In Apple's first financial report after CEO John Ternus ( John Ternus ) took over from Tim Cook ( Tim Cook ), the quarterly financial results exceeded expectations, but the company continues to be under pressure due to soaring costs of memory chips.
This iPhone manufacturer announced revenue of $114.5 billion for the fourth fiscal quarter, which exceeded the expectations of Wall Street analysts. The net profit was $30.7 billion. iPhone had revenue of $57.58 billion, and both of these figures also surpassed market forecasts. Revenue from the services business, including iCloud, App Store, and other services, amounted to $31.57 billion.
The company's stock price fell slightly in after-hours trading.
Tenuis stated in a written statement that iPhone set a revenue record for the September quarter, and its service business also reached a new historical high, 'closing out what has been our best fiscal year to date.'
He said, "We are ending this year with the most ambitious product lineup to date. Coupled with the brand-new Siri AI, this will be an incredible lineup that will lead us into the holiday season."
Many investors have been paying attention to the impact of rising memory chip prices on Apple, and how this will drag down its profit margins. In July, Apple stated that this issue would pose a pressure on its business. Nevertheless, Apple's gross margin in its fourth fiscal quarter rose from 47.2% a year ago to 47.9%, approaching the upper end of its expected range. The gross margin did decline from 50.1% in the previous quarter. Apple said that tariff refunds contributed about 1 percentage point to the gross margin in the most recent quarter, compared to about 2 percentage points in the June quarter.
In the first few months after Tenuis took office, Apple launched a series of products intensively, which helped this executive, who comes from an engineering background, to showcase Apple's latest innovations and also enabled him to adapt to his new position more quickly. These products included the foldable iPhone Duo released in September, followed by new home products, as well as Apple's first touchscreen MacBook Pro that was unveiled last week.
Apple's financial report was released shortly after that of other large technology companies. Meta, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have all disclosed their latest earnings in the past two weeks. Although these companies have generally achieved good results, the stock price of the Nasdaq Composite Index has fallen in recent days as investors weigh the positive growth driven by large technology companies in cloud computing and AI services, as well as the billions of dollars invested by companies like Microsoft and Amazon in AI infrastructure.
