Yesterday, Apple released the results for its 2019 fiscal second quarter (which ran from December 30, 2018 to March 30, 2019) and held a call with analysts to discuss the results. Apple's first fiscal quarter is the one with all of the holiday sales, so Q2 is usually not a particular impressive quarter for Apple, although one year ago Apple posted its best Q2 ever, with revenue of $61.1 billion. This time, the revenue was $58 billion, which was within the guidance of $55 to $59 billion that Apple had predicted three months ago in its Q1 earnings call. If you want to get all of the nitty gritty details, you can download the audio from the announcement conference call from iTunes, or you can read a rough transcript of the call prepared by Seeking Alpha. Jason Snell of Six Colors also prepared a transcript. Apple's official press release is here. As always, I'm not as interested in the financial details as I am the statements of Apple executives during the call that are of interest to iPhone and iPad users. Here are the items that stood out to me.
- Apple stopped releasing specific sales numbers for the iPhone, iPad, etc. six months ago, so it is no longer possible to get an exact sense of whether iPhone sales are up or down, but you can still get some sense from revenue, which Apple does still announce. iPhone revenue was down 17% compared to a year ago, so obviously they must have been selling fewer iPhones; it is hard to imagine that decrease came only from selling less expensive models. But Apple is hopeful that iPhone sales will increase again. For example, Apple CFO Luca Maestri said that of business buyers who said that they plan to purchase a smartphone in April, May, or June, 81% of them say that they plan to purchase iPhones.
- Although over half of Apple's revenue comes from the iPhone, this past quarter the iPad did particularly well. Revenue was $4.9 billion, up 22% compared to a year ago, which was Apple's highest iPad revenue growth rate in six years. Apple CEO Tim Cook attributed this increase to the iPad Pro.
- Apple Pay transaction volume has more than doubled from last year.
- Maestri said that Apple's wearables business — which includes the Apple Watch but I'm not sure what else, perhaps AirPods? — grew almost 50%.
- Speaking of AirPods, Cook said that they are nothing less than a cultural phenomenon, and Maestri said that Apple is working hard to catch up with customer demand.
- Surprising nobody, Cook said that the App Store "is definitely a business that is big and getting bigger."
