Apple CEO Cook Discloses $1 Billion Advanced Manufacturing Fund

In the three months to 1 April – All Fools Day – Apple sold 50.76mln iPhones, down from 51.19mln in the same period of a year ago.

Cook, who visited India a year ago and met Prime Minister Narendra Modi, said the iPhone maker is putting a “lot of energy” in India, just like Apple has in other geographies that eventually wound up producing more.

Apple Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri argued the decline was not as bad as it looked, given the peculiarities of how phone sales are calculated. Is Cook concerned by these numbers?

There’s also a chance that Apple was negatively affected by the hype surrounding Samsung’s new Galaxy S8. On the bright side, Mac sales rose from 4 million to 4.2 million year-on-year.

According to the company, it posted a quarterly revenue of $52.9 billion.

India’s continuously growing smartphone market proved an advantage for Apple as it recorded strong double digit growth for its revenues in the second quarter.

Shares of Apple, which had traded at all-time highs ahead of the earnings report, were down about 2 percent at $144.55 in after-hours trading on Tuesday. Ninety-three percent of Apple’s $256.8 billion cash is held overseas.

“In our view, consumers are becoming aware of the product cycle and we believe this should cause increased seasonality in the product as consumers await updated and fully remade iPhones”, said Amit Daryanani, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets. Apple, which reported its first ever decline in iPhone sales previous year, had returned to growth three months ago and analysts had expected a second straight quarter of improving sales.

The iPhone number was the biggest surprise in the results as sales usually soar once prices tend to ease after the Christmas season.

“We highlight these facts not to be unduly harsh to Apple, but to indicate that the company has only partially emerged from the slump that hit it over the last fiscal year”, Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData Retail, wrote in a note.

In total, Apple announced that in the first two quarters of its fiscal year it accumulated net profits of $28.92 billion, slightly higher than the same period last year, when it was $28.87 billion.