Apple’s sales have already created its peak, and it’s time to look at this once great company from a different perspective.
On October 30th, in the auditorium of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Apple released the new iPad and Mac. There were thousands of people gathered at the venue that day, many of them from the fashion world. Apple is not a technology company, it is now more like a luxury company.
Apple is also trying to change the understanding of investors. On November 1, Apple released its earnings report, and announced that the company will no longer announce the sales of all products. Apple said that sales are far less important for today’s Apple than it used to be. Over the past decade, Apple’s iPhone sales have created a miracle in the history of mobile phones.
Sales are no longer important to Apple, and Apple no longer expects people to change phones as often as they used to. Apple is going to start telling a new story – the story about “new apple.”
In the latest financial report, iPhone sales growth has been flat, but the average selling price of the iPhone has risen sharply, and the profit margin has risen sharply. This is Apple’s aggressive strategy in the last year – selling less and selling more expensive.
Although the agency believes that Apple’s cessation of iPhone sales data implies a decline in sales and Apple’s concealment of investors. But Apple CFOMaestri explained in a conference call after the earnings report: “Apple’s sales data can’t fully reflect the company’s potential business value. The relationship between the sales of a single product and the company’s business is not as important as it used to be because we now have wider Product line and larger price range.”
The Apple iPhone now offers consumers a large price range. From the current product perspective, the iPhone 7 launched in 2016 has become its lowest-end product, starting at $449, and the most expensive mobile phone is this year. The iPhoneXSMax, which was launched in September and sold for $1,449, has a price difference of $1,000.
In addition to hardware, the story of “New Apple” relies more on software and services. In the past quarter, Apple’s service business revenue has been close to $10 billion, and its services include Apple’s Apple Music and Apple Store and iCloud Storage Services. Apple also said it will soon announce the profit margin of its service business. This frees up the key signal that the service business may surpass hardware in the future and become a bright spot for Apple’s revenue growth.
Despite Apple’s economic uncertainty in some emerging markets, it has lowered its outlook for the shopping season, but Cook expressed satisfaction with the Chinese market. The growth of Apple’s China market has continued to maintain double digits.
Another good news is that Apple is attracting more users migrating from the Android platform, which is reflected in the increasing installed base. Cook revealed that in all of Apple’s devices, the installed rate almost double-digit growth. The growth of these users is not reflected in the data of Apple’s iPhone sales, because many users buy second-hand iPhones, but this group of people can also boost the income of Apple’s service business.
This is an era of growth that is about to reach the bottleneck, but also an opportunity full of opportunities, both for hardware companies and software companies. When Facebook has conquered more than 2 billion people around the world, it wants to earn more advertising dollars from everyone. When the Apple iPhone has reached most of the people who are eager to own it, it not only wants to sell more expensive equipment to these people, but also hopes to earn more service fees from each device.
But can the story of “New Apple” allow investors to buy it? In the short term, it is difficult. Many institutions have lowered their stock price expectations after Apple announced that it will stop publishing sales data. After Apple announced its earnings report, its market value also fell below US$1 trillion and fell into an adjustment period.
Whenever you start telling a new story to the capital market, you may want to convince your users if you want to convince investors.