New York: Apple’s second quarter 2019 financial report is yet another weak showing for the iPhone brand. A Q2 2019 report released on Tuesday stated that the company’s quarterly revenue of $58 billion, down five percent from the same time period last year, included $31 billion in iPhone sales — down from $37.5 billion in iPhone sales the same quarter in 2018.
However, Apple’s other units did fairly well: iPad sales increased from $4 billion in Q2 2018 to $4.8 billion in Q2 2019, while its wearables, home, and accessories division went from $3.9 billion to $5.1 billion. Per the Verge, the company brought in “an all-time high” of about $11.5 billion from its services division. In general, Apple came out on the high end of its $55-59 billion projection for the quarter, a notable upgrade from its disappointing Q1 2019 results.
Apple also cited strong showings in its revamped trade-in and financing programs, per Ars Technica, with the company claiming “four times the trade-in volume than it did in March 2018” after it rolled out new programs in the U.S., Spain, Italy, the UK, China, and Australia.
However, its real emphasis was on the number of existing Apple customers that could provide revenue, rather than hardware sales volume. At the end of last year, Apple explained that it would not report iPhone unit sales per quarter, a decision that frustrated some but makes sense for Apple’s bottom-line. Instead, the company disclosed on its Q1 2019 earnings call that its global install base includes 900 million iPhones—and today’s earnings report shows that the company’s install base is comprised of 1.4 billion devices.
Rather than focusing on how many new iPhones it has sold, Apple wants to now focus on how many iPhones are out in the world to show how vast its services business could be.
iPhone sales slumped from about 61 percent of Apple’s quarterly revenue in Q2 2018 to 54 percent in Q2 2019. In Greater China, where the company has had difficulty pushing phones (in large part due to cheaper competitors like Huawei), Apple posted $10.2 billion in sales, down from the Q2 2018 tally of $13 billion. CEO Tim Cook Cook, however, said Apple saw “better year-over-year performance [in China] in the last weeks of the quarter.”