In general, Apple showed weak results for the calendar 4th quarter of 2024 (some say better than feared). The most disappointing were sales in China… where revenues fell 11% YoY.
Nevertheless, the next quarter may be a bit better… the company expects YoY revenue growth of “low to mid single digits” – and this is after deducting the effect of the strong dollar, which will take away as much as 2.5 points from the annual change in sales.
Kevan Parekh, CFO:
“The color we're providing today assumes that the macroeconomic outlook doesn't worsen from what we're projecting today for the current quarter. As the dollar strengthens significantly, we expect foreign exchange to be a headwind and to have a negative impact on revenue of about 2.5 percentage points on a year-over-year basis. Despite that headwind, we expect our March quarter total company revenue to grow low to mid single digits year over year. We expect services revenue to grow low double digits year over year.”
Apple... on the negative side there is lack of revenue growth + problems in China, but on the positive side we have a strong brand, 2.35 billion of active devices (customer base) and the ability to offer this customer base AI services (Apple Intelligence).
Can Apple Intelligence trigger another sales upgrade wave of the latest iPhone models? At least that's what investors are counting on.. and introducing Apple Intelligence to the market will take some time (e.g. preparing different language versions). In addition (or maybe it's a good thing) Apple Intelligence is only available on the latest iPhones.. (iPhone 15 Pro or iPhone 16). The next release of Apple Intelligence iOS 18.4 will be in April. Additionally, DeepSeek breakthrough can help with AI adoption on phones.
Tim Cook:
“In October, we released the first set of Apple Intelligence features in U.S. (...) And we were excited to recently begin our international expansion with Apple Intelligence now available in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, and the U.K. We're working hard to take Apple Intelligence even further. In April, we're bringing Apple Intelligence to more languages, including French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, and simplified Chinese, as well as localized English to Singapore and India.
(…) we did see that the markets where we had rolled out Apple Intelligence that the year over year performance on the iPhone 16 family was stronger than those where Apple Intelligence was not available. In terms of the features that people are using, they're using all of the ones that I'd referenced in my opening comments, from Writing Tools to Image Playground and Genmoji, to visual intelligence and more.”
Figure 1 shows TTM revenues and 3 growth waves... can Apple Intelligence cause a 4th wave? For a complete picture, Figure 2 shows quarterly revenues.



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