Apple reports R1 trillion in earnings and 1 billion active products

Apple sold roughly as many iPhones during the last quarter of 2015 as it did during the same period in 2014, signaling a possible end to continual gains for the phone and a potential shift in Apple’s business and the smartphone market at large. These results compare to revenue of $74.6 billion and net income of $18 billion, in the year-ago quarter.

Ernest Doku, technology expert at uSwitch.com, said: “Most companies would do cartwheels with those kind of numbers but it’s Apple, so anything that’s not astronomical growth is looked at with some fear and trepidation”.

For the quarter, Apple reported an all-time quarterly record of $18.4 billion in profit on revenue of $75.9 billion. That marks the most profitable quarter of any single public corporation in history. The quarterly sales shows 0.4 percent growth from the 74.5 million units that the Cupertino giant had sold in the same quarter past year.

The growing Indian market for iPhone is a major boost for Apple, which is seeing a cooling in demand in one of its key market, China.

Earlier this month, post the holiday season, Apple revealed that it had witnessed “the biggest ever” holiday season for the App store with customers spending $1.1 billion on apps and in-app purchases over the two-week period which ended January 3. The company projected its revenue for Q2 2016 would be between $50 and $53 billion, lower than pessimistic Wall Street predictions and down from $58 billion the same time past year.

This was the first holiday quarter for Apple’s newest products, the Apple Watch and iPad Pro. Apple once again neglected to provide specific sales figures for the Apple Watch however.

“It’s disappointing to see them miss on an already downward adjusted sales number and the fact is that with their iPhone growth slowing what was needed was a product to be excited about”.

With respect to Apple’s cash position, Apple CFO Luca Maestri said that the company “generated operating cash flow of $27.5 billion during the quarter”. This was the slowest year-over-year growth rate for the device ever.