Apple Earnings For Fiscal Q3 2021 Point To The Future: Services
Generally an Apple earnings announcement focuses on how the company reached new heights, broke records, took the world of one device or another by storm. Normally we're talking about how the iPhone sold more units than any other device, how the iPad refuses to stop being the monstrous devourer of all other tablets, and so forth. This quarter, though, it's clear that Apple's focused on what'll be their future, now that they've saturated the earth in their hardware products. Now, the key is: "Services revenue reaches new all-time high."
Apple still made a June quarter "record revenue" of $81.4 billion USD. That's a whopping 36-percent leap year-over-year (largely due to 2020's pandemic scare and so forth), but still – that wasn't Apple's only focus.
"We're continuing to press forward in our work to infuse everything we make with the values that define us," said Apple CEO Tim Cook, "by inspiring a new generation of developers to learn to code, moving closer to our 2030 environment goal, and engaging in the urgent work of building a more equitable future."
Each of Apple's main "net sales by category" categories jumped year-over-year, including iPhone, Mac, iPad, Services, and the consolidated category "Wearables, Home, and Accessories" (we'll call it WHA). Net sales for the iPhone went from $26.418 billion to 39.57, sales for Mac went from 7.079 billion USD to 8.235, iPad went from 6.582 to 7.368, and WHA went from 6.45 to 8.775.
Services leapt from $13.156 billion to 17.486, and from 39.219 to 50.148 billion over a 9-month period. This significant rise in net sales in Services for Apple means they'll most certainly continue to focus on Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, and the various other pay-to-use pieces of their software empire through the future.
This certainly does not mean Apple will stop focusing on their hardware categories – especially since they ALL continue to grow by significant percentages every quarter. It only means that Apple has no reason to give up or pull back on any of the products (and/or services) they have in play right now – they're sticking around for the long haul.