After Apple faced its third class action in Europe over throttled iPhones, the California-based tech giant finally received some good news as it reported its first-quarter with over $100 billion in sales.
Not surprisingly, it was the iPhone that accounted for a huge chunk of the company’s revenue – 59% – during the winter quarter. Its sales rose by 17% to reach $65.6 billion, after shipping around 90 million iPhones for the same period. This is the largest number of smartphones sold in any quarter, said analyst Francisco Jeronimo. The previous record for revenue earned from iPhones in a quarter was $61.58 billion, in the first quarter of fiscal 2018.
The first quarter saw Apple set the record for revenue earned in a quarter – $111.4 billion – an improvement of 21% since 2019. Earnings per share were up by 35% to $1.68 per share, another record. Apple announced that 64% of the quarter’s revenue came from international sales.
Apple CEO was all praise. “This quarter for Apple wouldn’t have been possible without the tireless and innovative work of every Apple team member worldwide,” he said. “We’re gratified by the enthusiastic customer response to the unmatched line of cutting-edge products that we delivered across a historic holiday season. We are also focused on how we can help the communities we’re a part of build back strongly and equitably, through efforts like our Racial Equity and Justice Initiative as well as our multi-year commitment to invest $350 billion throughout the United States.”
Luca Maestri, Apple CFO, said, “Our December quarter business performance was fuelled by double-digit growth in each product category, which drove all-time revenue records in each of our geographic segments and an all-time high for our installed base of active devices. These results helped us generate a record operating cash flow of $38.8 billion. We also returned over $30 billion to shareholders during the quarter as we maintain our target of reaching a net cash neutral position over time.”
The iPad did not fall behind as its sales rose by 41%, while sales of MacBook came third with a growth of 21%. The sales of wearables and services set new records for Apple.
Cook, in a conference call, revealed that more and more people were not only upgrading their models to purchase newer ones, but people who had previously used competitor phones are now getting their first iPhone. “Looking at the iPhone 12 family, we saw both switchers and upgraders increase on a year over year basis. And in fact, we saw the largest number of upgraders, that we’ve ever seen in a quarter,” hesaid.
