Thursday, January 28, 2021
It's going well in Cupertino
Apple breaks records in the Christmas quarter
Crisis, which crisis? At the end of the first Corona year, Apple is celebrating the most successful quarter in its company's history. The group succeeds in what only two other companies have done so far: to crack the sales mark of 100 billion dollars.
Despite the Corona crisis and shop closings around the globe, Apple has increased sales and profits to unprecedented heights in the Christmas business. Revenues climbed 21 percent to $ 111.4 billion, Apple announced on the evening after the market closed. Thus, the iPhone group exceeded the mark of 100 billion dollar quarterly sales for the first time. Only the supermarket giant Walmart and the oil company Exxon Mobil had succeeded in this before. With a market capitalization of $ 2.4 trillion, Apple is the world's most valuable publicly traded company.
All product lines as well as the services business contributed to the growth. In terms of profit, there was an increase of 29.3 percent in the first fiscal quarter that ended at the end of December. Apple launched the new iPhone 12 for the Christmas business, which is the first to be equipped for super-fast 5G cellular communications and has been given a new design for the first time in years. IPhone sales rose 17.2 percent year over year. The iPhone remains by far the most important product from Apple. For some time now, Apple has stopped disclosing how many iPhones have been sold. However, company boss Tim Cook said that there are now more than a billion iPhones in use worldwide.
The business with subscription services such as Apple Music or iCloud storage brought in sales of almost 15.8 billion dollars – almost a quarter more than a year earlier. The company now has 620 million payment customers, which is above its own target of 600 million by the end of the year.
With Mac computers, Apple made almost $ 8.7 billion, an increase of 21 percent. In the Corona crisis, notebook sales are increasing across the industry. It was only in November that Apple launched its first Macbook with chips it had developed itself, thereby sealing its departure from long-term partner Intel. Similar to the auto industry or Microsoft, the Cupertino group recently felt delivery bottlenecks – for semiconductors, but also in other areas.
A decisive factor in the strong growth was a significant improvement in Apple's business in China. There sales rose within a year by 57 percent to 21.3 billion dollars.
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