Apple Inc. was saved by an unexpected hero on its last earnings report. The same dynamic may show up in tech giants’ holiday season earnings.
Macs posted record sales of $11.5 billion, more than $2 billion more than expected for the September quarter, making up for Apple’s AAPL shortfall.
iPhone sales. Apple will get another boost from White Nights when it reports holiday quarter results on Thursday afternoon as his iPhone business faces supply disruptions amid its COVID-19 shutdown in China. may be asking.
Apple has made updating its Macs a key priority, injecting its own custom chips into its lineup to improve speed, battery life, and more. The personal computer maker saw sales surge early in the pandemic thanks to the remote work craze, but Apple’s improvement saw HP Inc. HPQ,
We saw a big slowdown.
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Another record quarter for Apple may not be in the cards this time around. Management’s own outlook is for Mac revenue to be “substantially down” from last year, with analysts tracked by FactSet predicting the company will post $9.4 billion in Mac revenue for the December quarter. forecast, which is 13.5% below sales in the same period last year. The period last year benefited from the launch of the MacBook Pro.
Still, earnings of that magnitude are Apple’s fourth-highest on record in this category, despite the lack of major product updates, and there may be upside room for Macs this quarter as well.Morgan Stanley analyst Erik Woodring recently raised his forecast for Mac sales to $9.8 billion. That’s a 12% increase from his previous forecast due to “faster-than-expected Mac shipments.”
According to IDC’s third-party data, Apple has held its best during the worst quarterly decline in the global PC industry’s history. According to IDC calculations, his PC shipments worldwide fell by 28.1% in the fourth quarter, so Apple was the only major manufacturer not to record a double-digit decline. Shipments fell by 2.1% to his 7.5 million units.
The future of Apple’s Mac momentum will also be a major issue in this report. According to Jefferies analyst Kyle McNealy, Apple refreshed his MacBook Pro lineup with an upgraded custom his chip in early January. He acknowledged that Apple was “unaffected” by the general PC weakness of the holiday quarter.
Wells Fargo analyst Aaron Lakers was cautious about the outlook.
“We believe both low consumer confidence and spending will weigh on demand for Macs over the next few years. [quarters]We continue to believe that the performance advantages offered by the M-series Arm-based processors will allow Apple to perform well and gain market share in the PC industry,” he wrote in a note to clients.
Mac performance will never be the main event for Apple, but it could be a source of stability from the quarter when analysts asked many questions about iPhone sales. Apple executives warned in November that the iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max shipments would fall short of expectations due to pandemic-related production restrictions at a major Foxconn facility in China, but analysts said that was expected in the December quarter. I wasn’t sure how severely it would affect the iPhone’s bottom line since then.
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iPhone revenue is expected to fall 5.1% to $67.9 billion in the most recent period, according to FactSet consensus, but estimates range widely from $59.9 billion to $74.8 billion.
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Overall earnings may experience a smaller decline. The consensus forecast is down 2% to $121.5 billion, driven by expectations for record performance in the services and wearables, home and accessories categories.