revenue came from China — down 5 percent from the previous quarter, but double the level of a year ago.
Cook said the fiscal year showed “our largest absolute revenue growth ever” and was helped by “huge inroads into emerging markets generating over US$79 billion of revenue and growing 63 percent, despite very strong headwinds from foreign exchange.”
The iPhone was the key driver for Apple, bringing in more than 60 percent of its revenues for the past quarter, but iPad unit sales fell 20 percent in the quarter to 9.9 million units. For its traditional computers, Apple sold an all-time record 5.7 million Macs in the quarter.
No specific sales figures were given for the Apple Watch, but the results showed revenue from “other” products was US$3 billion over the same period.
Cook said of the Apple Watch that “we’re in the very early innings of this promising new part of our business.”
Apple Watch “has already had a tremendous effect on customer health and fitness and the stories we’re hearing about its impact are truly inspirational,” he said.
Apple is making efforts to diversify with services such as its streaming music service and Apple Pay, and its new streaming television devices.
“The reach of our ecosystem continues to grow, and iOS is changing more and more aspects of our customers’ lives in very meaningful ways from their health to their homes to their cars,” Cook said on the earnings call.
He added that Apple Pay is expected to expand to Hong Kong, Singapore and Spain next year.
CHIP HANG-UP: Surging memorychip prices would deal a blow to smartphone sales this year, potentially hindering one of MediaTek’s biggest sources of revenue MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s biggest smartphone chip designer, yesterday said its new artificial intelligence (AI) chips used in data centers are to account for 20 percent of its total revenue next year, as cloud service providers race to deploy AI infrastructure to meet voracious demand. MediaTek is believed to be developing tensor processing units for Google, which are used in AI applications. While it did not confirm such reports, MediaTek said its new application-specific IC (ASIC) business would be a new growth engine for the company. It again hiked its forecast for the addressable ASIC market to US$70 billion by 2028, compared
Motorists ride past a mural along a street in Varanasi, India, yesterday.
MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s biggest smartphone chip supplier, yesterday said it plans to double investment in data center-related technologies, including advanced packaging and high-speed interconnect technologies, to broaden the new business’ customer and service portfolios. The chip designer is redirecting its resources to data centers, mainly designing application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) with artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities for cloud service providers. The data center business is forecast to lead growth in the next three years and become the company’s second-biggest revenue source, replacing chips used in smart devices, MediaTek president Joe Chen (陳冠州) told a media event in Taipei. “Three or four years
AT HIGH CAPACITY: Three-month order visibility on stable customer demand would push factory utilization to between 80 and 85 percent, Vanguard’s president said Foundry service provider Vanguard International Semiconductor Corp (世界先進) yesterday said it is unable to fully satisfy surging demand for chips used in artificial intelligence (AI) servers and data centers, amid an AI infrastructure investment boom that is crowding out production of less advanced chips. Vanguard is facing an “undersupply of chips” made using mature process technologies, due to strong demand for AI products and improving demand from customers in the commercial, industrial and auto sectors, which are digesting excess inventory to a healthier level, company chairman Fang Leuh (方略) told a virtual investors’ conference. However, Vanguard gave a more conservative view on
RSS