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This is Scott Becker with the Becker Business. In the Becker Private Equity podcast, we try to bring you one to two business and market insight episodes a day, plus typically a interview with a brilliant business leader at least four to five times a week. Thank you for listening to the Becker Business, the Becker Private Equity Podcast. Today's discussion is Apple hits record revenues and we'll go through eight key points. So here's the deal with Apple. Apple beat estimates for revenues and earnings for the fiscal first quarter. The fiscal first quarter includes the Christmas season, the holiday season, so it's their first quarter, but most of us would think of it as the fourth quarter. Second, overall revenues for the quarter were $143 billion in handily beat expectations. That's good news. Third, iPhone revenues set a record at 85.3 billion. This both beat expectations and, and beat the quarter the same quarter a year ago where sales were about 69.1 billion. So sales jumped significantly for the iPhone and that's so important for Apple because that's both. It's, it's one, it's a primary driver of revenues, but two, it's the primary driver of their operating system, their services revenues to everything else that they do. IPhone revenues were 85 out of $143 billion. So maybe 60, 70% of revenues. Services revenues were 30 billion. But again, everything comes from that ecosystem, that Apple ecosystem being installed. Fourth, the CEO Tim Cook warned of tougher margins is the overall world demand for computer chips and memory is rising. The company has gross margins of nearly 49% or so. They expect those gross margins to maybe drive down a point or so, but that's a big deal when you're dealing with $100 billion or so. $120 billion company 12 percentage points makes a big difference. Fifth, the stock is currently down on Friday about 1 1/2% on news of the reports. Again, overall beat their estimates on revenues and earnings, but down just based on concerns about can they continue that growth, can they continue to move in that direction and will margins have some compression? Sixth, as we noted earlier, iPhone revenues were at 85 billion. Services revenues with 30 billion. Those were exactly in line with expectations. Seventh, Apple is currently the fifth largest company in the US by revenues. Walmart and Amazon are overall number one. And number two, Apple's coming in for the year at about 420 billion in revenue. So serious, serious machine that they've got going. Eighth, Apple's also the third largest company in the US by market cap. Nvidia and Alphabet are number one and two, one of the challenges that some of these mega companies are running into for particularly some of the older mega companies like Apple, Amazon and Microsoft is they've become sort of incredible cash cows. But keeping up the growth levels, they need to trade at the same pricing that Google Meta platforms price at is that Google Nvidia Meta platforms price at is becoming really hard. So you're seeing these stocks, if they don't hit great growth numbers, get punished strongly by the market. Microsoft was down 10% the other day even even though it had great numbers. But on slowing growth in its cloud business and some other challenges. So fascinating to watch. In any event, thank you for listening to the Becker Business the Becker Private Equity Podcast. If you get a chance, go online to Amazon, buy our new book, pre order our new book, we'd really appreciate it. Building Great Businesses Create Momentum, Overcome Setbacks and Scale with confidence. Thank you and have a great weekend. That's our news on Apple. I think the most interesting about Apple, Amazon and Microsoft is how continuing to be hot growth companies becomes very hard as they become bigger and bigger. More like cash cows than necessarily huge growth engines. Fascinating to watch. Thank you for listening to the Becker Business the Becker Private Equity Podcast how.
