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  • Technology
Apple Inc. logo
Apple Inc.
AAPL · US · NASDAQ
221.27
USD
+3.74
(1.69%)
Executives
Name Title Pay
Ms. Katherine L. Adams Senior Vice President, General Counsel & Secretary 4.62M
Mr. Chris Kondo Senior Director of Corporate Accounting --
Mr. Adrian Perica Head of Corporate Development --
Suhasini Chandramouli Director of Investor Relations --
Mr. Greg Joswiak Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing --
Mr. Timothy D. Cook Chief Executive Officer & Director 16.2M
Mr. Luca Maestri Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President 4.61M
Mr. Jeffrey E. Williams Chief Operating Officer 4.64M
Ms. Deirdre O'Brien Senior Vice President of Retail 4.61M
Mr. James Wilson Chief Technology Officer --
Insider Transactions
Date Name Title Acquisition Or Disposition Stock / Options # of Shares Price
2024-08-09 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer D - S-Sale Common Stock 5178 216.5
2024-08-05 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - S-Sale Common Stock 97600 206.42
2024-08-05 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - S-Sale Common Stock 2400 207.05
2024-08-07 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - G-Gift Common Stock 4500 0
2024-05-30 LEVINSON ARTHUR D director D - S-Sale Common Stock 75000 191.58
2024-05-15 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer D - S-Sale Common Stock 4999 190.395
2024-05-10 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - G-Gift Common Stock 1850 0
2024-04-15 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer A - M-Exempt Common Stock 8119 0
2024-04-15 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer D - F-InKind Common Stock 3120 172.69
2024-04-15 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 1899 0
2024-04-15 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 2078 0
2024-04-15 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 1915 0
2024-04-15 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 2227 0
2024-04-11 WILLIAMS JEFFREY E COO D - S-Sale Common Stock 59162 172.22
2024-04-11 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - S-Sale Common Stock 12700 173.19
2024-04-11 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - S-Sale Common Stock 27600 174.12
2024-04-11 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - S-Sale Common Stock 12894 175.02
2024-04-01 WILLIAMS JEFFREY E COO A - M-Exempt Common Stock 113309 0
2024-04-01 WILLIAMS JEFFREY E COO D - F-InKind Common Stock 54147 170.03
2024-04-01 WILLIAMS JEFFREY E COO D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 22689 0
2024-04-01 WILLIAMS JEFFREY E COO D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 29688 0
2024-04-01 WILLIAMS JEFFREY E COO D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 60932 0
2024-04-01 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President A - M-Exempt Common Stock 113309 0
2024-04-01 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - F-InKind Common Stock 58577 170.03
2024-04-02 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - S-Sale Common Stock 54732 168.91
2024-04-01 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 22689 0
2024-04-01 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 29688 0
2024-04-01 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 60932 0
2024-04-01 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO A - M-Exempt Common Stock 113309 0
2024-04-01 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - F-InKind Common Stock 60115 170.03
2024-04-01 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 22689 0
2024-04-01 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 29688 0
2024-04-01 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 60932 0
2024-04-01 COOK TIMOTHY D Chief Executive Officer A - M-Exempt Common Stock 196410 0
2024-04-01 COOK TIMOTHY D Chief Executive Officer D - S-Sale Common Stock 99183 170.03
2024-04-02 COOK TIMOTHY D Chief Executive Officer D - S-Sale Common Stock 97062 168.62
2024-04-02 COOK TIMOTHY D Chief Executive Officer D - S-Sale Common Stock 165 169.3
2024-04-01 COOK TIMOTHY D Chief Executive Officer D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 85081 0
2024-04-01 COOK TIMOTHY D Chief Executive Officer D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 111329 0
2024-04-01 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary A - M-Exempt Common Stock 113309 0
2024-04-01 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - F-InKind Common Stock 58577 170.03
2024-04-02 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - S-Sale Common Stock 54732 168.9
2024-04-01 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 22689 0
2024-04-01 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 29688 0
2024-04-01 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 60932 0
2024-02-28 WAGNER SUSAN director A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 1516 0
2024-02-28 SUGAR RONALD D director A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 1516 0
2024-02-28 LOZANO MONICA C director A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 1516 0
2024-02-29 LEVINSON ARTHUR D director D - S-Sale Common Stock 100000 180.94
2024-02-28 LEVINSON ARTHUR D director A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 1516 0
2024-02-28 JUNG ANDREA director A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 1516 0
2024-02-28 Gorsky Alex director A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 1516 0
2024-02-28 Austin Wanda M director A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 1516 0
2024-02-28 Austin Wanda M director D - Common Stock 0 0
2024-02-01 WAGNER SUSAN director A - M-Exempt Common Stock 1852 0
2024-02-01 WAGNER SUSAN director D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 1852 0
2024-02-01 SUGAR RONALD D director A - M-Exempt Common Stock 1852 0
2024-02-01 SUGAR RONALD D director D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 1852 0
2024-02-01 LOZANO MONICA C director A - M-Exempt Common Stock 1852 0
2024-02-01 LOZANO MONICA C director D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 1852 0
2024-02-01 LEVINSON ARTHUR D director A - M-Exempt Common Stock 1852 0
2024-02-01 LEVINSON ARTHUR D director D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 1852 0
2024-02-01 JUNG ANDREA director A - M-Exempt Common Stock 1852 0
2024-02-01 JUNG ANDREA director D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 1852 0
2024-02-01 Gorsky Alex director A - M-Exempt Common Stock 1852 0
2024-02-01 Gorsky Alex director D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 1852 0
2024-02-01 GORE ALBERT JR director A - M-Exempt Common Stock 1852 0
2024-02-01 GORE ALBERT JR director D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 1852 0
2024-02-01 BELL JAMES A director A - M-Exempt Common Stock 1852 0
2024-02-01 BELL JAMES A director D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 1852 0
2023-11-29 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer D - S-Sale Common Stock 5513 192
2023-11-16 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - G-Gift Common Stock 123448 0
2023-11-16 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary A - G-Gift Common Stock 123448 0
2023-11-17 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - S-Sale Common Stock 123448 188.79
2023-11-10 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer D - S-Sale Common Stock 4806 184.04
2023-10-15 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer A - M-Exempt Common Stock 10785 0
2023-10-15 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer D - F-InKind Common Stock 5272 178.85
2023-10-15 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 2077 0
2023-10-15 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 1914 0
2023-10-15 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 2226 0
2023-10-15 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 4568 0
2023-10-06 WILLIAMS JEFFREY E COO D - S-Sale Common Stock 69785 177
2023-10-06 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - S-Sale Common Stock 32010 177.89
2023-10-09 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - S-Sale Common Stock 19000 178.55
2023-10-09 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - S-Sale Common Stock 12685 178.91
2023-10-01 WILLIAMS JEFFREY E COO A - M-Exempt Common Stock 136268 0
2023-10-01 WILLIAMS JEFFREY E COO D - F-InKind Common Stock 66483 171.21
2023-10-01 WILLIAMS JEFFREY E COO A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 58408 0
2023-10-01 WILLIAMS JEFFREY E COO D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 136268 0
2023-10-01 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President A - M-Exempt Common Stock 136268 0
2023-10-01 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - F-InKind Common Stock 70732 171.21
2023-10-03 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - S-Sale Common Stock 61610 172.08
2023-10-03 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - S-Sale Common Stock 3926 172.65
2023-10-01 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 58408 0
2023-10-01 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 136268 0
2023-10-01 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO A - M-Exempt Common Stock 136268 0
2023-10-01 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - F-InKind Common Stock 72573 171.21
2023-10-01 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 58408 0
2023-10-01 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 136268 0
2023-10-01 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 15187 0
2023-10-01 COOK TIMOTHY D Chief Executive Officer A - M-Exempt Common Stock 511000 0
2023-10-01 COOK TIMOTHY D Chief Executive Officer D - F-InKind Common Stock 270431 171.21
2023-10-03 COOK TIMOTHY D Chief Executive Officer D - S-Sale Common Stock 55664 171.42
2023-10-03 COOK TIMOTHY D Chief Executive Officer D - S-Sale Common Stock 99223 172.52
2023-10-03 COOK TIMOTHY D Chief Executive Officer D - S-Sale Common Stock 85682 173.18
2023-10-01 COOK TIMOTHY D Chief Executive Officer A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 219030 0
2023-10-01 COOK TIMOTHY D Chief Executive Officer A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 73010 0
2023-10-01 COOK TIMOTHY D Chief Executive Officer D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 511000 0
2023-10-01 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary A - M-Exempt Common Stock 136268 0
2023-10-01 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - F-InKind Common Stock 70732 171.21
2023-10-03 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - S-Sale Common Stock 25850 171.62
2023-10-03 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - S-Sale Common Stock 32886 172.23
2023-10-03 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - S-Sale Common Stock 6800 173.24
2023-10-01 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 58408 0
2023-10-01 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 136268 0
2023-08-08 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - G-Gift Common Stock 5600 0
2023-08-05 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President A - M-Exempt Common Stock 31896 0
2023-08-05 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - F-InKind Common Stock 16477 181.99
2023-08-07 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - S-Sale Common Stock 15419 178.56
2023-08-05 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 31896 0
2023-05-16 JUNG ANDREA director D - G-Gift Common Stock 68642 0
2023-05-10 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - G-Gift Common Stock 2900 0
2023-05-08 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer D - S-Sale Common Stock 4092 173.26
2023-04-15 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer A - M-Exempt Common Stock 10792 0
2023-04-15 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer D - F-InKind Common Stock 4384 165.21
2023-04-15 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 2078 0
2023-04-15 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 1915 0
2023-04-15 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 2227 0
2023-04-15 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 4572 0
2023-04-13 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - S-Sale Common Stock 69996 165.25
2023-04-06 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - S-Sale Common Stock 200 164.92
2023-04-01 WILLIAMS JEFFREY E COO A - M-Exempt Common Stock 149684 0
2023-04-01 WILLIAMS JEFFREY E COO D - F-InKind Common Stock 71867 164.9
2023-04-04 WILLIAMS JEFFREY E COO D - S-Sale Common Stock 77430 166.11
2023-04-04 WILLIAMS JEFFREY E COO D - S-Sale Common Stock 387 166.62
2023-04-01 WILLIAMS JEFFREY E COO D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 60932 0
2023-04-01 WILLIAMS JEFFREY E COO D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 29688 0
2023-04-01 WILLIAMS JEFFREY E COO D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 59064 0
2023-04-01 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President A - M-Exempt Common Stock 90620 0
2023-04-01 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - F-InKind Common Stock 46998 164.9
2023-04-03 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - S-Sale Common Stock 17664 164.73
2023-04-03 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - S-Sale Common Stock 25958 165.87
2023-04-01 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 60932 0
2023-04-01 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 29688 0
2023-04-01 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO A - M-Exempt Common Stock 149684 0
2023-04-01 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - F-InKind Common Stock 79488 164.9
2023-04-03 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - G-Gift Common Stock 2464 0
2022-12-13 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - G-Gift Common Stock 703 0
2023-04-01 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 60932 0
2023-04-01 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 29688 0
2023-04-01 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 59064 0
2023-04-01 COOK TIMOTHY D Chief Executive Officer A - M-Exempt Common Stock 111329 0
2023-04-01 COOK TIMOTHY D Chief Executive Officer D - F-InKind Common Stock 55257 164.9
2023-04-03 COOK TIMOTHY D Chief Executive Officer D - S-Sale Common Stock 26623 164.67
2023-04-03 COOK TIMOTHY D Chief Executive Officer D - S-Sale Common Stock 29449 165.62
2023-04-01 COOK TIMOTHY D Chief Executive Officer D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 111329 0
2023-04-01 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary A - M-Exempt Common Stock 149684 0
2023-04-01 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - F-InKind Common Stock 77459 164.9
2023-04-03 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - S-Sale Common Stock 33407 164.71
2023-04-03 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - S-Sale Common Stock 38818 165.81
2022-12-09 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - G-Gift Common Stock 2275 0
2023-04-01 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 60932 0
2023-04-01 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 29688 0
2023-04-01 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 59064 0
2023-03-22 WILLIAMS JEFFREY E COO D - S-Sale Common Stock 187730 159.76
2023-03-10 WAGNER SUSAN director A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 1852 0
2023-03-10 SUGAR RONALD D director A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 1852 0
2023-03-10 LOZANO MONICA C director A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 1852 0
2023-03-10 LEVINSON ARTHUR D director A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 1852 0
2023-03-10 JUNG ANDREA director A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 1852 0
2023-03-10 Gorsky Alex director A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 1852 0
2023-03-10 GORE ALBERT JR director A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 1852 0
2023-03-10 BELL JAMES A director A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 1852 0
2023-02-01 WAGNER SUSAN director A - M-Exempt Common Stock 1685 0
2023-02-01 WAGNER SUSAN director D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 1685 0
2023-02-01 SUGAR RONALD D director A - M-Exempt Common Stock 1685 0
2023-02-01 SUGAR RONALD D director D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 1685 0
2023-02-01 LOZANO MONICA C director A - M-Exempt Common Stock 1685 0
2023-02-01 LOZANO MONICA C director D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 1685 0
2023-02-01 LEVINSON ARTHUR D director A - M-Exempt Common Stock 1685 0
2023-02-03 LEVINSON ARTHUR D director D - G-Gift Common Stock 1685 0
2023-02-01 LEVINSON ARTHUR D director D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 1685 0
2023-02-01 JUNG ANDREA director A - M-Exempt Common Stock 1685 0
2023-02-01 JUNG ANDREA director D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 1685 0
2023-02-01 Gorsky Alex director A - M-Exempt Common Stock 1685 0
2023-02-01 Gorsky Alex director D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 1685 0
2023-02-01 GORE ALBERT JR director A - M-Exempt Common Stock 1685 0
2023-02-01 GORE ALBERT JR director D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 1685 0
2023-02-01 BELL JAMES A director A - M-Exempt Common Stock 1685 0
2023-02-01 BELL JAMES A director D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 1685 0
2022-11-22 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer D - S-Sale Common Stock 20200 148.72
2022-10-28 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - S-Sale Common Stock 14274 154.7
2022-10-28 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - S-Sale Common Stock 85147 155.63
2022-10-28 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - S-Sale Common Stock 69678 156.46
2022-10-28 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - S-Sale Common Stock 7200 157.2
2022-10-15 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President A - M-Exempt Common Stock 16612 0
2022-10-15 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - F-InKind Common Stock 8559 138.38
2022-10-17 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - S-Sale Common Stock 8053 142.45
2022-10-15 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 16612 0
2022-10-15 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer A - M-Exempt Common Stock 13136 0
2022-10-15 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer D - F-InKind Common Stock 6399 138.38
2022-10-15 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 1914 0
2022-10-15 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 4568 0
2022-10-15 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 2226 0
2022-10-15 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 4428 0
2022-10-01 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President A - M-Exempt Common Stock 365600 0
2022-10-01 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - F-InKind Common Stock 189301 138.2
2022-10-03 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - S-Sale Common Stock 42393 141.09
2022-10-03 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - S-Sale Common Stock 66880 142.17
2022-10-03 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - S-Sale Common Stock 67026 142.83
2022-10-01 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 365600 0
2022-10-01 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary A - M-Exempt Common Stock 365600 0
2022-10-01 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - F-InKind Common Stock 184461 138.2
2022-10-03 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - S-Sale Common Stock 5400 138.44
2022-10-03 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - S-Sale Common Stock 13199 139.15
2022-10-03 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - S-Sale Common Stock 27669 140.34
2022-10-03 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - S-Sale Common Stock 56271 141.19
2022-10-03 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - S-Sale Common Stock 65350 142.45
2022-10-03 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - S-Sale Common Stock 13250 142.93
2022-10-01 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 365600 0
2022-10-01 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO A - M-Exempt Common Stock 365600 0
2022-10-01 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - F-InKind Common Stock 189301 138.2
2022-10-01 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 365600 0
2022-10-01 WILLIAMS JEFFREY E COO A - M-Exempt Common Stock 365600 0
2022-10-01 WILLIAMS JEFFREY E COO D - F-InKind Common Stock 177870 138.2
2022-10-01 WILLIAMS JEFFREY E COO D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 365600 0
2022-09-25 WILLIAMS JEFFREY E COO A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 66477 0
2022-09-25 WILLIAMS JEFFREY E COO A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 66477 0
2022-09-25 COOK TIMOTHY D Chief Executive Officer A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 199429 0
2022-09-25 COOK TIMOTHY D Chief Executive Officer A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 199429 0
2022-09-25 COOK TIMOTHY D Chief Executive Officer A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 66477 0
2022-09-25 COOK TIMOTHY D Chief Executive Officer A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 66477 0
2022-09-25 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 66477 0
2022-09-25 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 66477 0
2022-09-25 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 66477 0
2022-09-25 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 16620 0
2022-09-25 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 66477 0
2022-08-17 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - S-Sale Common Stock 66390 174.66
2022-08-17 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - S-Sale Common Stock 66390 174.66
2022-08-17 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - S-Sale Common Stock 30345 175.6
2022-08-17 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - S-Sale Common Stock 30345 175.6
2022-08-17 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - S-Sale Common Stock 66390 174.66
2022-08-17 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - S-Sale Common Stock 30345 175.6
2022-08-05 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President A - M-Exempt Common Stock 31896 0
2022-08-05 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - F-InKind Common Stock 16530 165.35
2022-08-08 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - S-Sale Common Stock 15366 164.86
2022-08-05 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 31896 0
2022-08-03 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - S-Sale Common Stock 700 161.46
2022-08-03 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - S-Sale Common Stock 2928 162.43
2022-08-03 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - S-Sale Common Stock 5073 163.69
2022-08-03 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - S-Sale Common Stock 5031 164.69
2022-08-03 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - S-Sale Common Stock 5568 165.91
2022-08-03 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - S-Sale Common Stock 5700 166.28
2022-05-06 BELL JAMES A director D - G-Gift Common Stock 1276 0
2022-05-04 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - S-Sale Common Stock 9136 159.94
2022-05-04 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - S-Sale Common Stock 5316 160.82
2022-05-04 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - S-Sale Common Stock 4006 161.93
2022-05-04 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - S-Sale Common Stock 900 162.77
2022-05-04 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - S-Sale Common Stock 1550 163.94
2022-05-04 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - S-Sale Common Stock 1800 165.06
2022-05-04 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - S-Sale Common Stock 2292 165.95
2022-04-15 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President A - M-Exempt Common Stock 16612 0
2022-04-15 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - F-InKind Common Stock 8612 165.29
2022-04-18 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - S-Sale Common Stock 4569 164.54
2022-04-18 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - S-Sale Common Stock 3431 165.41
2022-04-15 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 16612 0
2022-04-15 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer A - M-Exempt Common Stock 13146 0
2022-04-15 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer D - F-InKind Common Stock 5537 165.29
2022-04-15 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 4572 0
2022-04-15 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 1915 0
2022-04-15 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 2227 0
2022-04-15 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 4432 0
2022-04-01 WILLIAMS JEFFREY E COO A - M-Exempt Common Stock 204932 0
2022-04-01 WILLIAMS JEFFREY E COO A - M-Exempt Common Stock 204932 0
2022-04-01 WILLIAMS JEFFREY E COO D - F-InKind Common Stock 99031 174.31
2022-04-01 WILLIAMS JEFFREY E COO D - F-InKind Common Stock 99031 174.31
2022-04-04 WILLIAMS JEFFREY E COO D - S-Sale Common Stock 63164 177.46
2022-04-04 WILLIAMS JEFFREY E COO D - S-Sale Common Stock 63164 177.46
2022-04-04 WILLIAMS JEFFREY E COO D - S-Sale Common Stock 42737 178.19
2022-04-04 WILLIAMS JEFFREY E COO D - S-Sale Common Stock 42737 178.19
2022-04-01 WILLIAMS JEFFREY E COO D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 60936 0
2022-04-01 WILLIAMS JEFFREY E COO D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 60936 0
2022-04-01 WILLIAMS JEFFREY E COO D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 59064 0
2022-04-01 WILLIAMS JEFFREY E COO D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 59064 0
2022-04-01 WILLIAMS JEFFREY E COO D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 84932 0
2022-04-01 WILLIAMS JEFFREY E COO D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 84932 0
2022-04-01 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President A - M-Exempt Common Stock 60936 0
2022-04-01 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - F-InKind Common Stock 31738 174.31
2022-04-04 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - S-Sale Common Stock 17497 177.49
2022-04-04 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - S-Sale Common Stock 11701 178.18
2022-04-01 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 60936 0
2022-04-01 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO A - M-Exempt Common Stock 204932 0
2022-04-01 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO A - M-Exempt Common Stock 204932 0
2022-04-01 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - F-InKind Common Stock 108197 174.31
2022-04-01 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - F-InKind Common Stock 108197 174.31
2022-04-01 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 60936 0
2022-04-01 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 60936 0
2022-04-01 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 59064 0
2022-04-01 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 59064 0
2022-04-01 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 84932 0
2022-04-01 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 84932 0
2022-04-01 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary A - M-Exempt Common Stock 120000 0
2022-04-01 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - F-InKind Common Stock 62381 174.31
2022-04-01 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 60936 0
2022-04-01 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 59064 0
2022-03-04 WAGNER SUSAN director A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 1685 0
2022-03-04 SUGAR RONALD D director A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 1685 0
2022-03-04 LOZANO MONICA C director A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 1685 0
2022-03-04 LEVINSON ARTHUR D director A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 1685 0
2022-03-04 LEVINSON ARTHUR D director A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 1685 0
2022-03-04 JUNG ANDREA director A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 1685 0
2022-03-04 JUNG ANDREA director A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 1685 0
2022-03-04 Gorsky Alex director A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 1685 0
2022-03-04 GORE ALBERT JR director A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 1685 0
2022-03-04 GORE ALBERT JR director A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 1685 0
2022-03-04 BELL JAMES A director A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 1685 0
2021-11-29 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - G-Gift Common Stock 2000 0
2022-02-01 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - G-Gift Common Stock 1450 0
2022-02-03 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - S-Sale Common Stock 2058 173.04
2022-02-03 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - S-Sale Common Stock 6400 174.32
2022-02-03 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - S-Sale Common Stock 14242 175.08
2022-02-03 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - S-Sale Common Stock 2300 175.78
2022-02-01 WAGNER SUSAN director A - M-Exempt Common Stock 1986 0
2022-02-01 WAGNER SUSAN director D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 1986 0
2022-02-01 SUGAR RONALD D director A - M-Exempt Common Stock 1986 0
2022-02-01 SUGAR RONALD D director A - M-Exempt Common Stock 1986 0
2022-02-01 SUGAR RONALD D director D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 1986 0
2022-02-01 SUGAR RONALD D director D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 1986 0
2022-02-01 LOZANO MONICA C director A - M-Exempt Common Stock 1986 0
2022-02-01 LOZANO MONICA C director D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 1986 0
2022-02-01 LEVINSON ARTHUR D director A - M-Exempt Common Stock 1986 0
2022-02-01 LEVINSON ARTHUR D director A - M-Exempt Common Stock 1986 0
2022-02-01 LEVINSON ARTHUR D director D - S-Sale Common Stock 1986 173.29
2022-02-01 LEVINSON ARTHUR D director D - S-Sale Common Stock 1986 173.29
2022-02-01 LEVINSON ARTHUR D director D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 1986 0
2022-02-01 LEVINSON ARTHUR D director D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 1986 0
2022-02-01 JUNG ANDREA director A - M-Exempt Common Stock 1986 0
2022-02-01 JUNG ANDREA director A - M-Exempt Common Stock 1986 0
2022-02-01 JUNG ANDREA director D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 1986 0
2022-02-01 JUNG ANDREA director D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 1986 0
2022-02-01 Gorsky Alex director A - M-Exempt Common Stock 486 0
2022-02-01 Gorsky Alex director D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 486 0
2022-02-01 GORE ALBERT JR director A - M-Exempt Common Stock 1986 0
2022-02-01 GORE ALBERT JR director A - M-Exempt Common Stock 1986 0
2022-02-01 GORE ALBERT JR director D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 1986 0
2022-02-01 GORE ALBERT JR director D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 1986 0
2022-02-01 BELL JAMES A director A - M-Exempt Common Stock 1986 0
2022-02-01 BELL JAMES A director D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 1986 0
2021-11-12 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer D - S-Sale Common Stock 9005 150
2021-11-09 Gorsky Alex director A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 486 0
2021-11-09 Gorsky Alex director D - Common Stock 0 0
2021-11-01 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - S-Sale Common Stock 21710 148.61
2021-11-01 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - S-Sale Common Stock 3290 149.11
2021-10-19 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - S-Sale Common Stock 165829 148.62
2021-10-15 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President A - M-Exempt Common Stock 38904 0
2021-10-15 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - F-InKind Common Stock 20657 144.84
2021-10-15 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - S-Sale Common Stock 17108 146.32
2021-10-15 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - S-Sale Common Stock 1139 146.75
2021-10-15 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 16612 0
2021-10-15 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 22292 0
2021-10-15 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer A - M-Exempt Common Stock 17591 0
2021-10-15 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer D - F-InKind Common Stock 8586 144.84
2021-10-15 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 4568 0
2021-10-15 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 2227 0
2021-10-15 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 4428 0
2021-10-15 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 6368 0
2021-10-01 WILLIAMS JEFFREY E COO A - M-Exempt Common Stock 354392 0
2021-10-01 WILLIAMS JEFFREY E COO D - F-InKind Common Stock 188563 142.65
2021-10-01 WILLIAMS JEFFREY E COO D - S-Sale Common Stock 165829 138.83
2021-10-01 WILLIAMS JEFFREY E COO D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 354392 0
2021-10-01 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President A - M-Exempt Common Stock 191376 0
2021-10-01 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - F-InKind Common Stock 101939 142.65
2021-10-01 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - S-Sale Common Stock 89437 138.83
2021-10-01 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 191376 0
2021-10-01 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary A - M-Exempt Common Stock 354392 0
2021-10-01 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - F-InKind Common Stock 188563 142.65
2021-10-01 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 354392 0
2021-10-01 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO A - M-Exempt Common Stock 354392 0
2021-10-01 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - F-InKind Common Stock 188563 142.65
2021-10-01 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 354392 0
2021-09-26 WILLIAMS JEFFREY E COO A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 68065 0
2021-09-26 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 68065 0
2021-09-26 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 68065 0
2021-09-26 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 15315 0
2021-09-26 COOK TIMOTHY D Chief Executive Officer A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 255241 0
2021-09-26 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 68065 0
2021-08-24 COOK TIMOTHY D Chief Executive Officer A - M-Exempt Common Stock 5040000 0
2021-08-24 COOK TIMOTHY D Chief Executive Officer D - F-InKind Common Stock 2653560 149.62
2021-08-24 COOK TIMOTHY D Chief Executive Officer D - S-Sale Common Stock 1820655 148.3
2021-08-24 COOK TIMOTHY D Chief Executive Officer D - S-Sale Common Stock 475724 149.37
2021-08-24 COOK TIMOTHY D Chief Executive Officer D - S-Sale Common Stock 90061 149.97
2021-08-24 COOK TIMOTHY D Chief Executive Officer D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 5040000 0
2021-08-20 COOK TIMOTHY D Chief Executive Officer D - G-Gift Common Stock 70000 0
2021-08-05 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President A - M-Exempt Common Stock 31896 0
2021-08-05 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - F-InKind Common Stock 17019 147.06
2021-08-05 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - S-Sale Common Stock 14877 145.99
2021-08-05 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 31896 0
2021-08-02 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - G-Gift Common Stock 4010 0
2021-08-02 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - S-Sale Common Stock 15600 145.83
2021-08-02 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - S-Sale Common Stock 1400 146.5
2021-05-03 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - S-Sale Common Stock 87612 132.58
2021-05-03 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - S-Sale Common Stock 29760 133.34
2021-05-03 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - S-Sale Common Stock 3700 133.93
2021-05-03 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - S-Sale Common Stock 12130 132.57
2021-05-03 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - S-Sale Common Stock 4470 133.33
2021-05-03 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - S-Sale Common Stock 400 133.93
2021-04-15 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President A - M-Exempt Common Stock 38908 0
2021-04-15 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - F-InKind Common Stock 20692 134.5
2021-04-15 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - S-Sale Common Stock 18216 134.01
2021-04-15 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 16612 0
2021-04-15 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 22296 0
2021-04-15 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer A - M-Exempt Common Stock 17603 0
2021-04-15 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer D - F-InKind Common Stock 7499 134.5
2021-04-15 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 4572 0
2021-04-15 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 2227 0
2021-04-15 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 4432 0
2021-04-15 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 6372 0
2021-04-01 WILLIAMS JEFFREY E COO A - M-Exempt Common Stock 257348 0
2021-04-01 WILLIAMS JEFFREY E COO D - F-InKind Common Stock 123481 123
2021-04-01 WILLIAMS JEFFREY E COO D - S-Sale Common Stock 133867 125.74
2021-04-01 WILLIAMS JEFFREY E COO D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 59068 0
2021-04-01 WILLIAMS JEFFREY E COO D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 84932 0
2021-04-01 WILLIAMS JEFFREY E COO D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 113348 0
2021-04-01 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO A - M-Exempt Common Stock 257348 0
2021-04-01 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - F-InKind Common Stock 136276 123
2021-04-01 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 59068 0
2021-04-01 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 84932 0
2021-04-01 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 113348 0
2021-04-01 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary A - M-Exempt Common Stock 59068 0
2021-04-01 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - F-InKind Common Stock 30475 123
2021-04-01 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 59068 0
2021-02-23 WAGNER SUSAN director A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 1986 0
2021-02-23 SUGAR RONALD D director A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 1986 0
2021-02-23 LOZANO MONICA C director A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 1986 0
2021-02-23 LEVINSON ARTHUR D director A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 1986 0
2021-02-23 JUNG ANDREA director A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 1986 0
2021-02-23 GORE ALBERT JR director A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 1986 0
2021-02-23 BELL JAMES A director A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 1986 0
2021-02-01 WAGNER SUSAN director A - M-Exempt Common Stock 3416 0
2021-02-01 WAGNER SUSAN director D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 3416 0
2021-02-01 SUGAR RONALD D director A - M-Exempt Common Stock 3416 0
2021-02-01 SUGAR RONALD D director D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 3416 0
2021-02-01 LOZANO MONICA C director A - M-Exempt Common Stock 281 0
2021-02-01 LOZANO MONICA C director D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 281 0
2021-02-01 LEVINSON ARTHUR D director A - M-Exempt Common Stock 3416 0
2021-02-01 LEVINSON ARTHUR D director D - G-Gift Common Stock 408 0
2021-02-01 LEVINSON ARTHUR D director D - S-Sale Common Stock 3416 135.6
2021-02-01 LEVINSON ARTHUR D director D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 3416 0
2021-02-01 JUNG ANDREA director A - M-Exempt Common Stock 3416 0
2021-02-01 JUNG ANDREA director D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 3416 0
2021-02-01 GORE ALBERT JR director A - M-Exempt Common Stock 3416 0
2021-02-01 GORE ALBERT JR director D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 3416 0
2021-02-01 BELL JAMES A director A - M-Exempt Common Stock 3416 0
2021-02-01 BELL JAMES A director D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 3416 0
2021-02-01 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - S-Sale Common Stock 1908 131.79
2021-02-01 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - S-Sale Common Stock 2902 132.85
2021-02-01 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - S-Sale Common Stock 4762 133.82
2021-02-01 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - S-Sale Common Stock 7428 134.56
2021-01-04 LOZANO MONICA C director A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 281 0
2021-01-04 LOZANO MONICA C director D - Common Stock 0 0
2020-11-13 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary A - M-Exempt Common Stock 57480 0
2020-11-13 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - F-InKind Common Stock 30524 119.26
2020-11-13 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 57480 0
2020-11-03 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - S-Sale Common Stock 2612 109.22
2020-11-03 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - S-Sale Common Stock 8641 110.4
2020-11-03 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - S-Sale Common Stock 5747 110.99
2020-10-15 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President A - M-Exempt Common Stock 66532 0
2020-10-15 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - F-InKind Common Stock 35332 120.71
2020-10-15 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - S-Sale Common Stock 18748 119.58
2020-10-15 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - S-Sale Common Stock 12452 120.14
2020-10-15 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 16612 0
2020-10-15 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 22292 0
2020-10-15 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 27628 0
2020-10-15 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer A - M-Exempt Common Stock 23652 0
2020-10-15 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer D - F-InKind Common Stock 11528 120.71
2020-10-15 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 4568 0
2020-10-15 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer D - S-Sale Common Stock 14840 121.34
2020-10-15 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 4428 0
2020-10-15 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 6368 0
2020-10-15 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 8288 0
2020-10-09 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - S-Sale Common Stock 243431 116.89
2020-10-01 WILLIAMS JEFFREY E COO A - M-Exempt Common Stock 519080 0
2020-10-01 WILLIAMS JEFFREY E COO D - F-InKind Common Stock 261737 116.79
2020-10-01 WILLIAMS JEFFREY E COO D - S-Sale Common Stock 228957 113.52
2020-10-01 WILLIAMS JEFFREY E COO D - S-Sale Common Stock 28386 114.19
2020-10-01 WILLIAMS JEFFREY E COO D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 519080 0
2020-10-01 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO A - M-Exempt Common Stock 519080 0
2020-10-01 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - F-InKind Common Stock 275649 116.79
2020-10-01 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 519080 0
2020-10-01 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary A - M-Exempt Common Stock 459856 0
2020-10-01 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - F-InKind Common Stock 227496 116.79
2020-10-01 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 459856 0
2020-09-27 WILLIAMS JEFFREY E COO A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 89064 0
2020-09-27 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 89064 0
2020-09-27 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 89064 0
2020-09-27 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 17813 0
2020-09-27 COOK TIMOTHY D Chief Executive Officer A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 333987 0
2020-09-27 Adams Katherine L. SVP, GC and Secretary A - A-Award Restricted Stock Unit 89064 0
2020-08-24 COOK TIMOTHY D Chief Executive Officer A - M-Exempt Common Stock 560000 0
2020-08-24 COOK TIMOTHY D Chief Executive Officer D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 560000 0
2020-08-24 COOK TIMOTHY D Chief Executive Officer D - F-InKind Common Stock 294840 503.43
2020-08-24 COOK TIMOTHY D Chief Executive Officer D - S-Sale Common Stock 7118 493.5
2020-08-24 COOK TIMOTHY D Chief Executive Officer D - S-Sale Common Stock 18014 494.59
2020-08-24 COOK TIMOTHY D Chief Executive Officer D - S-Sale Common Stock 97417 495.53
2020-08-24 COOK TIMOTHY D Chief Executive Officer D - S-Sale Common Stock 30814 496.45
2020-08-24 COOK TIMOTHY D Chief Executive Officer D - S-Sale Common Stock 19650 497.54
2020-08-24 COOK TIMOTHY D Chief Executive Officer D - S-Sale Common Stock 32447 498.54
2020-08-24 COOK TIMOTHY D Chief Executive Officer D - S-Sale Common Stock 58710 499.42
2020-08-24 COOK TIMOTHY D Chief Executive Officer D - S-Sale Common Stock 990 500.11
2020-08-20 COOK TIMOTHY D Chief Executive Officer D - G-Gift Common Stock 10715 0
2020-05-08 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer D - S-Sale Common Stock 4491 305.62
2020-04-28 JUNG ANDREA director A - M-Exempt Common Stock 9590 48.9457
2020-04-28 JUNG ANDREA director D - M-Exempt Director Stock Option (Right to Buy) 9590 0
2020-04-28 JUNG ANDREA director D - M-Exempt Director Stock Option (Right to Buy) 9590 48.9457
2020-04-15 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President A - M-Exempt Common Stock 16634 0
2020-04-15 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - F-InKind Common Stock 7497 284.43
2020-04-15 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - S-Sale Common Stock 2278 283.82
2020-04-15 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - S-Sale Common Stock 2851 284.52
2020-04-15 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - S-Sale Common Stock 1847 285.66
2020-04-15 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - S-Sale Common Stock 2161 286.82
2020-04-15 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 4153 0
2020-04-15 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 5574 0
2020-04-15 O'BRIEN DEIRDRE Senior Vice President D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 6907 0
2020-04-15 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer A - M-Exempt Common Stock 5916 0
2020-04-15 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer D - F-InKind Common Stock 2345 284.43
2020-04-15 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 1143 0
2020-04-15 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 1108 0
2020-04-15 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 1593 0
2020-04-15 KONDO CHRIS Principal Accounting Officer D - M-Exempt Restricted Stock Unit 2072 0
2020-04-07 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - S-Sale Common Stock 3203 260.1
2020-04-07 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - S-Sale Common Stock 3185 260.97
2020-04-07 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - S-Sale Common Stock 4395 262.09
2020-04-07 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - S-Sale Common Stock 3700 263.04
2020-04-07 Maestri Luca Senior Vice President, CFO D - S-Sale Common Stock 4500 264.08
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Transcripts
Suhasini Chandramouli:
Good afternoon and welcome to the Apple Q3 Fiscal Year 2024 Earnings Conference Call. My name is Suhasini Chandramouli, Director of Investor Relations. Today's call is being recorded. Speaking first today is Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, and he'll be followed by CFO, Luca Maestri. After that, we'll open the call to questions from analysts. Please note that some of the information you'll hear during our discussion today will consist of forward-looking statements, including, without limitation, those regarding revenue, gross margin, operating expenses, other income and expense, taxes, capital allocation, and future business outlook including the potential impact of macroeconomic conditions on the company's business and results of operations. These statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results or trends to differ materially from our forecast. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in Apple's most recently filed Annual Report on Form 10-K and the Form 8-K filed with the SEC today along with the associated press release. Apple assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements which speak only as of the date they are made. I'd now like to turn the call over to Tim for introductory remarks.
Tim Cook :
Thank you Suhasini. Good afternoon everyone and thanks for joining the call. Today, Apple is reporting a new June quarter revenue record of $85.8 billion, up 5% from a year ago and better than we had expected. EPS grew double digits to $1.40 and achieved a record for the June quarter. We also set quarterly revenue records in more than two dozen countries and regions, including Canada, Mexico, France, Germany, the UK, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand. And we set an all-time revenue record in services which grew 14%. At our Worldwide Developers Conference, we were thrilled to unveil game-changing updates across our platforms, including Apple Intelligence. Apple Intelligence builds on years of innovation and investment in AI and Machine Learning. It will transform how users interact with technology, from writing tools to help you express yourself, to image playground, which gives you the ability to create fun images and communicate in new ways, to powerful tools for summarizing and prioritizing notifications. Siri also becomes more natural, more useful, and more personal than ever. Apple Intelligence is built on a foundation of privacy, both through on-device processing that does not collect users' data and through private cloud compute, a groundbreaking new approach to using the cloud, while protecting users' information powered by Apple silicon. We are also integrating ChatGPT into experiences within iPhone, Mac, and iPad, enabling users to draw on a broad base of world knowledge. We are very excited about Apple Intelligence and we remain incredibly optimistic about the extraordinary possibilities of AI and its ability to enrich customers' lives. We will continue to make significant investments in this technology and dedicate ourselves to the innovation that will unlock its full potential. Recently, we've also been excited to bring Apple Vision Pro to more countries, giving customers the chance to discover the remarkable capabilities of this magical device. Vision Pro users are customizing their own workspaces, watching movies on 100-foot screens, and exploring entire worlds with just a pinch of their fingertips. With more than 2,500 native spatial apps and 1.5 million compatible apps for Vision OS, the developer community continues to pioneer stunning spatial experiences that are only possible with Vision Pro. Last month, we announced that we're bringing some amazing new immersive content to Vision Pro, including new series, concerts, films, and more. And we've seen great interest for Vision Pro in the enterprise, where it can empower companies large and small to pursue their best ideas like never before. With each innovation, we're unlocking new ways of working, new ways of learning, and new ways of tapping into the unlimited promise of human potential. We are doing that across every product and every service. Now let me share more detail in our June quarter results, beginning with iPhone. iPhone revenue was $39.3 billion, down 1% year-over-year. On a constant currency basis, we grew compared to last year. Customers continue to praise the iPhone 15 lineup for its incredible battery life, exceptional cameras, and unmatched power and performance. And we are excited to bring incredible new features to the iPhone with iOS 18, making it more personal, capable, and intelligent than ever before. This update includes the biggest redesign of the Photos app, new customization options for the home screen, messages over satellite, and the introduction of Apple Intelligence. Apple Intelligence utilizes the power of our most advanced iPhones, the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max, offering a transformative set of capabilities. Mac revenue was $7 billion, up 2% from a year ago. Customers are loving the latest M3-powered 13 and 15 inch MacBook Air. With back-to-school season upon us, MacBook Air is the perfect companion for students on campus and small business owners, developers, and creatives of all kinds depend on Mac to do more than they ever could before. Powered by Apple silicon with its neural engine and privacy built in at the chip level, Macs are simply the best personal computers for AI. And every Mac we've shipped with Apple silicon since 2020, is capable of taking advantage of Apple Intelligence with Mac OS Sequoia. We also know the importance of security for our users and enterprises so we continue to advance protections across our products. Turning to iPad, revenue was $7.2 billion, 24% higher year-over-year. During the quarter, we had an incredible launch where we unveiled the all-new 11 and 13 inch iPad Air, the perfect device for education, entertainment, and so much more. And With the new iPad Pro, we pushed the boundaries of power-efficient performance with the remarkable M4 chip, the engine behind this incredibly thin device. By leveraging the latest in Apple silicon, Video Editors and Musicians can take advantage of the cutting edge AI features in Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro. And we're very excited that iPad Pro and iPad Air models powered by the M series of Apple silicon will be able to utilize the powerful capabilities of Apple Intelligence. In wearables, home, and accessories, revenue was $8.1 billion, down 2% from a year ago. Apple Watch is empowering users to live a healthier day with a range of tools to take charge of their wellness journeys. At the core of Apple Watch, are powerful AI features that are helping users get help when they need it most, from irregular heart rhythm notifications to walking steadiness to crash detection and fall detection. I've heard time and again how meaningful these features are for users and their loved ones, and their stories motivate us to keep pushing forward on this vital work. As I mentioned earlier, in services, we set an all-time revenue record of $24.2 billion with paid subscriptions climbing to an all-time high. We achieve revenue records in the majority of the services categories with all-time revenue records in advertising, cloud, and payment services. Apple TV+ productions are delighting audiences on screens large and small. We're sharing powerful works of imagination with series and movies like Presumed Innocent, the Upcoming Disclaimer, and The Instigators starring Matt Damon. And we can't wait for returning fan favorites with new seasons of The Morning Show, Slow Horses, and Severance. Apple TV+ productions also continue to earn accolades with nearly 2,300 nominations and 500 wins to-date. That includes 72 Emmy Award nominations across 16 programs our best ever showing for the upcoming awards event. During the quarter, we also expanded Tap to Pay on iPhone to more markets including Japan, Canada, Italy, and Germany, enabling more businesses to use the power of iPhone to accept contactless payments. And we announced new updates to our services coming this fall, including US national park hikes and custom walk routes and Apple Maps, the ability to pay with rewards using Apple Pay, collaborative listening with Apple Music, and a redesigned Apple Fitness+ experience to help users make the most of our library of workouts and meditations. Turning to retail, we continue to expand in emerging markets with our first ever location in Malaysia. Customers from all over the country came together with our team members to celebrate this special moment. Elsewhere in the world, our teams have been sharing the magic of Apple Vision Pro and demos that delight, inspire, and deeply move customers exploring the wonders of spatial computing for the first time. At the heart of all of our innovations are the values that guide everything we do. We believe fundamentally that the best technology is technology that works for everyone. And in honor of Global Accessibility Awareness Day, we introduced all new capabilities to give users more ways to take advantage of all our products can do. These include eye tracking for users to control iPhone or iPad visually, music haptics to give those who are deaf or hard of hearing a tangible way to experience music, and vocal shortcuts that tie task to a user's voice. And we are committed as ever to shipping products that offer the highest standards of privacy for our users. With everything we do, whether it's offering a browser like Safari that prevents third-parties from tracking you across the internet or providing new features like the ability to lock and hide apps, we are determined to keep our users in control of their own data. And we are just as dedicated to ensuring the security of our users' data. That's why we work to minimize the amount of data we collect and work to maximize how much is processed directly on people's devices, a foundational principle that is at the core of all we build, including Apple Intelligence. And we continue to make significant progress on the environment. We are proud to say that all of our data centers, including those that will run private cloud compute, operate on 100% renewable energy. At Apple, we're constantly accelerating our pace of innovation. We are a company in relentless pursuit of big ideas. Time and again, we've seen how a spark of creativity can reach breakthrough velocity, reach across previously unexplored dimensions, and ultimately take flight in ways that can change the world. It's why we're going to keep investing in the meaningful innovation that enriches the lives of all of our customers. We have a busy time ahead of us, and I couldn't be more excited for all the amazing things yet to come. With that, I'll turn it over to Luca.
Luca Maestri :
Thank you, Tim, and good afternoon, everyone. We are very pleased to report a new June quarter revenue record of $85.8 billion, up 5% year-over-year, despite 230 basis points of negative foreign exchange impact. We achieved growth in the vast majority of our markets, with June quarter revenue records in the Americas, Europe, and rest of Asia Pacific. Products revenue was $61.6 billion, up 2% year-over-year, driven by the launch of the new iPad Pro and iPad Air. Our installed base of active devices reach an all-time high across all products and geographic segments, thanks to our unmatched levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty and a large number of customers who are new to our products. Services revenue reached an all-time record of $24.2 billion, up 14% year-over-year, with an all-time record in developed markets and a June quarter record in emerging markets. Company gross margin was 46.3% near the high end of our guidance range and down 30 basis points sequentially driven by a different mix within products which was partially offset by a favorable mix shift towards services and cost savings. Products gross margin was 35.3%, down 130 basis points sequentially, primarily driven by mix, partially offset by favorable costs. Services gross margin was 74% down 60 basis points from last quarter. Operating expenses of $14.3 billion were at the low end of the guidance range we provided and up 7% year-over-year. Net income was $21.4 billion, diluted EPS of $1.40 was up 11% year-over-year and set a June quarter record. And operating cash flow was very strong at $28.9 billion, also a June quarter record. Let me get into more detail for each of our revenue categories. iPhone revenue was $39.3 billion, down 1% year-over-year, but grew on a constant currency basis. We set June quarter records across several countries, including the UK, Spain, Poland, Mexico, Indonesia, and the Philippines. And the iPhone Active installed base grew to a new all-time high in total and in every geographic segment. During the June quarter, many iPhone models were among the top selling smartphones around the world. In fact, according to a survey from Kantar, iPhone was the top selling model in the US, urban China, the UK, Germany, Australia, and Japan. Customer satisfaction on the iPhone 15 family continues to be extremely high, with 451 Research measuring it at 98% in the US in their latest reports. Mac generated $7 billion in revenue, up 2% year-over-year, driven by the MacBook Air powered by the M3 chip. We saw particularly strong performance in our emerging markets, with June quarter records for Mac in Latin America, India, and South Asia. The Mac installed base reached an all-time high with half of MacBook Air customers in the quarter being new to Mac. And customer satisfaction for Mac was recently reported at 96% in the US. iPad revenue was $7.2 billion, up 24% year-over-year, driven by the launch of the new iPad Pro and iPad Air. Customers are loving the latest iPad lineup for its new design and display, unparalleled performance, AI capabilities and much more. The iPad install base has continued to grow and is an all-time high, as half of the customers who purchased iPads during the quarter were new to the product. Also, customer satisfaction was recently measured at 97% in the US. Wearables, home and accessories revenue was $8.1 billion, down 2% year-over-year, a sequential acceleration from the March quarter. Watch and AirPods continue to face a difficult compare against prior year launches of the AirPods Pro second generation, the Watch SE and the first Watch Ultra. Apple Watch continues to attract new customers, with almost two-thirds of customers purchasing an Apple Watch during the quarter being new to the product, sending the Apple Watch install base to a new all-time high. And the latest reports from 451 Research indicate a customer satisfaction of 97% for watch in the US. In services, total revenue reached an all-time record of $24.2 billion, growing 14% year-over-year. We continue to have great momentum in services, as the growth of our installed base of active devices, sets a strong foundation for the future expansion of our ecosystem. And we see increased customer engagement with our services offerings. Both transacting accounts and paid accounts reach a new all-time high with paid accounts growing double digits year-over-year. Also, paid subscriptions showed strong double digit growth. We have well over 1 billion paid subscriptions across the services on our platform, more than double the number that we had only four years ago. And we are constantly focused on improving the breadth and quality of our services. From critically acclaimed new content on Apple TV+ to new games on Apple Arcade and the many latest features we previewed during WWDC for iCloud, Apple Pay, Apple Cash, Apple Music, and more. Turning to enterprise, we continue to see businesses, leveraging our entire suite of products to drive productivity and creativity for their teams and customers. USAA, a leading insurance and financial services company, recently expanded beyond their existing iPhone and iPad deployments to provide their employees with the latest MacBook Air. And American Express has continued to add to their fleet of over 10,000 Macs to enhance their employees' productivity, security, and collaboration. We're also excited to see leading organizations such as Boston Children's Hospital and Lufthansa using Apple Vision Pro to build innovative spatial computing experiences to transform the training of their workforces. Let me now turn to our cash position and capital return program. We ended the quarter with $153 billion in cash and marketable securities. We repaid $4.3 billion in maturing debt and increased commercial paper by $1 billion, leaving us with total debt of $101 billion. As a result, net cash was $52 billion at the end of the quarter. During the quarter, we returned over $32 billion to shareholders, including $3.9 billion in dividends and equivalents and $26 billion through open market repurchases of 139 million Apple shares. As we move ahead into the September quarter, I'd like to review our outlook, which includes the types of forward-looking information that Suhasini referred to at the beginning of the call. The color we are providing today assumes that the macroeconomic outlook doesn't worsen from what we are projecting today for the current quarter. We expect foreign exchange to continue to be a headwind and to have a negative impact on revenue of about 1.5 percentage points on a year-over-year basis. We expect our September quarter total company revenue to grow year-over-year at a rate similar to the June quarter. We expect services revenue to grow double digits at a rate similar to what we reported in the first three quarters of this fiscal year. We expect gross margin to be between 45.5% and 46.5%. We expect OpEx to be between $14.2 billion and $14.4 billion. We expect OI&E to be around negative $50 million, excluding any potential impact from the mark to market of minority investments, and our tax rate to be around 16.5%. Finally, today our Board of Directors has declared a cash dividend of $0.25 per share of common stock payable on August 15, 2024, to shareholders of record as of August 12, 2024. With that, let's open the call to questions.
Suhasini Chandramouli :
Thank you Luca. We ask that you limit yourself to two questions. Operator, may we have the first question, please?
Operator:
Certainly. We will go ahead and take our first question from Erik Woodring with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Erik Woodring:
Great. Thank you very much for taking my question. Maybe Tim, if we start with you, you know, I thought some of the color you provided before the call about iPhone 15 performing better than the iPhone 14 was interesting. So just with that context, can you maybe help us understand where you see iPhone replacement cycles today, where you think the size of the base of iPhones that are aged and likely to upgrade are, and what that translates to in potential pent-up demand, as we enter a new iPhone cycle. And I have a follow-up, thank you.
Tim Cook:
Yes, hi Eric. The installed base hit an all-time high during the quarter and so we were very happy about that. iPhone in general grew in constant currency. And the 15, as you point out, if you look at the same number of weeks of the 15 from launch and compare that to the 14, the 15 is doing better than the 14. And so that's kind of a state of where we currently are. In terms of upgrade rates, it's very difficult mid-cycle to call upgrade rates. I would just say that with Apple Intelligence, we are very excited about the level of value that we're going to provide to users. And we believe that -- that presents another reason for a compelling upgrade.
Erik Woodring:
Okay, that's very helpful. Thanks, Tim. And then second, can you maybe dig into the China dynamics a bit? Sales down 6% this quarter, 3% in constant currency, an improvement from last quarter on a tougher compare that came on the back of some iPhone discounting. So can you maybe just share color on the China market as a whole how much you believe promotions helped in the quarter, how sustainable this improvement is, and if this performance really changes any of your approach to the China market as we look forward. Thanks so much.
Tim Cook:
Yeah, Erik, as you point out, we decreased by 6.5% year-over-year for the whole of Greater China. And if you look at it on a constant currency basis, we declined by less than 3%. So over 50% of the decline year-over-year is currency related. That is an improvement from the first half of the fiscal year, and so we're happy to see the acceleration. If you look at iPhone in particular for Greater China, the installed base set a record. We also in Mainland China set a June quarter record for upgraders and so that's a very strong signal and in fact from Kantar -- the survey from Kantar this quarter showed that iPhones were the top three models in urban China. Also, if you look at -- one of the things we look at is the 15 family compared to the 14 family for the same number of weeks from launch. So this goes all the way back to the September of 2023. If you look at that, the 15 is outperforming the 14. And so those are some of the color I would provide. In addition, one of the things that we're very focused on is the level of new customers buying our products. And so if you look at this on the Mac and iPad, in Mainland China, the majority of customers buying or buying for the first time, buying that product for the first time and the watch, the vast, vast majority of people are buying a product for the first time. And during the quarter, I should say also that iPad returned to growth in Greater China, as it did around the world. And so we continue to be confident in the long-term opportunity in China. I don't know how every chapter of the book reads, but we're very confident in the long-term.
Erik Woodring:
Great. Thanks so much.
Tim Cook:
Yeah.
Suhasini Chandramouli:
Thank you, Erik. Operator, may we have the next question, please?
Operator:
Our next question is from Ben Reitzes with Melius. Please go ahead.
Ben Reitzes:
Hey, thanks a lot. Appreciate it. Hey, Tim, you know, now that you've launched or announced Apple intelligence, do you have any ideas on how it may impact services. Would it – do you feel like it'll accelerate your Services business augmented? And maybe folks will need to buy more storage and some other things. How are you thinking about it as a catalyst for Services into next year? And I have a follow-up. Thanks.
Tim Cook:
We started the rollout of Apple Intelligence this week with developers, so some of the features are out there as of Monday. And we couldn't be more excited about getting them out there. Obviously, this will enable developers to take their apps to the next level. And so we are taking the first step in getting the beta out there, and we can't wait to see what kind of amazing things they do with it.
Ben Reitzes:
Okay. Thanks. And then Luca, with regard to gross margin, it's been -- there's been some component price inflation and mix. Do you mind just giving us a little more color on how you are managing that sequentially and how you feel about the current component environment as an impact on margins? Thanks.
Luca Maestri:
Sure, Ben. I think I'll give you a bit of the walk for the June quarter and then get into the outlook that we provided for the September quarter. At the total company level, we've reported 46.3%. It is down 30 basis points sequentially, and it was really driven by a different mix. Within products, of course, we launched very important products like the iPad during the course of the quarter. But we had an offset from a shift in mix towards Services, and we got some good cost savings. And so when you look at it on a year-over-year basis, we are up significantly on the margin front. And keep in mind that foreign exchange continues to be a bit of a headwind for us. As we go into the September quarter, we are guiding 45.5% to 46.5%, which is kind of within the guidance that we provided last quarter. Again similar dynamics, we expect a slightly different mix. We expect foreign exchange to have a minimal impact sequentially, although a more significant impact on a year-over-year basis. On the commodity side, I think that is what you are referring to, yes we have seen some increases on the memory front, but the rest of the commodities, we see a continuous decline. So in general, we feel -- we're well positioned. And as you know well, these are very high levels of gross margin for us and we are pleased where we are.
Ben Reitzes:
Okay. Thanks a lot.
Suhasini Chandramouli:
Thank you Ben. Operator may we have the next question please.
Operator:
Our next question is from Mike Ng with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Mike Ng:
Hi, good afternoon. I just have two questions. First, I was wondering if you could talk about whether or not you've seen a shift in demand for iPhone 15 Pro, Pro Max models since WWDC that could potentially foreshadow consumer demand for Apple Intelligence enabled phones?
Tim Cook:
We just announced the sort of the requirements at the system and the silicon level in June. And so we had very limited time during the quarter. So it's really too early to tell.
Mike Ng:
That's fair. And then with the focus on upgrader potential over the next several years, I was just wondering if you could talk about what you are expecting from the US promotional environment from your channel partners, whether that's US wireless carriers, given the importance of device sales for those partners during an upgrade cycle. Or any retail support on what could be a very strong smartphone upgrade period? Thank you.
Tim Cook:
We are very excited about Apple Intelligence and what it brings, and it is another compelling reason for an upgrade. I'd leave the promotional question for the sort of the carriers themselves to answer. But I believe it will be a very key time for -- and a compelling upgrade cycle.
Mike Ng:
Great. Thank you Tim.
Suhasini Chandramouli:
Thanks Mike. Operator, can we have the next question please.
Operator:
Our next question is from Amit Daryanani with Evercore. Please go ahead.
Amit Daryanani:
Good afternoon everyone. And I have two as well. I guess, Tim, maybe back to the Apple Intelligence dynamic. There's clearly a lot of excitement from consumers around what Apple Intelligence could mean for them. Can you just touch on your -- do you think the intent is to launch all the Apple Intelligence features at the same time to consumers, or do you think they end up getting staggered a bit? And if they are staggered, do you think it impacts how consumers come out and buy the next-generation iPhone?
Tim Cook:
The rollout, as we mentioned in June, sort of -- we've actually started with developers this week. We started with some features of Apple Intelligence, not the complete suite. There are other features like languages beyond US English that will happen over the course of the year, and there are other features that will happen over the course of the year. And ChatGPT is integrated by the end of the calendar year. And so yes, so it’s a staggered launch.
Amit Daryanani:
Got it. And then I guess your Services growth rates have been extremely impressive for several quarters and it seems like it is accelerated recently. Can you just touch -- talk about when you look at this double-digit growth, how much of that do you think is coming from the installed base growth versus better ARPU or better monetization of the installed base? And how do you kind of see that mix changing as you go forward?
Luca Maestri:
Yes, Amit, it is Luca. It's a combination of a number of factors. The installed base growth is very important of course, because we have a larger pool of customers that uses the ecosystem and uses our Services. We are seeing and we've seen this consistently for many, many quarters now. We see continued growth in the level of engagement that our customers have with our ecosystem. We have more transacting accounts every quarter, so more people using the ecosystem both the free elements of the ecosystem and the paid elements. We see paid accounts growing double digits, and we've seen that for many, many quarters. Now we look at our paid subscriptions on our platform, and they are growing strong double digits as well. So obviously, the growing level of engagement helps us both from an ARPU standpoint and just a volume standpoint. Obviously, as you've seen over the last several years, we launched new services over time, and we've launched many new services, fairly recently. Obviously, our payments business is relatively new, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, Fitness+, so many other services we've added. And so we are providing more and more opportunities for our customers to interact with the ecosystem. And we believe we are doing also a very good job at improving the quality of these services and improving the amount of content that we make available. We continue to make significant investments on TV+, on Apple Arcade. We are launching new shows, new games all the time. And I think you will continue to see that as we go forward. We are very, very happy with the 14% growth that we had this quarter because, particularly if you look at the performance that we had in Services a year ago, the compares for us tend to get a bit more challenging in the second half of our fiscal year. But in spite of that, we delivered a level of growth that was better than what we were expecting at the beginning of the quarter.
Suhasini Chandramouli:
Thanks Amit. Operator we will take the next question please.
Operator:
Our next question is from Wamsi Mohan with Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Wamsi Mohan:
Yes. Thank you so much. Tim, you announced Apple Intelligence, but you also announced partnerships with OpenAI and presumably more coming down the road. How should investors think about the monetization models around these partnerships where the CapEx investments are clearly being made by these potential partners. But you're obviously -- they're leveraging your distribution to your very attractive installed base. So in the long-term, do you see the Apple Intelligence part -- the Services growth from Apple Intelligence being the larger contributor over time? Or do you see these partnerships becoming a larger contributor over time? And I have a follow-up.
Tim Cook:
I think the way that I look at it is that Apple Intelligence is the on-device processing and the Private Cloud Compute. And a lot of that will be things with a personal context. And then for world knowledge, we are integrating with ChatGPT initially, and that will be focused on world knowledge as I said. And so the monetization model, I don't want to get into the terms of the commercial agreements because they are confidential between the parties. But I see both aspects as being very important. People want both.
Wamsi Mohan:
Okay. Thanks. As a follow-up maybe for Luca. Just stepping back to the gross margin discussion again. If I look at calendar 2023, you had on average 150 basis points increase in product gross margins on a year-on-year basis. In 2024 so far, it had been more flat year-on-year. When we think about that, is the incremental headwind, I mean there was FX headwinds throughout the last several years. So ex-FX, are there other incremental headwinds that are either temporary or structural in nature that are perhaps limiting further upside to what are obviously very strong gross margins? Thank you.
Luca Maestri:
Yes. Of course, as you said, the foreign exchange continues to be -- this is incremental on a year-over-year basis. And it is one of those things that is outside of our control. We try to hedge our exposures. But it is what it is. We know that when the dollar is strong, our gross margins are affected. The other element that I think it's always important to keep in mind is that within the Products business, our products have different margin profiles. And depending on the relative success in the marketplace, our products' gross margin tends to move. And so the mix of our products has an impact on gross margins, right? And so we need to pay attention to that. Of course, we just launched an iPad and that is one of the factors. But we want all our products to be very successful in the marketplace. And that's why we always look at gross margin dollars as the first order of priority, and gross margin percentage tends to follow from that. The other factor that obviously has an impact, a significant impact is the state of the commodity markets, and they tend to go in cycles. And so we will see how that plays out over time. But in general, we feel good about the level of gross margins that we have for our products business, and we think we are in a good position there.
Suhasini Chandramouli:
Thanks Wamsi. Operator, can we have the next question please.
Operator:
Our next question is from Krish Sankar with TD Cowen. Please go ahead.
Krish Sankar:
Hi, thanks for taking my question. And congrats on the strong results. The first one for Luca or Tim. We keep hearing about these increasing silicon content for AI edge devices. And also, I think, Luca you spoke about increasing commodity costs. So I'm curious how to think about margins for these new AI devices. And Tim, do any of these Apple Intelligence features need more hardware updates than what we have today? And then I have a quick follow-up.
Tim Cook:
Maybe I'll take the second one first and then pass it over to Luca. In terms of the requirements to run Apple Intelligence, there are system requirements and there are silicon requirements. And so from an iPhone point of view, the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max will run Apple Intelligence and the successor products obviously. If you look at the Mac, it starts with the M series of silicon that started in 2020. And the iPad is the same, and so it starts with the M series of silicon. And so there are system requirements and silicon requirements that go with each of those.
Luca Maestri:
And from a gross margin standpoint, as you know, we don't provide any color past the current quarter, and we just provided guidance for the quarter 45.5% to 46.5%. It is essentially broadly in line with what we reported for the June quarter. So we'll take it quarter by quarter and we will report as the time goes by.
Krish Sankar:
Got it. Very helpful. And then a quick follow-up for Tim. Thanks for the color on China. We also see many other consumer discretionary and luxury brands talk about a weak China. And I think Tim, you said half the details was FX related. I'm curious, the other half of the weakness, was that more China macro related or do you think it is kind of like specific to Apple with domestic competitors? Any other color you could give would be very helpful. Thank you very much.
Tim Cook:
Well, certainly, the competitive environment there is the most competitive in the world. I've said that before and that remains to be the case. The macroeconomic factors have been in the press too, and I'm not an expert on those. I can only tell you what we're seeing. And we were pleased that the business showed improvement from the first half of the year.
Krish Sankar:
Thanks Tim.
Suhasini Chandramouli:
Thank you Krish. Operator, can we have the next question please.
Operator:
Our next question is from David Vogt with UBS. Please go ahead.
David Vogt:
Great. Two, if I may also. Tim, first one for you. I know it is early days, and you talked about the developers just getting their hands on Apple Intelligence. But when you think about the categories that are currently in the App Store and kind of what you think app developers could do with this new technology, what's your instinct say in terms of -- are these going to be iterative applications to currently available applications? Is there any sort of category that you think lends itself more naturally to Apple Intelligence? Is it games? Is it more creative? I'm just trying to get a sense of how you're thinking about it. And then I have a follow-up for Luca. Thanks.
Tim Cook:
If you look at how we've deployed Apple Intelligence or are deploying Apple Intelligence, we've really thought about it at pretty much all of the apps that you use every day. And so we've thought about it from Notes to Mail to Messages and all the rest. And so there is been a deep level of thinking about how it affects those apps. And that's going to surface Apple Intelligence in a way that is natural to the user, in a way that will I think, get them very excited about it and get usage. Similarly, I think the developers will do that on a broad basis with their apps as well. And so I think, it is profound and we'll see what the developers do. But we're very excited to get the initial seed out there this week and see what they do. I think it will be amazing, yes.
David Vogt:
Yes. No, that's helpful. I appreciate it. And Luca, just maybe -- I know you didn't give a full rundown of product categories in your prepared remarks. But if I kind of take your comments at face value, I guess what I'm trying to think about is for the next quarter, it sounds like with Services being relatively strong and FX easing a little bit. You are effectively saying that product revenue in the September quarter is going to basically be flat with the September quarter last year ahead of a product launch. And so I'm just trying to get a sense for, what are the puts and takes in that sort of outlook particularly as you have Apple Intelligence hopefully stoking the fire for demand going forward? Thanks.
Luca Maestri:
Well, we have provided -- let me repeat what we provided. We think that we are going to be growing total company revenue at a rate that is similar to what we reported, so the plus 5%, right? In spite of the fact that we are going to have some foreign exchange headwinds, and we said about 150 basis points in the December quarter. And we said that we will grow Services double digits at a rate that is similar to what we've reported for the first three quarters of the fiscal year. We are not going into the other categories. I think there is a lot of good math that you can do from what we've given you here. Keep in mind on the Mac that we will have a challenging compare from a year ago, given the fact that we launched and we had the full quarter impact of the launch of the MacBook Air 15-inch a year ago. And also on the iPad, we reported 24% growth in the June quarter. Clearly we had the benefit from the launch in the June quarter of the new products, the iPad Air and the iPad Pro. So important to keep that in mind on a sequential basis.
David Vogt:
Great. Thank you very much.
Suhasini Chandramouli:
Thank you David. Operator may we have the next question please.
Operator:
Our next question is from Atif Malik with Citi. Please go ahead.
Atif Malik:
Hi, thank you for taking my question. The first one is for Tim. I know it's early days. The feedback on Apple Intelligence software features like notification summary and reduced interruption focus from the developers who have tried the iOS 18.1 beta version this week is very positive. My question is in response to an earlier question, you talked about a staggered launch on some of these software features. So are you expecting most of the features that you announced at WWDC to be part of iOS 18? Or we should be thinking that some of these features could potentially be part of iOS 19 next year?
Tim Cook:
Our objective that we said in June is to roll out US English starting in the fall and that is to users, and then proceed with more functionality, more features, if you will, and more languages and regions coverage as we proceed across the next year. And so we sort of gave a time frame that -- and we're tracking to that.
Atif Malik:
Understand. And the next one for Luca. Luca the Services growth momentum seems very strong. Are you seeing any impact from changes made to comply with the DMA rules?
Luca Maestri:
Well, as you know we have introduced some changes to the way we run the App Store in Europe already in March. And we are seeing a good level of adoption from developers on those changes. We are on an ongoing basis, discussing with the European Commission how to ensure full compliance with the DMA. It is obviously early stage, but in general, our results for the Services business and for the App Store have been pretty good until now. Again to just provide you a frame of reference, the percentage of revenue that we generate from the European Union on the App Store is about 7% of the total.
Atif Malik:
Very helpful. Thank you.
Suhasini Chandramouli :
Thank you Atif. Operator may we have the next question please.
Operator:
Our next question is from Samik Chatterjee with JPMorgan. Please go ahead.
Samik Chatterjee:
Yes. Hi. Thanks for taking my question. I guess, Tim, if I can just ask you about Apple Intelligence as well. There is a regulatory aspect as well in certain geographies. You mentioned the staggered launch that you are aiming for and the timelines you're thinking. How are you thinking about the complexity of the regulatory process, in particular like EU and maybe China? And does -- in terms of your timelines of the rollout, are you sort of embedding in the regulatory aspect here? And how should we think about timing then including that? And I have a follow-up. Thank you.
Tim Cook:
We are engaged as you would guess, with both regulatory bodies that you mentioned. And our objective is to move as fast as we can, obviously because our objective is always to get features out there for everyone. We have to understand the regulatory requirements before we can commit to doing that and commit a schedule to doing that. But we're very constructively engaged with both.
Samik Chatterjee:
Okay, got it. And a quick one on the Wearables category, Luca. I know you mentioned the acceleration there on a sequential basis. Maybe you can just sort of parse that out in terms of what -- which categories drove the acceleration because that's been a category that has been lagging a bit in terms of revenue trends for the past couple of quarters. So just curious what is starting to sort of drive it to accelerate on a sequential basis? Thank you.
Tim Cook:
Yes, I'll take that one. I think the important thing to remember when you look at the Wearables, Home and Accessories categories is that we have a difficult launch compare. And we've been running that for a few quarters and we still have that because last year had the continued benefit from the AirPods Pro second generation, the Watch SE and the very first Watch Ultra. And so it is important to keep that in mind. If you sort of take a step back, however and look at the business across the trailing 12 months, it is grown -- the Wearables, Home and Accessories business has grown to almost $40 billion, which is double what it was five years ago.
Samik Chatterjee:
Thank you.
Suhasini Chandramouli:
Thank you Samik. Operator, may we have the last question please.
Operator:
Our last question is from Richard Kramer with Arete Research. Please go ahead.
Richard Kramer:
Thanks. Thanks very much. Tim, you referenced the investment in innovation, and your R&D sales ratio reached what I think was a June quarter record even before launching Apple Intelligence. Do you see the rollout of these features requiring further increases in R&D or increases in OpEx or CapEx for cloud compute capacity? And is it even possible to forecast the Services usage as they roll out, given that they are so new for consumers? Thanks.
Tim Cook:
Clearly, we have increased R&D over time. We have been investing in AI and ML for years. And in addition to investing more, we've also redeployed certain skills onto AI and ML. And so the growth in sort of embedded in our numbers that we've shared here, it is increasing year-over-year. On the CapEx part, it is important to remember that we employ a hybrid kind of approach, where we do things internally and we have certain partners that we do business with externally where the CapEx would appear in their respective businesses. But yes, I mean you can expect that there is -- we will continue to invest and increase it year-on-year.
Richard Kramer:
Okay. And maybe a quick follow-up for Luca. When we look at the free cash flow margins for the first nine months, they are up materially. And given this year's product mix, can you describe to us what exactly in the Services mix or cost control is driving what seems to be structurally higher free cash flow margins across the business?
Luca Maestri:
Yes, I'm glad you noticed that. We are pretty pleased with that fact. And I think you probably also noticed that we've increased our return of capital to shareholders this quarter. This one was a record quarter for us. Well, it's a combination of a number of things. Of course, an improvement in the top-line helps the margin expansion that we've had over the last several years and several quarters obviously has helped. And so that is driving better operating cash flow. On the CapEx front as Tim said, we employ a hybrid model. Some of the investments show up on our balance sheet and some other investments show up somewhere else and we pay, as we go. But in general, we try to run the company efficiently. We continue to think that capital efficiency is a good thing. And therefore, we are pleased with the fact that our free cash flow is doing well this year.
Richard Kramer:
Okay. Thanks.
Suhasini Chandramouli:
Thank you, Richard. A replay of today's call will be available for two weeks on Apple Podcasts, as a webcast on apple.com/investor, and via telephone. The number for the telephone replay is (866)-583-1035. Please enter confirmation code 1969407 followed by the pound sign. These replays will be available by approximately 5 p.m. Pacific Time today. Members of the press with additional questions can contact Josh Rosenstock at (408)-862-1142. And financial analysts can contact me, Suhasini Chandramouli with additional questions at (408)-974-3123. Thank you again for joining us today.
Operator:
Once again this does conclude today's conference. We do appreciate your participation.
Suhasini Chandramouli:
Good Afternoon, and welcome to the Apple Q2 Fiscal Year 2024 Earnings Conference Call. My name is Suhasini Chandramouli, Director of Investor Relations. Today's call is being recorded. Speaking first today is Apple's CEO, Tim Cook, and he'll be followed by CFO, Luca Maestri. After that, we'll open the call to questions from analysts. Please note that some of the information you'll hear during our discussion today will consist of forward-looking statements, including, without limitation, those regarding revenue, gross margin, operating expenses, other income and expense, taxes, capital allocation and future business outlook, including the potential impact of macroeconomic conditions on the company's business and results of operations. These statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results or trends to differ materially from our forecast. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in Apple's most recently filed Annual Report on Form 10-K and the Form 8-K filed with the SEC today, along with the associated press release. Apple assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date they are made. I'd now like to turn the call over to Tim for introductory remarks.
Tim Cook:
Thank you, Suhasini. Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining the call. Today, Apple is reporting revenue of $90.8 billion and an EPS record of $1.53 for the March quarter. We set revenue records in more than a dozen countries and regions. These include, among others, March quarter records in Latin-America and the Middle East, as well as Canada, India, Spain and Turkey. We also achieved an all-time revenue record in Indonesia, one of the many markets where we continue to see so much potential. In services, we set an all-time revenue record, up 14% over the past year. Keep in mind, as we described on the last call, in the March quarter a year-ago, we were able to replenish iPhone channel inventory and fulfill significant pent-up demand from the December quarter COVID-related supply disruptions on the iPhone 14 Pro and 14 Pro Max. We estimate this one-time impact added close to $5 billion to the March quarter revenue last year. If we remove this from last year's results, our March quarter total company revenue this year would have grown. Despite this impact, we were still able to deliver the records I described. Of course, this past quarter, we were thrilled to launch Apple Vision Pro and it has been so wonderful to hear from people who now get to experience the magic of spatial computing. They describe the impossible becoming possible right before their eyes and they share their amazement and their emotions about what they can do now, whether it's reliving their most treasured memories or having a movie theater experience right in their living room. It's also great to see the enthusiasm from the enterprise market. For example, more than half of the Fortune 100 companies have already bought Apple Vision Pro units and are exploring innovative ways to use it to do things that weren't possible before, and this is just the beginning. Looking ahead, we're getting ready for an exciting product announcement next week that we think our customers will love. And next month, we have our Worldwide Developers Conference, which has generated enormous enthusiasm from our developers. We can't wait to reveal what we have in-store. We continue to feel very bullish about our opportunity in Generative AI. We are making significant investments, and we're looking forward to sharing some very exciting things with our customers soon. We believe in the transformative power and promise of AI, and we believe we have advantages that will differentiate us in this new era, including Apple's unique combination of seamless hardware, software and services integration, groundbreaking Apple's silicon, with our industry-leading neural engines and our unwavering focus on privacy, which underpins everything we create. As we push innovation forward, we continue to manage thoughtfully and deliberately through an uneven macroeconomic environment and remain focused on putting our users at the center of everything we do. Now let's turn to our results for the March quarter across each product category, beginning with iPhone. iPhone revenue for the March quarter was $46 billion, down 10% year-over-year. We faced a difficult compare over the previous year due to the $5 billion impact that I mentioned earlier. However, we still saw growth on iPhone in some markets, including Mainland China, and according to Kantar during the quarter, the two best-selling smartphones in Urban China were the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Pro Max. I was in China recently where I had the chance to meet with developers and creators who are doing remarkable things with iPhone. And just a couple of weeks ago, I visited Vietnam, Indonesia and Singapore, where it was incredible to see all the ways customers and communities are using our products and services to do amazing things. Everywhere I travel, people have such a great affinity for Apple, and it's one of the many reasons I'm so optimistic about the future. Turning to Mac. March quarter revenue was $7.5 billion, up 4% from a year ago. We had an amazing launch in early March with the new 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Air. The world's most popular laptop is the best consumer laptop for AI with breakthrough performance of the M3 chip and it’s even more powerful neural engine. Whether it's an entrepreneur starting a new business or a college student finishing their degree, users depend on the power and portability of MacBook Air to take them places they couldn't have gone without it. In iPad, revenue for the March quarter was $5.6 billion, 17% lower year-over-year, due to a difficult compare with the momentum following the launch of M2 iPad Pro and the 10th Generation iPad last fiscal year. iPad continues to stand apart for its versatility, power and performance. For video editors, music makers and creatives of all kinds, iPad is empowering users to do more than they ever could with a tablet. Across Wearables, Home and Accessories, March quarter revenue was $7.9 billion, down 10% from a year-ago due to a difficult launch compare on Watch and AirPods. Apple Watch is helping runners go the extra mile on their wellness journeys, keeping hikers on course with the latest navigation capabilities in watchOS 10, and enabling users of all fitness levels to live a healthier day. Across our watch lineup, we're harnessing AI and machine-learning to power lifesaving features like a regular rhythm notifications and fall detection. I often hear about how much these features mean to users and their loved ones and I'm thankful that so many people are able to get help in their time of greatest need. As I shared earlier, we set an all-time revenue record in services with $23.9 billion, up 14% year-over-year. We also achieved all-time revenue records across several categories and geographic segments. Audiences are tuning in on screens large, small and spatial and are enjoying Apple TV+ Originals like Palm Royale and Sugar. And we have some incredible theatrical releases coming this year, including Wolves, which reunites George Clooney and Brad Pitt. Apple TV+ productions continue to be celebrated as major awards contenders. Since launch, Apple TV+ productions have earned more than 2,100 award nominations and 480 wins. Meanwhile, we're enhancing the live sports experience with a new iPhone app, Apple Sports. This free app allows fans to follow their favorite teams and leagues with real-time scores, stats and more. Apple Sports is the perfect companion for MLS Season Pass subscribers. Turning to retail, our stores continued to be vital spaces for connection and innovation. I was delighted to be in Shanghai for the opening of our latest flagship store. The energy and enthusiasm from our customers was truly something to behold. And across the United States, our incredible retail teams have been sharing Vision Pro demos with customers, delighting them with a profound and emotional experience of using it for the very first time. Everywhere we operate and everything we do, we're guided by our mission to enrich users' lives and lead the world better than we found it, whether we're making Apple podcasts more accessible with a new transcripts feature or helping to safeguard iMessage users' privacy with new protections that can defend against advances in quantum computing. Our environmental work is another great example of how innovation and our values come together. As we work toward our goal of being carbon-neutral across all of our products by 2030, we are proud of how we've been able to innovate and do more for our customers while taking less from the planet. Since 2015, Apple has cut our overall emissions by more than half, while revenue grew nearly 65% during that same time period. And we're now using more recycled materials in our products than ever before. Earlier this spring, we launched our first-ever product to use 50% recycled materials with a new M3-powered MacBook Air. We're also investing in new solar and wind power in the U.S. and Europe, both to power our growing operations and our users' devices. And we're working with partners in India and the U.S. to replenish 100% of the water we use in places that need it most with the goal of delivering billions of gallons of water benefits over the next two decades. Through our Restore Fund, Apple has committed $200 million to nature-based carbon removal projects. And last month, we welcomed two supplier partners as new investors, who will together invest up to an additional $80 million in the fund. Whether we're enriching lives of users across the globe or doing our part to be a force for good in the world, we do everything with a deep sense of purpose at Apple. And I'm proud of the impact we've already made at the halfway point in a year of unprecedented innovation. I couldn't be more excited for the future we have ahead of us, driven by the imagination and innovation of our teams and the enduring importance of our products and services in people's lives. With that, I'll turn it over to Luca.
Luca Maestri:
Thank you, Tim, and good afternoon, everyone. Revenue for the March quarter was $90.8 billion, down 4% from last year. Foreign exchange had a negative year-over-year impact of 140 basis points on our results. Products revenue was $66.9 billion, down 10% year-over-year due to the challenging compare on iPhone that Tim described earlier, which was partially offset by strength from Mac. And thanks to our unparalleled customer satisfaction and loyalty and a high number of customers who are new to our products, our installed base of active devices reached an all-time high across all products and all geographic segments. Services revenue set an all-time record of $23.9 billion, up 14% year-over-year with record performance in both developed and emerging markets. Company gross margin was 46.6%, up 70 basis points sequentially, driven by cost savings and favorable mix to services, partially offset by leverage. Products gross margin was 36.6%, down 280 basis points sequentially, primarily driven by seasonal loss of leverage and mix, partially offset by favorable costs. Services gross margin was 74.6%, up 180 basis points from last quarter due to a more favorable mix. Operating expenses of $14.4 billion were at the midpoint of the guidance range we provided and up 5% year-over-year. Net income was $23.6 billion, diluted EPS was $1.53 and a March quarter record, and operating cash flow was strong at $22.7 billion. Let me now provide more detail for each of our revenue categories. iPhone revenue was $46 billion, down 10% year-over-year, due to the almost $5 billion impact from a year ago that Tim described earlier. Adjusting for this one-time impact, iPhone revenue would be roughly flat to last year. Our iPhone active installed base grew to a new all-time high in total and in every geographic segment. And during the March quarter, we saw many iPhone models as the top-selling smartphones around the world. In fact, according to a survey from Kantar, an iPhone was the top-selling model in the U.S., Urban China, Australia, the U.K., France, Germany and Japan. And the iPhone 15 family continues to be very popular with customers. 451 Research recently measured customer satisfaction at 99% in the U.S. Mac revenue was $7.5 billion, up 4% year-over-year, driven by the strength of our new MacBook Air, powered by the M3 chip. Customers are loving the incredible AI performance of the latest MacBook Air and MacBook Pro models. And our Mac installed base reached an all-time high with half of our MacBook Air buyers during the quarter being new to Mac. Also customer satisfaction for Mac was recently reported at 96% in the U.S. iPad generated $5.6 billion in revenue, down 17% year-over-year. iPad continued to face a challenging compare against the launch of the M2 iPad Pro and iPad 10th Generation from last year. At the same time, the iPad installed base has continued to grow and is at an all-time high as over half of the customers who purchased iPads during the quarter were new to the product. In addition, the latest reports from 451 Research indicated customer satisfaction of 96% for iPad in the US. Wearables, Home and Accessories revenue was $7.9 billion, down 10% year-over-year due to a difficult launch compare. Last year, we had the continued benefit from the launches of the AirPods Pro second-generation, the Watch SE and the first Watch Ultra. Apple Watch continues to attract new customers, with almost two-thirds of customers purchasing an Apple Watch during the quarter being new to the product, sending the Apple Watch installed base to a new all-time high and customer satisfaction was recently measured at 95% in the U.S. In services, as I mentioned, total revenue reached an all-time record of $23.9 billion, growing 14% year-over-year with our installed-base of active devices continuing to grow at a nice pace. This provides a strong foundation for the future growth of the services business as we continued to see increased customer engagement with our ecosystem. Both transacting accounts and paid accounts reached a new all-time high with paid accounts growing double-digits year-over-year. And paid subscriptions showed strong double-digit growth. We have well over $1 billion paid subscriptions across the services on our platform, more than double the number that we had only four years ago. We continued to improve the breadth and quality of our current services from creating new games on Arcade and great new shows on TV+ to launching additional countries and partners for Apple Pay. Turning to enterprise, our customers continued to invest in Apple products to drive productivity and innovation. We see more and more enterprise customers embracing the Mac. In Healthcare, Epic Systems, the world's largest electronic medical record provider, recently launched its native app for the Mac, making it easier for healthcare organizations like Emory Health to transition thousands of PCs to the Mac for clinical use. And since the launch of Vision Pro last quarter, many leading enterprise customers have been investing in this amazing new product to bring spatial computing apps and experiences to life. We are seeing so many compelling use cases from aircraft engine maintenance training at KLM Airlines to real-time team collaboration for racing at Porsche to immersive kitchen design at Lowe's. We couldn't be more excited about the spatial computing opportunity in enterprise. Taking a quick step back, when we look at our performance during the first-half of our fiscal year, total company revenue was roughly flat to the prior year in spite of having one less week of sales during the period and some foreign exchange headwinds. We were particularly pleased with our strong momentum in emerging markets, as we set first-half revenue records in several countries and regions, including Latin-America, the Middle East, India, Indonesia, the Philippines and Turkey. These results, coupled with double-digit growth in services and strong levels of gross margin, drove a first half diluted EPS record of $3.71, up 9% from last year. Let me now turn to our cash position and capital return program. We ended the quarter with $162 billion in cash and marketable securities. We repaid $3.2 billion in maturing debt and commercial paper was unchanged sequentially, leaving us with total debt of $105 billion. As a result, net cash was $58 billion at the end of the quarter. During the quarter, we returned over $27 billion to shareholders, including $3.7 billion in dividends and equivalents and $23.5 billion through open-market repurchases of $130 million Apple's shares. Given the continued confidence we have in our business now and into the future, our Board has authorized today an additional $110 billion for share repurchases, as we maintain our goal of getting to net cash-neutral over time. We are also raising our dividend by 4% to $0.25 per share of common stock, and we continued to plan for annual increases in the dividend going forward as we've done for the last 12 years. This cash dividend will be payable on May 16, 2024 to shareholders of record as of May 13, 2024. As we move ahead into the June quarter, I'd like to review our outlook, which includes the types of forward-looking information that Suhasini referred to at the beginning of the call. The color we are providing today assumes that the macroeconomic outlook doesn't worsen from what we are projecting today for the current quarter. We expect our June quarter total company revenue to grow low-single-digits year-over-year in spite of a foreign exchange headwind of about 2.5 percentage points. We expect our services business to grow double-digits at a rate similar to the growth we reported for the first-half of the fiscal year. And we expect iPad revenue to grow double-digits. We expect gross margin to be between 45.5% to -- and 46.5%. We expect OpEx to be between $14.3 billion and $14.5 billion. We expect OI&E to be around $50 million, excluding any potential impact from the mark-to-market of minority investments and our tax rate to be around 16%. With that, let's open the call to questions.
Suhasini Chandramouli:
Thank you, Luca. We ask that you limit yourself to two questions. Operator, may we have the first question, please?
Operator:
Certainly. We will go ahead and take our first question from Mike Ng with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Mike Ng:
Hey, good afternoon. Thank you very much for the question. I have two, first, I'll ask about the June quarter guidance. The revenue outlook for low-single digits growth, I was wondering if you could run through some of the product assumptions, iPhone, like what kind of gives you confidence around that? And then on the service momentum, what was better than expected in the quarter? And then I just have a quick follow-up.
Luca Maestri:
Hey, Mike. It's Luca. On the outlook, what we said is we expect to grow low-single-digits in total for the company. We expect services to grow double-digits at a rate that is similar to what we've done in the first-half of our fiscal year. And we've also mentioned that iPad should grow double-digits. This is the color that we're providing for the June quarter. In services, we've seen a very strong performance across the board. We've mentioned, we've had records in several categories, in several geographic segments. It's very broad based, our subscription business is going well. Transacting accounts and paid accounts are growing double-digits. And also we've seen a really strong performance both in developed and emerging markets. So very pleased with the way the services business is going.
Mike Ng:
Great. Thank you. And I wanted to ask about, as Apple leans more into AI and Generative AI, should we expect any changes to the historical CapEx cadence that we've seen in the last few years of about $10 billion to $11 billion per year or any changes to, you know, how we may have historically thought about the split between tooling, data center and facilities? Thank you very much.
Luca Maestri:
Yes. We are obviously very excited about the opportunity with Gen AI. We obviously are pushing very hard on innovation on every front and we've been doing that for many, many years. Just during the last five years, we spent more than a $100 billion in research and development. As you know, on the CapEx front, we have a bit of a hybrid model where we make some of the investments ourselves. In other cases, we share them with our suppliers and partners on the manufacturing side, we purchased some of the tools and manufacturing equipment. In some of the cases, our suppliers make the investment. On the -- and we do something similar on the data center side. We have our own data center capacity and then we use capacity from third parties. It's a model that has worked well for us historically and we plan to continue along the same lines going forward.
Mike Ng:
Excellent. Thank you very much.
Suhasini Chandramouli:
Awesome. Thank you, Mike. Operator, can we have the next question, please?
Operator:
Our next question is from Wamsi Mohan with Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Wamsi Mohan:
Yes, thank you so much. Tim, can you talk about the implications to Apple from the changes driven by EU DMA? You've had to open up third-party app stores, clearly disposes some security risks on the one-hand, which can dilute the experience, but also lower payments from developers to Apple. What are you seeing developers choose in these early days and consumers choose in terms of these third-party app stores? And I have a follow-up.
Tim Cook:
It's really too early to answer the question. We just implemented in March, as you probably know, in the European Union, the alternate app stores and alternate billing, et cetera. So we're focused on complying while mitigating the impacts to user privacy and security that you mentioned. And so that's our focus.
Wamsi Mohan:
Okay. Thank you, Tim. And Luca, I was wondering if you could comment a bit on the product gross margins, the sequential step down. You noted both mix and leverage. Any more color on the mix, if you could share if customers are at all starting to mix down across product lines or is this more a mix across product lines? Just trying to get some color on customer behavior given some of the broader inflationary pressures. Thank you so much.
Luca Maestri:
On a sequential basis, yes, we were down. It's primarily the fact that we had a slightly different mix of products than the previous one. Obviously, leverage plays a big role as we move from the holiday quarter into the -- into, you know, a more typical quarter. So I would say primarily leverage in a different mix of products. I mean, we haven't seen anything different in terms within the product categories, we haven't seen anything particular.
Wamsi Mohan:
Thank you so much.
Suhasini Chandramouli:
Thanks, Wamsi. We'll take the next question, please.
Operator:
Our next question is from Erik Woodring with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Erik Woodring:
Great. Thanks so much for taking my questions. Maybe my first one, Tim, you've obviously mentioned your excitement around Generative AI multiple times. I'm just curious how Apple is thinking about the different ways in which you can monetize this technology because historically software upgrades haven't been a big factor in driving product cycles. And so could AI be potentially different? And how could that impact replacement cycles? Is there any services angle you'd be thinking? Any early color that you can share on that? And then I have a follow up, please. Thanks.
Tim Cook:
I don't want to get in front of our announcements, obviously. I would just say that we see Generative AI as a very key opportunity across our products. And we believe that we have advantages that set us apart there. And we'll be talking more about it in as we go through the weeks ahead.
Erik Woodring:
Okay. Very fair. Thank you. And then Luca, maybe to just follow up on Wamsi's comments or question. There's a broad concern about the headwind that rising commodity costs have on your product gross margins. Wondering if you could just clarify for us if we take a step back and look at all of the components and commodities that go into your products kind of collectively, are we -- are you seeing these costs rising? Are they falling? What tools do you have to try to help and mitigate some rising costs if at all, rising input costs if at all? Thank you so much.
Luca Maestri:
Yes. I mean during the last quarter, commodity costs, and in general, component costs have behaved favorably to us. On the memory front, prices are starting to go up. They've gone up slightly during the March quarter. But in general, I think it's been a period not only this quarter, but the last several quarters where, you know, commodities have behaved well for us. Commodities going cycles and so there's obviously always that possibility. Keep in mind that we are starting from a very high level of gross margins. We reported 46.6%, which is something that we haven't seen in our company in decades. And so we're starting from a good point. As you know, we try to buy ahead when the cycles are favorable to us. And so we will try to mitigate if there are headwinds. But in general, we feel particularly for this cycle, we are in good shape.
Erik Woodring:
Thank you so much.
Suhasini Chandramouli:
Great. Thank you, Erik. Operator, we'll take the next question, please.
Operator:
Our next question is from Ben Reitzes with Melius. Please go ahead.
Ben Reitzes:
Hey, thanks for the question. And hey, Tim, I was wondering if I could ask the China question again. Is there any more color from your visit there that gives you confidence that you've reached a bottom there and that it's turning? And I know you've been -- you've continued to be confident there in the long-term. Just wondering if there was any color as to when you think that the tide turns there? Thanks a lot. And I have a follow-up.
Tim Cook:
Yes, Ben, if you look at our results in Q2 for Greater China, we were down 8%. That's an acceleration from the previous quarter in Q1. And the primary driver of the acceleration was iPhone. And if you then look at iPhone within Mainland China, we grew on a reported basis. That's before any kind of normalization for the supply disruption that we mentioned earlier. And if you look at the top-selling smartphones, the Top 2 in Urban China are iPhones. And while I was there, it was a great visit and we opened a new store in Shanghai and the reception was very warm and highly energetic, and so I left there having a fantastic trip and enjoyed being there. And so I maintain a great view of China in the long-term. I don't know how each and every quarter goes and each and every week. But over the long haul, I have a very positive viewpoint.
Ben Reitzes:
Okay. Hey, thanks, Tim. And then my follow-up, I want to ask this carefully though. It's a -- there's a fear out there that, you may lose some traffic acquisition revenue. And I was wondering if you thought AI from big picture and it doesn't have to be on a long-term basis, I mean from a big picture, if AI is an opportunity for you to continue to monetize your mobile real estate, just how you -- how maybe investors can think about that from a big picture, just given that's been one of the concerns that's potentially been an overhang, of course, due to, you know, a lot of the news and the media around some of the legal cases? And I was wondering if there's just a big-picture color you could give that makes us kind of think about it better and your ability to sort of continue to monetize that real estate? Thanks a lot.
Tim Cook:
I think AI, Generative AI and AI, both are big opportunities for us across our products. And we'll talk more about it in the coming weeks. I think there are numerous ways there that are great for us. And we think that we're well-positioned.
Ben Reitzes:
Thanks, Tim.
Tim Cook:
Yes.
Suhasini Chandramouli:
Thanks, Ben. Can we have the next question, please?
Operator:
Thank you. Our next question is from Krish Sankar with TD Cowen. Please go ahead.
Krish Sankar:
Yes, hi. Thanks for taking my question. Again, sorry to beat the AI haul. But Tim, I know you don't want to like reveal a lot. But I'm just kind of curious, because last quarter you spoke about how you're getting traction in enterprise. Is the AI strategy going to be both consumer and enterprise or is it going to be one after the other? Any color would be helpful? And then, I have a follow-up for Luca.
Tim Cook:
Our focus on enterprise has been and you know through the quarter and the quarters that preceded it on selling iPhones and iPads and Macs and we recently added Vision Pro to that. And we're thrilled with what we see there in terms of interest from big companies buying some to explore ways they can use it. And so I see enormous opportunity in the enterprise. I wouldn't want to cabin that to AI only. I think there's a great opportunity for us around the world in the enterprise.
Krish Sankar:
Got it. Very helpful. And then for Luca, you know, I'm kind of curious on -- given the macro-environment, on the hardware side, are you seeing a bias towards like standard iPhone versus the Pro model? The reason I'm asking the question is that there's a weaker consumer spending environment, yet your services business is still growing and has amazing gross margins. So I'm just trying to like square the circle over there. Thank you.
Luca Maestri:
I'm not sure I fully understand the question, but in general, what we are seeing on the product side, we continued to see a lot of interest at the top of the range of our products. And I think it's a combination of consumers wanting to purchase the best product that we offer in the different categories and our ability to make those purchases more affordable over time. We've introduced several financing solutions from installment plans to trading programs that reduce the affordability threshold and therefore, customers tend to buy -- want to buy at the top of the range that is very valuable for us in developed markets, but particularly in emerging markets where the affordability issues are more pronounced. But in general, over the last several years and that is also reflected in our gross margins, over the last several years, we've seen this trend, which we think is pretty sustainable.
Krish Sankar:
Got it. Thank you very much, Luca, and thanks, Tim.
Suhasini Chandramouli:
Thank you, Krish. Operator, we'll have the next question, please.
Operator:
Our next question is from Amit Daryanani with Evercore. Please go ahead.
Amit Daryanani:
Thanks for taking my question. I have two as well. You know, I guess, first off on capital allocation, you folks have about $58 billion of net cash right now. As you think about eventually getting to this net cash-neutral target, do you think at some point, Apple would be open to taking on leverage on the balance sheet and continuing the buyback program? Or is it more like once you get to this neutral position, it's going to be about returning free cash flow back to shareholders? I'm just wondering, how do you think about leverage on your balance sheet over time and what sort of leverage do you think you'd be comfortable taking on?
Luca Maestri:
Hey, Amit. This is Luca. I would say one step at a time, we have put out this target of getting to net cash-neutral several years ago and we're working very hard to get there. Our free cash flow generation has been very strong over the years, particularly in the last few years. And so as you've seen this year, we've increased the amount that we're allocating to the buyback. For the last couple of years, we were doing $90 billion, now we're doing $110 billion. So let's get there first. It's going to take a while still. And then when we are there, we're going to reassess and see what is the optimal capital structure for the company at that point in time. Obviously, there's going to be a number of considerations that we will need to look at when we get there.
Amit Daryanani:
Fair enough. I figure it's worth trying anyway. If I go back to this China discussion a bit and, you know, Tim, I think your comments around growth in iPhones in Mainland China is really notable. Could you step back, I mean, these numbers are still declining at least Greater China on a year-over-year basis in aggregate. Maybe just talk about what are you seeing from a macro basis in China and then at least annual decline -- or year-over-year declines that we're seeing. Do you think it's more macro driven or more competitive driven over there? That would be helpful.
Tim Cook:
Yes, I can only tell you what we're seeing. And so I don't want to present myself as a economist. So I'll steer clear of that. From what we saw was an acceleration from Q1, and it was driven by iPhone and iPhone in Mainland China before we adjust for this $5 billion impact that we talked about earlier did grow. That means the other products didn't fare as well. And so we clearly have work there to do. I think it has been and is through last quarter, the most competitive market in the world. And I -- so I, you know, wouldn't say anything other than that. I've said that before, and I believe that it was last quarter as well. And -- but if you step back from the 90-day cycle, what I see is a lot of people moving into the middle class, a -- we try to serve customers very well there and have a lot of happy customers and you can kind of see that in the latest store opening over there. And so I continue to feel very optimistic.
Amit Daryanani:
Great. Thank you.
Suhasini Chandramouli:
Thanks, Amit. Operator, we'll take the next question, please.
Operator:
Our next question is from David Vogt with UBS. Please go ahead.
David Vogt:
Great. Thanks guys for taking my question. I'm going to roll the two together, so you guys have them both. So Luca obviously, I'm trying to parse through the outlook for the June quarter. And just based on the quick math, it looks like all things being equal, given what you said, the iPhone business is going to be down mid-single-digits again in the June quarter. And if that's the case and maybe this is for Tim obviously, how are you thinking about the competitive landscape in the context of what you just said maybe outside of China and what changes sort of, the consumer demand or receptivity to new devices because we've been in this malaise for a while. Is it really this AI initiative that a lot of companies are pursuing? And do you think that changes sort of the demand drivers going forward? Or is it just really more of a timing issue in terms of the replacement cycle is a little bit long in the tooth, and we see a bit of an upgrade cycle at some point, maybe later this year into next year? Thanks.
Tim Cook:
I do see a key opportunity, as I've mentioned before with Generative AI with all of our devices or the vast majority of our devices. And so I think that if you look out that that's not within the next quarter or so and we don't guide at the product level, but I'm extremely optimistic. And so that -- that's kind of how I view it. In terms of the -- I'll let Luca comment on the outlook portion of it. I think if you step back on iPhone though and you make this adjustment from the previous year, our Q2 results would be flattish on iPhone. And so that's how we performed in Q2.
Luca Maestri:
Yes, David, on the outlook, I'll only repeat what we said before, and this is the color that we're providing for the quarter. We do expect to grow in total, low-single-digits. And we do expect services to grow double-digits, and we expect iPad to grow double-digits for the rest. I'll let you make assumptions and then we will report three months from now.
David Vogt:
Great. Thanks guys. I'll get back in the queue.
Suhasini Chandramouli:
Thanks, David. Operator, we'll take the next question, please.
Operator:
Our next question is from Samik Chatterjee with JPMorgan. Please go ahead.
Samik Chatterjee:
Hi, thanks for taking my question, and I have a couple as well. Maybe for the first one, your services growth accelerated from 11% growth to 14%. If you can sort of dig into the drivers of where or which parts of services did you really see that acceleration? And why it isn't a bit more sustainable as we think about the next quarter? Because I believe you're guiding more to sort of averaging out the first half of the year for the next quarter. So just curious what were the drivers and why not have it a bit more sustainably sort of improve as we go through the remainder of the year? And I have a quick follow-up. Thank you.
Luca Maestri:
So a number of things on services. First of all, the overall performance was very strong. As I said earlier, all-time records in both developed and emerging markets. So we see our services do well across the world. Records in many of our services categories. There are some categories that are growing very fast also because they are relatively smaller in the scheme of our services business like cloud, video, payment services. You know, those all set all-time revenue records. And so we feel very good about the progress that we're making in services. As we go forward, I'll just point out that if you look at our growth rates a year ago, they improved during the course of the fiscal year last year. So the comps for the services business become a bit more challenging as we go through the year. But in general, as I mentioned, we still expect to grow double-digits in the June quarter at a rate that is very similar to what we've done in the first half.
Samik Chatterjee:
Got it. Got it. And for my follow up, if I can ask you more specifically about the India market. Obviously, you continue to make new records in terms of revenue in that market. How much of the momentum you're seeing would you associate with your sort of retail strategy in that market, retail expansion relative to maybe some of the supply change or the sort of manufacturing changes or strategy you've undergone or taken in that market itself. Any thoughts around that would be helpful?
Tim Cook:
Sure. We did grow strong double-digit. And so we were very, very pleased about it. It was a new March quarter revenue record for us. As you know, as I've said before, I see it as an incredibly exciting market and it's a major focus for us. In terms of the operational side or supply chain side, we are producing there, from a pragmatic point of view, you need to produce there to be competitive. And so yes, there the two things are linked from that point of view. But we have both operational things going on and we have go-to-market, and initiatives going on. We just opened a couple of stores as last year, as you know, and we see enormous opportunity there. We're continuing to expand our channels, and also working on the developer ecosystem as well. And we've been very pleased that there is a rapidly-growing base of developers there. And so, we're working all of the entire ecosystem from developer to the market to operations, the whole thing. And I just -- I could not be more excited and enthusiastic about it.
Samik Chatterjee:
Got it. Thank you. Thanks for that.
Tim Cook:
Yes.
Suhasini Chandramouli:
Thank you, Samik. Operator, we'll have the next question, please.
Operator:
Our next question is from. Please go ahead.
Aaron Rakers:
Yes, thanks for taking the questions, and I think I have to have two as well like everybody else. I guess, I'm going to go back to the China question. I guess, at a high level, the simple question is, when we look at the data points that have been repeatedly reported throughout the course of this quarter, I'm curious, Tim, you know, what are we missing? Like where do you think people are missing, Apple's iPhone traction within the China market, just at a high level, you know, given the data points that were reported throughout this course of the last quarter?
Tim Cook:
I can't address the data points. I can only address what our results are. And we did accelerate last quarter, and the iPhone grew in Mainland China. So that's what the results were. I can't bridge to numbers we didn't come up with.
Aaron Rakers:
Okay. And then as a quick follow-up, I know you guys haven't talked about this, you know, quantified it in quite some time. But I'm curious how we would characterize the channel inventory dynamics for iPhone?
Tim Cook:
Sure. The -- for the March quarter, we decreased channel inventory during the quarter. We usually decreased channel inventory during the Q2 timeframe. So that's not unusual. And we're very comfortable with the overall channel inventory.
Aaron Rakers:
Thank you.
Tim Cook:
Yes.
Suhasini Chandramouli:
Thank you, Aaron. Operator, we'll take the next question, please.
Operator:
Our next question is from Richard Kramer with Arete Research. Please go ahead.
Richard Kramer:
Thanks very much. I'm not going to ask about China, but you regularly call out all the rapid growth in many other emerging markets. So is Apple approaching a point where all of those other emerging markets in aggregate might crossover to become larger than your current $70 billion Greater China segments, and maybe investors could look at that for driving growth for the wider business? And then I have a follow-up for Luca. Thanks.
Luca Maestri:
I think, Richard, you're asking a really interesting question. We were looking at something similar recently. Obviously, China is by far the largest emerging market that we have. But when we started looking at places like India, like Saudi, like Mexico, Turkey, of course, Brazil and Mexico and Indonesia, the numbers are getting large, and we're very happy because these are markets where our market share is low, the populations are large and growing. And our products are really making a lot of progress with the -- in those markets. The level of excitement for the brand is very high. Tim was in Southeast Asia recently, and the level of excitement is incredibly high. So it is very good for us. And then -- and certainly, the numbers are getting larger all the time. And so the gap as you compare it to the numbers in China is reducing, and hopefully, that trajectory continues for a long time.
Richard Kramer:
Okay. And then as a follow-up, maybe for either of you, I mean, you're coming up on four years from what was incredibly popular iPhone 12 cycle. And, you know, given you're struggling to reduce your net -- your -- reach your net neutral cash position and your margins are sort of near highs, do you see ways to deploy capital more to spur replacement demand in your installed base either with greater device financing, more investment in marketing, more promotions. I mean, do you feel like you needed to produce those sort of margins or is it a more important to spur growth with replacement? Thanks.
Tim Cook:
I think innovation spurs the upgrade cycle, and as one thing, of course, there's economic factors as well that play in there. And what kind of offerings there are from our carrier partners and so forth. And so there's a number of variables in there. But we work all of those, and you know, we price our products for the value that we're delivering. And so that's how we look at it.
Luca Maestri:
And if I can add to Tim's comments, Richard, one of the things that when you look over the long arc of time that maybe is not fully understood is that we've gone through a long period of very strong dollar. And what that means given that our company sells more than 60% of our revenue is outside the United States. The demand for our products in those markets is stronger than the results that we report just because of the translation of those local currencies into dollars, right? And so that is something to keep in mind as you look at our results, right? And so we are making all the investments that are needed and Tim has talked about innovation. Obviously, we made a lot of progress with financing solutions, with trading programs and so on, and we will continue to make all those investments.
Richard Kramer:
Okay. Super. Thanks, guys.
Suhasini Chandramouli:
Thank you, Richard. Operator, can we take our last question, please.
Operator:
Our next question is from Atif Malik with Citi. Please go ahead.
Atif Malik:
Hi. Thank you for taking my questions, and I have two questions as well. First for Tim, for enterprise, specifically, what are some of the top two or three use cases on Vision Pro you're hearing most excitement? And then I have a follow-up for Luca.
Tim Cook:
Yes, the great thing is, I'm hearing about so many of them. I wouldn't say that one has emerged as the top, right now. The most impressive thing is that similar to the way people use a Mac, you use it for everything. People are using it for many different things in enterprise, and that varies from field service to training to healthcare related things like preparing a doctor for pre-op surgery or advanced imaging. And so the -- it commands control centers. And so it's an enormous number of different verticals. And you know our focus is on -- is growing that ecosystem and getting more apps and more and more enterprises engaged. And the event that we had recently, I can't overstate the enthusiasm in the room. It was extraordinary. And so we're off to a good start, I think, with the enterprise.
Atif Malik:
Great. And then Luca, I believe you mentioned that for the March quarter, the commodity pricing environment was favorable. Can you talk about what you're assuming for commodity pricing on memory and et cetera for the June quarter and maybe for the full-year?
Luca Maestri:
Yes, we provide guidance just for the current quarter. So I'll tell you about the, you know, the guidance. We're guiding to again to a very high level of gross margins, 45.5% to 46.5%. Within that guidance, we expect memory to be a slight headwind, not a very large one, but a slight headwind. And the same applies for foreign exchange. Foreign exchange will have a negative impact sequentially of about 30 basis points.
Atif Malik:
Thank you.
Suhasini Chandramouli:
Thank you, Atif. A replay of today's call will be available for two weeks on Apple podcasts as a webcast on apple.com/investor and via telephone. The number for the telephone replay is 866-583-1035. Please enter confirmation code 0467138 followed by the pound sign. These replays will be available by approximately 5:00 P.M. Pacific Time today. Members of the press with additional questions can contact Josh Rosenstock at 408-862-1142, and financial analysts can contact me, Suhasini Chandramouli, with additional questions at 408-974-3123. Thank you again for joining us.
Operator:
Good day, and welcome to the Apple Q1 Fiscal Year 2024 Earnings Conference Call. Today's call is being recorded. At this time, for opening remarks and introductions. I would like to turn the call over to Suhasini Chandramouli, Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Suhasini Chandramouli:
Thank you for joining us. Speaking first today is Apple's CEO, Tim Cook; and he'll be followed by CFO, Luca Maestri. After that, we'll open the call to questions from analysts. Before turning the call over to Tim, I would like to remind everyone that the quarter we're reporting today included 13 weeks, whereas the quarter we reported a year ago included 14 weeks. Please note that some of the information you'll hear during our discussion today will consist of forward-looking statements, including, without limitation, those regarding revenue, gross margin, operating expenses, other income and expense, taxes, capital allocation and future business outlook, including the potential impact of macroeconomic conditions on the company's business and results of operations. These statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results or trends to differ materially from our forecast. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in Apple's most recently filed annual report on Form 10-K and the form 8-K filed with the SEC today along with the associated press release. Apple assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date they are made. I'd now like to turn the call over to Tim for introductory remarks.
Tim Cook:
Thank you. Suhasini. Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining the call. Today, Apple is reporting revenue of $119.6 billion for the December quarter, up 2% from a year ago despite having one less week in the quarter. EPS was $2.18, up 16% from a year ago and an all-time record. We achieved revenue records across more than two dozen countries and regions including all-time records in Europe and rest of Asia-Pacific. We also continue to see strong double-digit growth in many emerging markets with all-time records in Malaysia, Mexico, The Philippines, Poland, and Turkey, as well as December quarter records in India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and Chile. In Services, we set an all-time revenue record with paid subscriptions growing double-digits year-over-year. And I'm pleased to announce today that we have set a new record for our installed base, which has now surpassed 2.2 billion active devices. We are announcing these results on the eve of what is sure to be a historic day as we enter the era of spatial computing. Starting tomorrow, Apple Vision Pro, the most advanced personal electronics device ever, will be available in Apple stores for customers in the U.S. with expansion to other countries later this year. Apple Vision Pro is a revolutionary device built on decades of Apple innovation and it's years ahead of anything else. Apple Vision Pro has a groundbreaking new input system and thousands of innovations, and it will unlock incredible experiences for users and developers that are simply not possible on any other device. There is already so much excitement behind this product from reviewers, customers, and developers. They are praising everything from the incredible experience of watching a movie on a 100-foot screen to remarkable new machine learning capabilities like hand tracking and room mapping. We can't wait for people to experience the magic for themselves. Moments like these are what we live for at Apple. They're why we do what we do. They're why we're so unflinchingly dedicated to groundbreaking innovation and why we're so focused on pushing technology to its limits as we work to enrich the lives of our users. As we look ahead, we will continue to invest in these and other technologies that will shape the future. That includes artificial intelligence where we continue to spend a tremendous amount of time and effort, and we're excited to share the details of our ongoing work in that space later this year. Now, let's turn to the results for the December quarter, beginning with iPhone. We are proud to report that revenue came in at $69.7 billion, 6% higher than a year ago. The iPhone 15 lineup has earned glowing reviews and been embraced by customers. The iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus feature a gorgeous new design with color-infused back glass and contoured edges, Dynamic Island, A16 Bionic, and a new 48 megapixel camera system. And the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max set the gold standard for smartphones with a beautiful and lighter titanium design, industry-leading performance with A17 Pro and our most advanced camera system with the equivalent of seven pro lenses and the ability to record spatial video. Features like Emergency SoS and roadside assistance via satellite bring peace of mind to users when they travel, and I'm grateful for every note I've received about their lifesaving impact. Turning to Mac. Revenue came in at $7.8 billion, up 1% year-over-year, driven by the strength of our latest M3-powered MacBook Pro models in spite of having one less week of sales. Just last week, we got to wish Mac a happy 40th birthday. When it was introduced 40 years ago, Mac changed everything, and through the years, it has done so again and again. Recently, we have been on a tremendous pace of innovation. Since the introduction of Apple silicon in 2020, we've been proud to offer our users unmatched performance and power along with a remarkable Neural Engine for artificial intelligence and machine learning. This past fall, we had an amazing launch of the latest generation of Apple silicon for Mac, M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max. These chips break new ground in power and performance empowering users to do more than they ever could before, whether they're making a musical masterpiece using the latest features in Logic Pro, or beating their high score in a graphics intensive game. A favorite amongst students, business owners, artists, and video editors, our MacBook Pro lineup is the world's best pro notebook family. And iMac, the world's most capable and best-selling all-in one, is now faster than ever, thanks to M3. In iPad, revenue for the December quarter was $7 billion, down 25% year-over-year due to a difficult compare with the launch of the M2 iPad Pro and the 10th generation iPad during the December quarter last year and one less week of sales. iPad remains the most versatile, capable, and elegant tablet on the market today. It continues to be the go-to-device for students, creators, and more with customers loving iPad's incredible combination of portability and performance. Powerful apps like Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro for iPad allow video and music creators to unleash their creativity in new ways that are only possible on iPad. iPad continues to push the boundaries of what's possible on a tablet. In Wearables, Home and Accessories, revenue came in at $12 billion, down 11% from a year ago due to a difficult compare with the launch timing of several products in this category and the impact of the 14th week last year. Across our latest Apple Watch lineup, we're enabling and encouraging our users to live a healthier day, while making Apple Watch even more intuitive to use. The new double tap gesture on Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 make it easier to answer calls, play and pause music or take a photo with iPhone. I've been deeply moved by the many touching stories about how features like a regular rhythm notification and fall detection helped Apple Watch users when they needed it most. And for the first time ever, users can choose a carbon-neutral option of any new Apple Watch. Meanwhile, our AirPods lineup continue to be a holiday favorite. In Services, we set an all-time revenue record of $23.1 billion and an 11% year-over-year increase. Because we had one less week this quarter, this growth represents an acceleration from the September quarter, and we achieved all-time revenue records across advertising, cloud services, payment services and video, as well as December quarter records in App Store and AppleCare. Across our services, we're constantly growing our offerings to give users even more to love. With the redesigned Apple TV app, we've made it easier for subscribers to enjoy all their favorite shows, movies and sports, including Apple TV+ hits like Masters of the Air, Monarch, and Slow Horses. We're proud to be a part of Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon, a film that has moved audiences and earned more than 200 accolades including Best Film of the Year from the New York Film Critics Circle, nine BAFTA nominations, a Golden Globe win, and 10 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. Across all Apple TV+ productions, we've now earned 2050 award nominations and 450 wins since we've introduced the service. We're also excited to have a new season of Major League Soccer kicking off this month. We're looking forward to seeing Lionel Messi return to the field and to following all of our favorite teams in what is sure to be an incredible season. And we're counting down to the Apple Music Super Bowl halftime show, featuring Usher. Turning to Retail. In recent months, we opened three stores, including our 100th store in Asia-Pacific. Throughout the holidays, our team members pulled out all the stops to help customers find the perfect gift. And I know our U.S. team members are especially excited to begin demoing Apple Vision Pro for our customers tomorrow. At Apple, we live and breathe innovation. We are driven to pioneer new technology that can enrich our customers' lives, and we're just as intentional about showing up with our values and being a force for good in the world. February is Black History Month, and to honor it, we've launched our new Black Unity Collection, which includes the Black Unity Sport Loop band. This year's designs reflect a lasting commitment to working toward a more equitable world. We also continue to do a central work through our Racial Equity and Justice Initiative, and we're proud to continue providing grants to organizations that are making a real impact in the world. In recent months, we've also taken significant strides in our environmental work. We're partnering with suppliers to bring more clean energy online for Apple production. We're using more recycled materials than ever before and more energy-efficient transportation than ever before. And each day, we are taking more and more steps toward becoming 100% carbon-neutral across all of our products by 2030. Apple is a company that has never shied away from big challenges. That's because we are grounded by a deep sense of purpose and guided by core belief in the transformative power of innovation. And so, we are optimistic about the future, confident in the long-term, and as excited as we've ever been to deliver for our users like only Apple can. With that, I'll turn it over to Luca.
Luca Maestri:
Thank you, Tim, and good afternoon, everyone. Revenue for the December quarter was $119.6 billion, up 2% from last year. During the December quarter a year ago, two unique factors affected our results. First, we had an additional week in the quarter. And second, we had COVID-related factory shutdowns that limited iPhone supply. We estimate that the net impact of these two factors resulted in a 2 percentage point headwind to our revenue performance this quarter. We set all-time revenue records in Europe and rest of Asia-Pacific, and continue to see strong performance across our emerging markets with double-digit growth in the majority of the emerging markets we track. Products revenue was $96.5 billion, flat compared to last year, driven by strength in iPhone, offset by challenging compares for iPad and Wearables, Home and Accessories and one less week of sales this year across the entire portfolio. Thanks to our unparalleled customer loyalty and very strong levels of customer satisfaction, our total installed base of active devices set a new record across all products and all geographic segments, and is now over 2.2 billion active devices. Services revenue set an all-time record of $23.1 billion, up 11% year-over-year. When we take into account the extra week last year, this represents a sequential acceleration of growth from the September quarter. We are very pleased with our Services performance in both developed and emerging markets with all-time revenue records in the Americas, Europe, and rest of Asia-Pacific. Company gross margin was 45.9%, up 70 basis points sequentially, driven by leverage and favorable mix, partially offset by foreign exchange. Products gross margin was 39.4%, up 280 basis points sequentially, also driven by leverage and mix, partially offset by foreign exchange. Services gross margin was 72.8%, up 190 basis points from last quarter, due to a more favorable mix. Operating expenses of $14.5 billion were at the midpoint of the guidance range we provided and up 1% year-over-year. Net income was $33.9 billion, up $3.9 billion from last year. Diluted EPS was $2.18, up 16% versus last year and an all-time record. And operating cash flow was very strong at $39.9 billion. Let me now provide more detail for each of our revenue categories. iPhone revenue was $69.7 billion, up 6% year-over-year. We set all-time records in several countries and regions, including Latin America, Western Europe, the Middle East, and Korea, as well as December quarter records in India and Indonesia. Our iPhone active installed base grew to a new all-time high, and we had an all-time record number of iPhone upgraders during the quarter. Customers are loving their new iPhone 15 family, with the latest reports from 451 Research indicating customer satisfaction of 99% in the U.S. In fact, many iPhone models were among the top-selling smartphones around the world during the quarter. According to a survey from Kantar, iPhones were four out of the top five models in the U.S. and Japan, four out of the top six models in urban China and the UK, and all top five models in Australia. Mac generated revenue of $7.8 billion and return to growth, despite one less week of sales this year. This represents a significant acceleration from the September quarter when we faced a challenging compare due to the supply disruptions and subsequent demand recapture we experienced a year ago. Customer response to our latest iMac and MacBook Pro models powered by the M3 chips has been great. And our Mac installed base reached an all-time high with almost half of Mac buyers during the quarter being new to the product. Also, 451 Research recently reported customer satisfaction of 97% for Mac in the U.S. iPad was $7 billion in revenue, down 25% year-over-year. iPad faced a difficult compare because during the December quarter last year, we launched the new iPad Pro and iPad 10 generation, and we had an extra week of sales. However, the iPad installed base continues to grow and is an all-time high with over half of the customers who purchased iPads during the quarter being new to the product, and customer satisfaction for iPad was recently measured at 98% in the U.S. Wearables, Home and Accessories revenue was $12 billion, down 11% year-over-year due to a challenging launch compare and the extra week a year ago. This time last year, we had the full quarter benefit from the launches of the AirPods Pro 2nd generation, the Watch SE, and the first Watch Ultra. We continue to attract new customers to Apple Watch. Nearly two-thirds of customers purchasing an Apple Watch during the quarter were new to the product, and the latest reports from 451 Research indicate customer satisfaction of 96% in the U.S. And in Services, we were very pleased with our double-digit growth, which was driven by the strength of our ecosystem. Our installed base is now over 2.2 billion active devices and continues to grow nicely, establishing a solid foundation for the future expansion of our Services business. And we continue to see increased customer engagement with our services. Both transacting accounts and paid accounts reached a new all-time high, with paid accounts growing double-digits year-over-year. Also, our paid subscriptions showed strong double-digit growth. We have well over 1 billion paid subscriptions across the services on our platform, more than double the number that we had only four years ago. Finally, we continue to build on the breadth and the quality of our current services. From Oscar-nominated theatrical releases with Apple TV+ to more publications or News+ like The Atlantic and exciting new games on Arcade. Turning to Enterprise, we continue to see many business customers leverage Apple products to improve productivity and drive innovation. Target recently added the latest M3 MacBook Pro to their existing deployment of thousands of Mac’s, enabling employees across various departments to do their best work. In emerging markets, Zoho, a leading technology company headquartered in India, offers its 15,000 plus global employees a choice of devices, with 80% of their workforce using iPhone for work and nearly two-thirds of them choosing Mac as their primary computer. With the upcoming launch of Apple Vision Pro, we are seeing strong excitement in Enterprise. Leading organizations across many industries such as Walmart, Nike, Vanguard, Stryker, Bloomberg, and SAP have started leveraging and investing in Apple Vision Pro as their new platform to bring innovative spatial computing experiences to their customers and employees. From everyday productivity to collaborative product design to immersive training, we cannot wait to see the amazing things our enterprise customers will create in the months and years to come. Let me now turn to our cash position and capital return program. We ended the quarter with $173 billion in cash and marketable securities. We decreased commercial paper by $4 billion, leaving us with total debt of $108 billion. As a result, net cash was $65 billion at the end of the quarter, and our goal of becoming net cash-neutral over time remains unchanged. During the quarter, we returned nearly $27 billion to shareholders, including $3.8 billion in dividends and equivalents and $20.5 billion through open market repurchases of 112 million Apple shares. We also retired an additional 6 million shares in the final settlement of our 19th ASR. As usual, we will provide an update to our capital return program when we report results at the end of this quarter. As we move ahead into the March quarter, I'd like to review our outlook, which includes the types of forward-looking information that Suhasini referred to at the beginning of the call. The color we are providing today assumes that the macroeconomic outlook doesn't worsen from what we are projecting today for the current quarter. And we expect foreign exchange to be a revenue headwind of about 2 percentage points on a year-over-year basis. As a reminder, in the December quarter a year ago, we faced significant supply constraints on the iPhone 14 Pro and 14 Pro Max due to COVID-19 factory shutdowns. And in the March quarter a year ago, we were able to replenish channel inventory and fulfill significant pent-up demand from the constraints. We estimate that this impact added close to $5 billion to the March quarter's total revenue last year. When we remove this impact from last year's revenue, we expect both our March quarter total company revenue and iPhone revenue to be similar to a year ago. For our Services business, we expect a similar double-digit growth rate to what we reported in the December quarter. We expect gross margin to be between 46% and 47%. We expect OpEx to be between $14.3 billion and $14.5 billion. We expect OI&E to be around $50 million, excluding any potential impact from the mark-to-market of minority investments and our tax rate to be around 16%. Finally, today our Board of Directors has declared a cash dividend of $0.24 per share of common stock payable on February 15, 2024, to shareholders of record as of February 12, 2024. With that, let's open the call to questions.
Suhasini Chandramouli:
Thank you, Luca. We ask that you limit yourself to two questions. Operator, may we have the first question please?
Operator:
Certainly. We'll go ahead and take our first question from Erik Woodring with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Erik Woodring:
Hey guys, good evening. Thank you for taking my questions. I have two. And congrats on the nice quarter here. Luca, maybe if we start with you. Can you unpackage some of the Services drivers a bit for us. Obviously, really nice outperformance in the December quarter versus your expectations. A record gross margin implies your higher margin businesses were likely the sources of outperformance. But can you maybe just clarify a bit how we should think about Services growth for the March quarter? And then, speak to some of those underlying drivers in the December quarter and then in the March quarter, what the different puts and takes would be? And then, I have a follow-up please. Thank you.
Luca Maestri:
Thanks, Erik, for the question. Let's start with the December quarter. As we said, up 11%, $23.1 billion is an all-time record for us, with all-time records in The Americas, in Europe, and the rest of Asia Pac. So it was pretty broad-based geographically, and very strong across all the Services categories, because we had all-time revenue records for cloud, for payments, for video, and for advertising and December quarter records for the App Store and for AppleCare. Obviously, last year, we had an extra week, so the 11% is stronger than -- the underlying performance is stronger than the 11% that we have reported. I think the entire ecosystem is doing well because we continue to see growth and new all-time highs in both transacting accounts and paid accounts, which is obviously very important. And paid subscriptions continue to grow strong double-digits. Just as a reference, we have more than a billion paid subscriptions across all the services on our platform. This is more than double the number of paid subscriptions that we had only four years ago. So, obviously, very significant growth there. What I said during the prepared remarks around the March quarter, I mentioned that we will continue to grow double-digits at a percentage that is similar to what we reported for the December quarter. We don't provide guidance around the different services categories. So, we will provide more color when we report in three months.
Erik Woodring:
Okay. Thank you, Luca. And then, Tim, really nice to see your installed base reach a record high, again, against all products and geos. I'm wondering if you could share a bit more detail about the new users you were able to on-board over the last 12 months. Meaning, how might this new cohort look different from past cohorts, either in terms of geographic representation or SKU to certain products or even how their monetization trends might differ from past cohorts. And that's it from me. Thanks so much.
Tim Cook:
Yes. Hi, Erik. I would say emerging markets are -- have been a very key area of strength for us. If you look at it, India grew -- in revenue terms grew strong double-digits in the December quarter and hit a quarter revenue record. The other emerging markets like Indonesia also hit a quarterly record. And we had several regions, with records from Latin America to the Middle East. And that theme has been pretty consistent across the other quarters that -- of the year as well. And so, emerging markets, very, very important. And I feel like we are doing a great job there.
Suhasini Chandramouli:
Thanks, Erik. Operator, can we have the next question please?
Operator:
Our next question is from Mike Ng with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Mike Ng:
Hey, good afternoon. I just have two questions as well. First, on Services. Just on the outlook for the March quarter for a similar double-digit growth rate as of December quarter. I'm just wondering why not -- why won't it be potentially faster, given that the December quarter obviously had a headwind from the extra week comp, and I'd also think that some of the pricing uplifts on select Apple One services that were implemented last winter should help in the March quarter? Any additional thoughts there would be great in terms of what some of your assumptions are. And then, I have a quick follow-up.
Luca Maestri:
Yes. We'll see how the quarter develops. I would point to two things. One is the fact that we mentioned that we expect a couple of points of negative foreign exchange in the March quarter, and foreign exchange was essentially flat for us in the December quarter. So, you've got a bit of a headwind there. And then, when you look at our other progression of our Services business over the last few quarters, the compares for March are slightly more difficult than the compares for December.
Mike Ng:
Great. Thank you, Luca. And then, my second question. It was very interesting to hear about some of the enterprise customer investments into Vision Pro. Could you maybe just talk about some of the efforts to support Vision Pro developer ecosystem. And it was also good to hear about the potential upcoming announcements on AI. So any thoughts there would also be helpful. Thank you.
Tim Cook:
Yeah. Hi. It's -- we are incredibly excited about the Enterprise opportunities with Vision Pro. I've seen several demos from different companies. Luca mentioned several in his opening remarks, but Walmart has a very cool merchandising app. There are firms that are doing collaboration -- design collaboration apps. There are field service applications. Really all over the map, there are applications that are for control center, command center kind of things. SAP has really gotten behind it and, of course, SAP is in so many of companies. I think there will be a great opportunity for us in Enterprise, and we couldn't be more excited about where things are right now. We are obviously looking forward to tomorrow. This has been multiple years of efforts from so many people across Apple. And really, it took a whole of company effort to bring it to this far. In terms of generative AI, which, I'd guess, is your focus, we have a lot of work going on internally as I've alluded to before. Our MO, if you will, has always been to do work and then talk about work and not to get out in front of ourselves. And so, we're going to hold that to this as well. But we've got some things that we are incredibly excited about that we'll be talking about later this year.
Mike Ng:
Wonderful. Thank you, Tim.
Tim Cook:
Yes.
Suhasini Chandramouli:
Thank you, Mike. Operator, can we have the next question please?
Operator:
Our next question is from Wamsi Mohan with Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Wamsi Mohan:
Yes, thank you so much. I have two questions as well. First on iPhone. There have been concerns around replacement cycles lengthening, China competition intensifying, and you still beat iPhone revenues despite the weaker performance in China. Curious how you're thinking about the 15 cycle overall, given what you saw in the December quarter. And I've a follow-up.
Tim Cook:
Hi, it's Tim. The -- we were up 6%, as we mentioned in the opening remarks. We are happy with that performance. Underneath there, we had really strong performance in several parts of the world with all-time records in Europe and rest of Asia-Pacific. As I mentioned earlier, we did particularly well in several emerging markets from Latin America to the Middle East. And we set December quarter records in India and Indonesia. And so, really some spectacular broad-based reactions to iPhone. We also importantly set an all-time record worldwide for iPhone upgraders. And the installed base hit a new all-time high consistent with the -- our overall devices. And so, there's lot of good things. Luca mentioned in his opening comments that iPhones were four out of the top five smartphone models in the U.S. and Japan and four out of the top six in urban China and the UK, and all top five in Australia, and the customer satisfaction level for iPhone 15 hit 99%. If you look at iPhone 15 since the announcement of it and shipment in September, so this is including some of Q4 and you compare that to iPhone 14 over the same period of time, iPhone 15 is outselling iPhone 14. And so, we feel very good about that, and the upgraders hitting a record is particularly exciting for us.
Wamsi Mohan:
Great. Thank you, Tim. And as a follow-up, obviously, you're just launching the Vision Pro and it's an entirely new category. It's a price point that's a much higher starting price point relative to most of your other, probably over the last decade, product introductions, but just wondering how would you measure the success of Vision Pro over time and which Apple products adoption curve would you look at as potentially the most similar? And is there a way in which we could think Vision Pro could eclipse maybe something like the iPad in revenue over time. Thank you.
Tim Cook:
You know, each product has its own journey. And so, I wouldn't want to compare it to any one in particular. I would just say we couldn't be more excited. Internally, we've got an incredible amount of excitement from developers and from customers that can't wait till tomorrow to pick up their units. And we are incredibly proud to be able to demo the unit in so many of our stores in the U.S. starting tomorrow for people that are -- that want to check it out. And so, we'll see and report the results of it in the Wearables category that you're familiar with. I think that if you look at it from a price point of view, there's an incredible amount of technology that's packed into the product. There's 5,000 patents in the product and it's, of course, built on many innovations that Apple has spent multiple years on, from silicon to displays and significant AI and machine learning. All the hand tracking, the room mapping, all of this stuff is driven by AI. And so, we're incredibly excited about it. I can't wait to be in the store for tomorrow and see the reaction myself.
Wamsi Mohan:
Thank you so much, Tim.
Suhasini Chandramouli:
Thanks, Wamsi. Operator, we'll take the next question please.
Operator:
Our next question is from Amit Daryanani with Evercore. Please go ahead.
Amit Daryanani:
Good afternoon. I have two as well. I guess, first off, I was hoping you could talk a little bit about what you're seeing in China right now. I think from a geographic basis, one of the few places that was down double-digits, while everything else was growing. So, I'm hoping you spend a bit of time discussing what are you seeing there from a competitive perspective and more importantly, from a demand perspective in China?
Tim Cook:
Yeah. If you look at iPhone in China Mainland, which I think has been the focus of a lot of interest, and you look at it in constant currency, so more of an operational view, we were down mid-single digits on iPhone. And so, it was the other things that drove the larger contraction year-over-year. On the good news side, we had solid growth on upgraders year-over-year in Mainland China and we had four of the top six smartphone models in urban China. Also, IDC just put out a note, that you may have seen, that we were the top brand in -- for the full year and for the December quarter. And so, there's some good news along with – obviously, we'd prefer not to [contract] (ph).
Amit Daryanani:
Fair enough. And then, as a follow-up, you folks have implemented a fair bit of changes around the App Store in Europe post the DMA implementation there. Can you just touch on what are some of the key updates? And then, Luca, as a net of it all, do you see it having any significant impact financially to your services or a broader Apple P&L statement? Thank you.
Tim Cook:
Yes. You know, the -- let me try to answer a little bit of both and then Luca can add some comments to it. We announced a number of changes last week in Europe that would be in effect beginning in March. So, the last month of the first calendar quarter, the second fiscal quarter. Those are -- some of the things that we announced include alternate billing opportunities, alternate app stores, our marketplaces, if you will. We're also opening NFC for new capabilities for banking and wallet apps. And so, these are some of the things we announced. The -- if you think about what we've done over the years is, we've really majored on privacy, security, and usability. And we've tried our best to get as close to the past in terms of the things that are -- that people love about our ecosystem as we can, but we are going to fall short of providing the maximum amount that we could supply, because we need to comply with the regulation. And so, in terms of predicting the choices that developers and users will make, it's very difficult to do that with precision. And so, I will see what happens in March.
Luca Maestri:
Yes, Amit. As Tim said, these are changes that we're going to be implementing in March. A lot will depend on the choices that will be made. Just to keep it in context, the changes applied to the EU market, which represents roughly 7% of our global app store revenue.
Amit Daryanani:
Perfect. That's a really good perspective to have. Thank you very much.
Suhasini Chandramouli:
Thank you, Amit. Operator, can we have the next question please?
Operator:
Our next question is from Aaron Rakers with Wells Fargo. Please go ahead.
Aaron Rakers:
Yes. Thanks for taking the question. I have two as well as you would imagine. I guess, the first question I wanted to just ask maybe unpack a little bit more, just remarkable trends that we're seeing in your product gross margin specifically. So, I'm curious as we look forward, I guess on this last quarter, where there any kind of benefits you're seeing from like just the purchase component, obligations that you've put in place, let's say, a year ago, and that flowing through. And how are you thinking about the component pricing environment as we think about that gross margin into the March quarter and looking-forward?
Luca Maestri:
Yes. On the product side and then maybe I'll make a comment in total for the company. On the product side, our gross margins increased sequentially 280 basis points. So, obviously, a very significant increase. I would say the two primary components of the increase are a favorable mix. Of course, iPhone did very well. We did very well with our high-end models. And leverage, of course, it's the biggest quarter of the year for us and so we get the leverage effect. We had a partial offset, negative impact from foreign exchange. But net-net, obviously, very significant improvement. And we had very similar dynamics on the Services side where we increased sequentially 190 basis points, also, in this case, due to a more favorable mix. And so, the combined effect of the two businesses gave us the 45.9% at the total company level, which is up 70% sequentially. You've heard from my prepared remarks that we are guiding total company gross margin to 46% to 47%, which is an additional expansion of margins compared to the already very strong results of the December quarter.
Aaron Rakers:
Okay. And then, the second question I was just going to ask. Tim, you alluded to kind of your excitement around generative AI and some announcements that we should think about maybe later this year. One of the things that stands out for me is that, your capital expenditures has actually come down this last year. I'm curious as you look to lean in more to generative AI, is there something we should consider about the CapEx intensity at Apple to make investments to really set the table for generative AI, kind of platform as we move forward? Just given some of the things that we've seen from some other large tech companies.
Luca Maestri:
I'll take the question, Aaron. We've always said, we will never underinvest in the business. So, we are making all the investments that are necessary throughout our product development, software development, services development. And so, we will continue to invest in every area of the business and at the appropriate level. And we're very excited about what's in store for us for the rest of the year.
Aaron Rakers:
Thank you.
Suhasini Chandramouli:
Thanks, Aaron. Operator, can we have the next question please?
Operator:
Our next question is from Krish Sankar with TD Cowen. Please go ahead.
Krish Sankar:
Yes. Hi. Thanks for taking my question. I have two of them. First one for Luca, a clarification on a question. The $5 billion impact in March quarter, is that for product revenue or is that total company revenue. And along the same part, you highlighted the strong gross margins. And I understand last year, some of the commodity costs were deflationary, buy looks like it’s going to be inflationary right now. And also you've done some of the Mac conversions that -- the silicon conversions. So I'm just trying to figure out how much juice is there more to squeeze on the gross margin side? And then I'll follow up for Tim.
Luca Maestri:
Yes. The -- so the first part of the question was around -- oh, the $5 billion. The $5 billion, as I mentioned, a year ago we had this disruption of supply on iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max because of the factory shutdown due to the COVID-19 situation. And so, essentially there was pent up demand as we exited December quarter, they got fulfilled and we also did the channel fill associated with it during the March quarter. So close to $5 billion that I mentioned is entirely related to iPhone. On the gross margin side, obviously, we are at very high levels of gross margin. And I'll repeat what I said before, we've had good expansion over the last few quarters and now we are guiding to 46% to 47% and that takes into account everything that is going on, which is, the commodity environment, which is the foreign exchange situation, and obviously the product and services mix. And the outcome of this is the guidance, which obviously is very strong and we're very happy with it.
Krish Sankar:
Thanks a lot, Luca. And then I have a follow-up for Tim. Tim, it was very interesting to hear your comments on enterprise. And historically, Apple has been a consumer centric company. And now with Vision Pro, Mac, it's sort of penetrating more into the enterprise. I'm kind of curious how to think about Apple of the future? Would it still be consumer centric or do you think it's going to be more enterprise focused also as we get into the future? Thank you very much.
Tim Cook:
We've really concluded that we can do both. That if you look at it, what has happened over the last several years is that, employees are in a position in many companies to choose their own technology that is the best for them. And so, it sort of took some of the central command from the traditional company and decentralized the decision-making. That is a huge advantage for Apple, because there's a lot of people out there that want to use a Mac. They're using a Mac at home. They'd like to use one in the office as well. iPad has also benefited from that. Vision Pro, it's -- when you look at the ton of use cases, I mean, we're starting with a million apps and 600 plus that are -- have been designed particularly for Vision Pro. When I look at what is coming out of Enterprise, it's some of the most innovative things I've seen come out of Enterprise in a long time. And so, I think there's a like there is for the Mac and iPad, and of course, iPhone has been in enterprise since the early days of iPhone. I think there's a nice opportunity there for Vision Pro as well.
Krish Sankar:
Great. Thanks a lot Tim. Very interesting to hear. Thank you.
Suhasini Chandramouli:
Thank you, Krish. Operator, can we have the next question, please?
Operator:
Our next question is from David Vogt with UBS. Please go ahead.
David Vogt:
Great. Thanks guys. And I have two questions as well. So, Tim and Luke, I appreciate the strength in the emerging markets like India and the other names that you kind of listed on the call, but can you maybe spend some time on the Americas? Obviously, that was relatively flat, you touched on China, but what are you seeing in that market from the carriers here in the States? And is the sales cycle elongating or the replacement cycle elongating? And in your view what has to change to kind of maybe re-accelerate that business in the America's, particular in the iPhone business? And then on sort of -- I just want to make sure I understand sort of the guide. So when I think about the $5 billion pull forward last year in the March quarter from a channel fill perspective, even if I back it out last quarter or I back it up this quarter, the March quarter, this would be sort of the softest quarter since the COVID pandemic. Obviously, I know the Americas as I just touched on is a little bit softer than China, which you cleared up earlier. But how do you think about the differences in sort of the macro conditions by region? And again, do you have a sense for are we nearing a trough from a macro demand perspective or how long do you think this particular weakness persists? Thanks.
Tim Cook:
Let me take the first part of your question about America. If you look at the U.S., which obviously drives the vast, vast majority of the revenue in America, we grew in the December quarter from an iPhone business point of view and the install base hit an all-time high. If you look at the replacement cycle, it's very difficult to measure the replacement cycle at any given point. And so, what we focus on internally a lot is the active install base and the -- obviously, the sales over usually a cycle and we feel better about those things. If you look at the -- who's selling what in the U.S., the iPhone is four out of the top five selling smartphones in the US. And of course, the customer satisfaction in the U.S. as we alluded to earlier is 99%. So we feel very, very good about what our position is in the U.S.
Luca Maestri:
And I would add to that, keep in mind, obviously, the extra week that we had a year ago that obviously makes the compare more -- a bit distorted. On the March quarter guide, I would point to you that, obviously, the COVID years had a lot of, let's say, turmoil in it, a lot of volatility that typically you wouldn't see. If you look at our sequential progression from December to March this year versus pre-COVID versus like a more normal environment, it's actually stronger than those years.
David Vogt:
Got it. Thanks, guys.
Suhasini Chandramouli:
Thank you, David. Operator, can we have the last question, please?
Operator:
Thank you. Our last question is from Ben Reitzes with Melius Research. Please go ahead.
Ben Reitzes:
Yes. Hi. Thanks. Appreciate it. Two questions, if I can sneak them in. Just wanted to clarify on China. Tim, I think last quarter you still thought it was a growth market. Obviously, there's some concerns with the -- recently and given what we saw in the quarter, is there something that we can kind of point to where you feel that that market can resume growth in the future? And I'm wondering if you're still upbeat about that prospect. And then I just have a quick follow up.
Tim Cook:
Ben, we've been in China for 30 years. And I remain very optimistic about China over the long term. And I feel good about hitting a new install base number, high watermark and very good about the growth in upgraders year-over-year during the quarter.
Ben Reitzes:
Great. Thanks Tim. And just in terms of AI, I know you're not going to talk about your plans, but do you believe -- are you a believer in the edge thesis that AI and processing on smartphones and devices like yours is going to have a huge role in AI and AI apps and that it's something you guys can take advantage of.
Tim Cook:
Let me just say that, I think there's a huge opportunity for Apple with GenAI and AI. And without getting into to more details and getting out in front of myself.
Ben Reitzes:
Thanks Tim.
Tim Cook:
Yes, Thanks, Ben.
Suhasini Chandramouli:
All right. Thank you Ben. A replay of today's call will be available for two weeks on Apple Podcasts, as a webcast on apple.com/investor and via telephone. The number for the telephone replay is 866-583-1035. Please enter confirmation code 0106234 followed by the pound sign. These replays will be available by approximately 5 p.m. Pacific time today. Members of the press with additional questions can contact Josh Rosenstock at 408-862-1142 and financial analysts can contact me, Suhasini Chandramouli, with additional questions at 408-974-3123. Thanks again for joining us.
Operator:
Once again, this does conclude today's conference. We do appreciate your participation.
Operator:
Good day, and welcome to the Apple Q4 Fiscal Year 2023 Earnings Conference Call. Today's call is being recorded. At this time, for opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn the call over to Suhasini Chandramouli, Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Suhasini Chandramouli:
Thank you. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us. Speaking first today is Apple's CEO, Tim Cook. And he'll be followed by CFO, Luca Maestri. After that, we'll open the call to questions from analysts. Please note that some of the information you'll hear during our discussion today will consist of forward-looking statements, including without limitation, those regarding revenue, gross margin, operating expenses, other income and expense, taxes, capital allocation and future business outlook, including the potential impact of macroeconomic conditions on the company's business and results of operations. These statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results or trends to differ materially from our forecast. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in Apple's most recently filed annual report on Form 10-K and the Form 8-K filed with the SEC today along with the associated press release. Apple assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date they are made. I'd now like to turn the call over to Tim for introductory remarks.
Tim Cook:
Thank you, Suhasini. Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining the call. Today, Apple is reporting revenue of $89.5 billion for the September quarter. We achieved an all-time revenue record in India, as well as September quarter records in several countries, including Brazil, Canada, France, Indonesia, Mexico, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the UAE, Vietnam and more. iPhone revenue came in ahead of our expectations, setting a September quarter record, as well as quarterly records in many markets, including China mainland, Latin America, the Middle-East, South Asia and an all-time record in India. In services, we set an all-time revenue record with double-digit growth and ahead of our expectations. During the September quarter, we continue to face an uneven macroeconomic environment, including foreign exchange headwinds and we've navigated these challenges by following the same principles that have always guided us. We've continued to invest in the future and manage for the long-term. We've adapted continuously to circumstances beyond our control, while being thoughtful and deliberate on spending. And we've carved a path of groundbreaking innovations and delivered with excellence every step of the way. That includes Apple Vision Pro, which has gotten such an amazing response from developers who are currently creating truly incredible apps. We're excited to get this magical product in the hands of customers early next year. Now let me share more about our products, beginning with iPhone. iPhone revenue came in at $43.8 billion, 3% higher than a year ago, and a new record for the September quarter. This fall, we were thrilled to debut the iPhone 15 lineup. The all-new iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus feature a gorgeous design, powerful cameras and the intuitive Dynamic Island. Powered by the industry-leading A17 Pro, our iPhone15 Pro lineup has a beautiful strong and durable titanium design and the best iPhone camera system ever, including a 5X Telephoto lens on iPhone 15 Pro Max. Customers are loving the entire iPhone 15 family and reviews have been off the charts. In Mac, revenue came in at $7.6 billion, down 34% year-over-year from the prior year's record quarter. This was due to challenging market conditions, as well as difficult compares against the supply disruptions and subsequent demand recapture we experienced a year ago. Earlier this week, we were excited to unveil the next generation of Apple silicon with our incredible family of M3 chips, M3; M3 Pro; and M3 Max. We're continuing to innovate at a tremendous pace. And our industry-leading lineup of personal computers just got even better. The new MacBook Pro lineup brings our most advanced technology to our Pro users, while iMac, the world's best-selling all-in-one, just got faster and more capable. And according to the latest data from Student Monitor, nearly two out of three college students chose a Mac. We couldn't be more excited about the future. Turning to iPad. Revenue for the September quarter was $6.4 billion. iPad sets the gold standard for tablets and our competitors are unable to match the iPad experience that is enabled by our seamless integration of hardware and software. iPad is also our most versatile product. In classrooms around the world, it's helping educators bring lessons to life, while giving students a window into the world around them. And in artist workshops, design studios and everywhere else, creative minds come together, iPad supercharges the creative process, helping users take their ideas farther than they ever could before. Across wearables, home and accessories, revenue came in at $9.3 billion. Apple Watch has become essential in our lives and this is our best Apple Watch lineup ever. With Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2, we're giving people even more tools to stay safe and live healthy, active lives. With the new double tap gesture, users can easily control Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 using just one hand and without touching the display. It feels like magic. Our latest Apple Watch lineup also includes our first-ever carbon-neutral products, a significant achievement of innovation and determination. Apple's unique ecosystem of hardware, software, and services delivers an unparalleled user experience. During the quarter, we also had the chance to introduce a range of exciting new updates to our software that will allow users to get even more out of their devices. Whether it's personalized contact posters and new face time features in iOS 17, new tools for users to make their experience their own in macOS Sonoma and iPadOS 17, or a bold new look in watchOS 10 that lets you see and do more, faster than ever, Apple is delivering an even better, richer experience that users are loving. Services revenue set an all-time record of $22.3 billion, a 16% year-over-year increase. We achieved all-time revenue records across App Store, advertising, AppleCare, iCloud, payment services, and video, as well as the September quarter revenue record in Apple Music. Whether subscribers are waking up to headlines on Apple News+, getting their morning workout in with Fitness+, feeling the beat with Apple Music on their way to work or school, or unwinding at the end of the day with Apple Arcade, we have so many different services to enrich their day. Apple TV+ continues to delight customers as well, with new and returning shows like the Morning Show, Lessons in Chemistry and Monarch. We're telling impactful stories that inspire imagination and stir the soul. Making movies that make a difference is also at the heart of Apple TV+ and we were thrilled to produce Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon, a powerful work of cinema that premiered in theaters around the world last month. We're proud to say that since launch, just over four years ago, Apple TV+ has earned nearly 1,600 award nominations and nearly 400 wins. We also offer subscribers an unprecedented live sports experience with MLS Season Pass. We couldn't be more pleased with how our partnership with Major League Soccer has gone in its first year. Subscriptions to MLS Season Pass have exceeded our expectations and we're excited to continue that momentum next year. With the playoffs now underway, we can't wait to see who takes home MLS cup. And nowhere does the magic of Apple come alive more than it does in our stores. Over the past year, we've continued to find ways to connect with even more customers. We welcomed customers to our first-ever retail locations in India. We also opened doors to new stores in Korea, China and the UK and expanded the Apple store online to Vietnam and Chile. And we have another store opening in China this week. In September, I joined our team at Apple Fifth Avenue on launch day and the energy and excitement were unbelievable. Every time we connect with the customer, we're reminded why we do what we do. From simple joys of creating and sharing memories, to lifesaving features like emergency SoS via satellite, we're enriching lives in ways large and small. And whether we're working to safeguard user privacy, ensure technology made by Apple is accessible for everyone, or build an even more inclusive workplace, we're determined to lead with our values. Our environmental efforts are a great example of the intersection of our work and our values. Across Apple, we act on a simple premise, the best products in the world should be the best products for the world. We've made our environmental work a central focus of our innovation, because we feel a responsibility to leave the world better than we found it and because we know that climate change cannot be stopped, unless everyone steps up and does their part. Our first ever carbon-neutral products represent a major milestone and we're going to go even further. We plan to make every product across our lineup carbon neutral by the end of the decade. And we're not doing it alone. Over 300 of our suppliers have committed to using a 100% clean energy for Apple production by 2030. We also continue to invest in entrepreneurs who are lighting the way for a greener, more equitable future. Through our third impact accelerator class, we're proud to support a new class of diverse innovators on the cutting edge of green technology and clean energy. Apple is always looking forward, driven in equal measure by a sense a possibility and a deep belief in our purpose. We're motivated by the meaningful difference we can make for our customers and keenly determined to push the limits of technology even further. And that's why I'm so confident that Apple's future is bright. With that, I'll turn it over to Luca.
Luca Maestri:
Thank you, Tim, and good afternoon, everyone. Revenue for the September quarter was $89.5 billion, down less than 1% from last year. Foreign exchange had a negative impact of over 2 percentage points. And on a constant-currency basis, our revenue grew year-over-year in total, and in each geographic segment. We set a September quarter record in the Americas and saw strong performance across our emerging markets, where both iPhone and Services grew double digits. Products revenue was $67.2 billion, down 5% from last year, due to very challenging compares on both Mac and iPad, which I will discuss in more detail later on. At the same time, we reached a September quarter record on iPhone, driven by strength in emerging markets. Our total installed-base of active devices reached an all-time high across all products and all geographic segments, thanks to our high levels of customer satisfaction and many new customers joining our ecosystem. Our Services revenue set an all-time record of $22.3 billion, up 16% year-over-year, with growth accelerating sequentially from the June quarter. Our performance in Services were broad based, as we reached all-time revenue records in the Americas, Europe and rest of Asia-Pacific and a September quarter record in Greater China. We also set new records in every Services category. Company gross margin set a September quarter record at 45.2%, up 70 basis points sequentially, driven by leverage and favorable mix, partially offset by foreign exchange. Products gross margin was 36.6%, up 120 basis points sequentially, also driven by leverage and mix, partially offset by foreign exchange. Services gross margin was 70.9%, up 40 basis points from last quarter due to a different mix. Operating expenses of $13.5 billion were at the low end of the guidance range we provided, up 2% year-over-year. Net income was $23 billion, diluted earnings per share was $1.46, up 13% versus last year and a September quarter record, and operating cash flow was strong at $21.6 billion. Let me now provide more detail for each of our revenue categories. iPhone revenue was $43.8 billion, up 3% year-over-year and a new September quarter record. We had strong performance in several markets, including an all-time record in India as September quarter records in Canada, Latin America, the Middle East, and South Asia . Our iPhone active installed base grew to a new all-time high and fiscal 2023 was another record year for switches. We continue to see extremely high levels of customer satisfaction which 451 Research recently measured at 98% in the U.S. Mac revenue was $7.6 billion, down 34% year-over-year, driven by challenging market conditions and compounded by a difficult compare in our own business, whereby last year we experienced supply disruptions from factory shutdowns in the June quarter and were subsequently able to fulfill significant pent-up demand during the September quarter. We also had a difference in launch timing with the MacBook Air launching earlier this year in the June quarter compared to the September quarter last year. We have great confidence in our Mac lineup and are excited about the recently announced iMac and MacBook Pro powered by our M3 chips. Our installed base is at an all-time high and half of Mac buyers during the quarter were new to the product, driven by MacBook Air. Also, we saw reported customer satisfaction of 97% for Mac in the U.S. iPad generated $6.4 billion in revenue, down 10% year-over-year. Similar to Mac, these results were a function of a difficult compare from the supply disruptions in the June quarter a year ago and the subsequent fulfillment of pent-up demand in the September quarter. iPad continues to attract a large number of new customers to the installed base with over half of the customers who purchase iPads during the quarter being new to the product and the latest reports from 451 Research indicate customer satisfaction of 98% in the U.S. Wearables, Home and Accessories revenue was $9.3 billion, down 3% year-over-year. We had a September quarter record in Europe and we saw strong performance in several emerging markets around the world. Apple Watch continues to expand its reach with nearly two-thirds of customers purchasing Apple Watch during the quarter being new to the product and customer satisfaction for the Watch was recently measured at 97% in the U.S. Services had a great quarter. We reached a new all-time revenue record of $22.3 billion, up 16% year-over-year. And we're happy to see growth coming from all categories and every geographic segment, which is a direct result of the strength of our ecosystem. Our installed base of over 2 billion active devices continues to grow at a nice pace and establishes a solid foundation for the future expansion of the ecosystem. And we continue to see increased customer engagement with our Services. Both transacting accounts and paid accounts grew double-digits year-over-year, each reaching a new all-time high. Also our paid subscriptions showed strong growth. We have well over 1 billion paid subscriptions across the services on our platform, nearly double the number we had only three years ago. And finally, we continue to improve the breadth and quality of our current services from exciting new content on Apple TV+ and Apple Arcade to additional storage tiers on iCloud. We believe our customers will love this new offering. Turning to enterprise. We are excited to see our business customers in both developed and emerging markets expand their deployment of Apple products and technologies to drive business innovation and employee satisfaction. Starbucks continuously invest in Apple technology to bring the best experience to the customers and employees, including tens of thousands of iPads across all retail stores to help their teams streamline order management, operations and training. In addition, Starbucks recently refreshed over 10,000 Macs to the latest M2-powered MacBook Air for all store managers, enabling them to do their best work and improve productivity. And in Indonesia, popular technology company GoTo is offering Mac as a choice, so that employees can have the best tools to be most productive. Today, more than half of its workforce are already choosing Mac for work. Let me now turn to our cash position and capital return program. We ended the quarter with over $162 billion in cash and marketable securities. We increased commercial paper by $2 billion, leaving us with total debt of $111 billion. As a result, net cash was $51 billion at the end of the quarter. And our goal of becoming net cash-neutral over time remains unchanged. During the quarter, we returned nearly $25 billion to shareholders, including $3.8 billion in dividends and equivalents and $15.5 billion through open market repurchases of 85 million Apple shares. We also began a $5 billion accelerated share repurchase program in August, resulting in the initial delivery and retirement of 22 million shares. Taking a step back, as we close our 2023 fiscal year, our annual revenue was $383 billion. While it was down 3% from the prior year, it grew on a constant-currency basis despite the volatile and uneven macroeconomic environment. Our year-over-year revenue performance improved each quarter as we went through the year, and so did our earnings per share performance, as we reported double-digit EPS growth in the September quarter. We are particularly pleased with our performance in emerging markets with revenue reaching an all-time record in fiscal 2023 and double-digit growth in constant currency. We are expanding our direct presence in these markets from new Apple retail stores in India to online stores in Vietnam and Chile. And we continue to work with our partners to offer a wide range of affordability programs so that we can best serve our customers. We're very excited about the momentum we have in these markets and the opportunity ahead of us. As we move ahead into the December quarter, I'd like to review our outlook, which includes the types of forward-looking information that Suhasini referred to at the beginning of the call. The color we are providing today assumes that the macroeconomic outlook doesn't worsen from what we are projecting today for the current quarter. Also, on foreign exchange, we expect a negative year-over-year revenue impact of about 1 percentage point. As a reminder, the December quarter this year will last the usual 13 weeks, whereas the December quarter a year ago spanned 14 weeks. For clarity, revenue from the extra week last year added approximately 7 percentage points to the quarter's total revenue. Despite having one less week this year, we expect our December quarter, total company revenue to be similar to last year. We expect iPhone revenue to grow year-over-year on an absolute basis. We also expect to grow after normalizing for both last year's supply disruptions and the one extra week. We expect Mac year-over-year performance to significantly accelerate from the September quarter. We expect the year-over-year revenue performance for both iPad and Wearables, Home and Accessories to decelerate significantly from the September quarter due to a different timing of product launches. On iPad, we launched a new iPad Pro and iPad 10th Generation during the December quarter a year ago. For the Wearable category, last year we had the full December quarter benefit from the launches of the AirPods Pro 2nd Generation, the Watch SE, and the first Watch Ultra. For our Services business, we expect the average revenue per week to grow at a similar strong double-digit rate as it did during the September quarter. We expect gross margin to be between 45% and 46%. We expect OpEx to be between $14.4 billion and $14.6 billion. We expect OI&E to be around negative $200 million, excluding any potential impact from the mark-to-market of minority investments and our tax-rate to be around 16%. Finally, today our Board of Directors has declared a cash dividend of $0.24 per share of common stock, payable on November 16, 2023, to shareholders of record as of November 13, 2023. With that, let's open the call to questions.
Suhasini Chandramouli:
Thank you, Luca. We ask that you limit yourself to two questions. Operator, may we have the first question, please?
Operator:
Certainly. We will go ahead and take our first question from Mike Ng of Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Michael Ng:
Hey. Good afternoon, and thank you very much for the questions. I just have a question on iPhone storage and demand versus iCloud. As demand for storage grows, are you seeing a mix-shift towards higher storage iPhone models or are consumers mostly opting for the same because of increased uptake of iCloud+? What are some of the strategic and financial considerations here and trade-offs, as you think about the mix shift towards higher storage models versus iCloud penetration? Thanks.
Tim Cook:
Michael, it's Tim. As you probably know, we started the line with the iPhone Pro Max at 256, and so we are seeing a different mix, if you will, this year than last year. Outside of that, not significant changes.
Michael Ng:
Great. Thank you. And as a separate follow-up, I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit about the market conditions on notebooks and desktops, and then any color that you can share regarding the timing of the Mac -- M3 MacBook Pros this year versus the M2 earlier in the calendar year? Thank you.
Tim Cook:
Yeah. We're thrilled to have announced the M3 lineup and get the new MacBook Pro, the new iMac out there. We couldn't be more excited about it. We -- as Luca said, with the lineup that we've got and the compare issue that we don't have during Q1, we anticipate a significant acceleration in the Mac space for Q1. To just repeat a little bit about the circumstances of the performance last quarter, in the year-ago June quarter, we had a factory disruption that lasted several weeks. The pent-up demand that resulted from that was filled in the September quarter, and that made the September quarter not only a record, but a substantial record. And obviously, we're now comparing against that for '23 and so that, I wouldn't look at the negative 34% as representative of the underlying business performance. It's sort of the net of it.
Michael Ng:
Excellent. That's very clear. Thank you, Tim.
Tim Cook:
Yeah.
Suhasini Chandramouli:
All right. Thanks, Mike. Can we have the next question, please?
Operator:
Our next question is from Aaron Rakers with Wells Fargo. Please go ahead.
Aaron Rakers:
Yeah. Thanks for taking the question and congratulations on the execution in the quarter. I'm curious, if you could help us characterize what the demand environment you're seeing in China looks like. How has the reception been to the iPhone 15? And kind of similar question to the prior one, how would you characterize the mix within China as you go through this current product cycle? And I have a follow-up.
Tim Cook:
Yeah. If you look at how we did in Greater China for the quarter, we came in at, on a revenue basis, minus 2. But one thing to keep in mind here is that the FX impact was nearly 6 points. So we grew in constant currency. And underneath that, if you look at the different -- the categories, iPhone actually set a September quarter record in mainland China. And the -- what pulled down the performance was a combination, largely of Mac and iPad. Services also grew during the quarter and the Mac and iPad suffered from the same issues that the company did with the compare issues to factory disruptions in Q3 that were filled subsequently in Q4 of '22. We had the -- in addition to that, we had the top four selling phones in urban China for last year, and I was -- I just took a trip over there and could not be more excited about the interactions I had with the customers and employees and others.
Aaron Rakers:
Yeah. And then, as a quick follow-up, I'm curious as we move towards more of an inflationary component pricing environment. Luca, how do we think about that effect? How you're thinking about the gross margin at the product level, as maybe component pricing starts to turn, what's been clearly very favorable over the last several quarters to more of an inflationary environment? Thank you.
Luca Maestri:
Well, as you've seen from our results in Q4 and the guidance for Q1, we're obviously experiencing very strong levels of gross margin. The 45.2% was a record for the September quarter. And then, the guidance for Q1 is obviously strong at 45% to 46%. Our gross margins are affected by multiple factors. Obviously, the commodity environment is one of them, as you mentioned. It's been a good environment in recent quarters. But equally important is the mix of what we sell. And obviously, growth in Services for us is favorable, and that has helped our company gross margin. Foreign exchange, on the other hand, has been a drag for us for several quarters, given the strength of the dollar. We don't provide guidance past the December quarter, which is a very important one for us because it's the beginning of the product cycle for many products. And so we feel very good, very confident about, this coming year, and I think the gross margin guidance reflects that.
Aaron Rakers:
Thank you.
Suhasini Chandramouli:
Thanks, Aaron. Can we have the next question, please?
Operator:
Our next question is from Erik Woodring with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Erik Woodring:
Awesome. Thank you very much for taking my questions. Maybe if I start, Luca, I know that the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max are constrained today, but I think some of your comments suggests you should be back to supply demand balance before quarter end. So, I guess, my question is, does your December quarter revenue guidance account for any supply constraints? And if so, is there any way to kind of quantify how much supply would be limiting your December quarter revenue performance? And then, I have a follow-up. Thank you.
Luca Maestri:
Yes. It's correct. We are constrained today on iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max. We're working very hard to get the product in the hands of all the customers that have ordered it. We expect, as of today, that we're going to be in supply demand balance by the end of the quarter. So the guidance reflects that.
Erik Woodring:
Okay, very clear. Thanks. And then, maybe for you and Tim. You guys have been on the leading end of -- edge of innovation across hardware, software, silicon, services. And I'm sure there's plenty of technology in kind of longer-term projects that you're investing in. How should we think about your capital intensity as we look to fiscal year '24, just given over the last few years, CapEx as a percentage of revenue had been relatively low compared to the eight years prior? So should we expect a step-up or kind of similar capital intensity? And what are the more notable moving pieces, if any, that we should be thinking about? Thanks.
Luca Maestri:
Well, the big areas of investment for us are tooling and equipment for manufacturing plants. Our investments in data centers and our investments in our own facilities, both corporate facilities and retail stores. And so, both for the tooling in our plants and our data center investments, we tend to have a bit of a hybrid model where we share some of the investments with our partners and suppliers and so maybe that's why you see sometimes a bit of variability. But over the last few years, we've made all the investments that we needed to make. And obviously, we're planning to make all the investments that we believe are needed and appropriate in order to continue to innovate.
Erik Woodring:
Great. Thanks so much for the color, guys.
Suhasini Chandramouli:
Thanks, Eric. Can we have the next question, please?
Operator:
Our next question is from David Vogt with UBS. Please go ahead.
David Vogt:
Great. Thanks, guys for taking my question. I know you covered China. I want to pivot to the US for a second. Obviously, iPhone and the business looks like it returned to growth in the quarter. But it's still relatively softer kind of where I thought it would be at this point in the cycle and some of the U.S. carriers obviously haven't been that particularly aggressive in promoting upgrades. So just wanted to kind of get a sense, first, what you're seeing from your partners in the U.S. kind of currently and going forward and what do you expect? And then, second, Luca, on the margins, I mean, is it fair to say that the mix in Q1 from a product versus services dynamic is kind of the key driver of the better gross margin guide as a whole relative to, let's say, the December quarter? Or is there anything else? I know you mentioned there's a lot of moving pieces, but is that the primary driver of the uplift in the margin? Thanks.
Tim Cook:
On the U.S. carriers and the U.S. business in general, it's really too early to call the iPhone cycle, particularly with the constraint around the Pro and the Pro Max and the U.S. tends to do quite well with those products. It's really too early to tell what the upgrade rates will be and what the switcher rates will be.
Luca Maestri:
On the margin side, if I understood your question correctly about the December quarter guidance, keep in mind that actually December is the quarter where our products business is tends to be very heavy because of the holiday season. And so the services gross margins that are accretive to total company had an impact, but not as meaningful as other quarters during the year and so I think that the main drivers of the guidance that we provided are the fact that we are seeing improved costs, and improved mix on our -- on the product side of the business, partially offset by foreign exchange, which continues to be a drag, both sequentially and on a year-over-year basis.
David Vogt:
Got it. So the weakness in iPad and Wearables are less of an impact on sort of the margin trajectory in the December quarter?
Luca Maestri:
That's correct.
David Vogt:
I guess?
Luca Maestri:
That's correct.
David Vogt:
Got it. Thanks, Luca.
Suhasini Chandramouli:
All right. Thanks, David. We'll take our next question, please.
Operator:
Our next question is from Amit Daryanani with Evercore. Please go ahead.
Amit Daryanani:
Yeah. Good afternoon. Thanks for taking my question. I have two as well. I guess, first off, just the Services growth rate, there's a tremendous acceleration I think in September quarter, the 16% growth. And it sounds like it’s going to hold there pretty well into December. Can you just talk about what is driving this acceleration? Are there a couple of products that have just stepped up in a very meaningful way? Just maybe flush out like what is driving this acceleration because it's fairly notable compared to what you've been seeing in the last few quarters.
Luca Maestri:
We had a really strong quarter across the border, Amit, because both geographically and from a product category standpoint, we saw very significant growth, I mentioned the records on a geographic basis. And from a category standpoint, literally, we set records in each one of the big categories. We had all-time record for App Store, for advertising, for cloud, video, AppleCare, payments and a September quarter record for Music. So it's hard to pick, one in particular because they all did well. And really then, we step back and we think about why is it that our Services business is doing well and it's because we have an installed base of customers that continues to grow at a very nice space and the engagement in our ecosystem continues to grow. We have more transacting accounts, we have more paid accounts, we have more subscriptions on the platform and we continue to add. We continue to add content and features. We're adding a lot of content on TV+, new games on Apple Arcade, new features, new storage plans for iCloud. So it's a combination of all these things and the fact that the engagement in the ecosystem is improving, and therefore, it benefits every service category.
Amit Daryanani:
Got it. That's really helpful. And then, maybe if I could ask you about Vision Pro, which I believe is supposed to be launched more broadly sometime in 2024, in the early part of the year. I'm curious how different do you think the launch and the consumer education of this product or a new category will be versus other things like AirPods or Apple Watch that you've done. And then, perhaps any themes I think that's set out to you from the developers that have been able to use this and the developer labs, what feedback have you gotten from them?
Tim Cook:
Yeah. That's a great question. There is a tremendous amount of excitement around the Vision Pro and we're -- we've been very happy to share it with developers, and we have developer labs set up in different parts of the world so that they can actually get their hands on it and are working on apps and I've been fortunate enough to see a number of those. And there is some real blow away kinds of things that are coming out, and so that all looks good. To answer your question about is it similar to AirPods or Apple Watch, I would say, no. There's never been a product like the Vision Pro. And so, we're purposely bringing it out in our stores only, so we can really put a great deal of attention on the last mile of it. We'll be offering demos in the stores and it will be very different process than the -- a normal grab-and-go kind of process.
Amit Daryanani:
Perfect. Thank you.
Suhasini Chandramouli:
Thanks, Amit. We'll take the next question, please.
Operator:
Our next question is from Harsh Kumar with Piper Sandler. Please go ahead.
Harsh Kumar:
Yeah. Hey, thanks for the question and congratulations on tremendous execution in a very tough macro. Actually, Tim, the last question is a perfect segue here, given what you are doing with your Vision Pro. So lots of companies are experimenting with generative AI. I'm curious about what kind of efforts you have. I'm sure there are segues into Pro Vision that you have, but I was curious about if you can give us a glimpse on how you might be able to monetize some of these efforts of generative AI.
Tim Cook:
If you kind of zoom out and look at what we've done on AI and machine learning and how we've used it, we view AI and machine learning as fundamental technologies, and they're integral to virtually every product that we ship. And so just recently, when we shipped iOS 17, it had features like Personal Voice and Live Voicemail. AI is at the heart of these features. And then, you can go all the way to then lifesaving features on the launch end of phone like fall detection, crash detection, ECG on the watch. These would not be possible without AI. And so, we don't label them as such, if you will. We label them as to what their consumer benefit is. But at the fundamental technology behind it is AI and machine learning. In terms of generative AI, we have -- obviously, we have work going on. I'm not going to get into details about what it is, because -- as you know, we don't -- we really don't do that. But you can bet that we're investing, we're investing quite a bit, we're going to do it responsibly and it will -- you will see product advancements over time that where the -- those technologies are at the heart of them.
Harsh Kumar:
Thanks, Tim. Very clear. And for my follow-up, I had a philosophical question. So, you guys always try to provide the best experience for consumers. To that end, I think, over the last decade you in-sourced a lot of important chips in your phones, in your Macs, iPads, so on and so forth. And that was, I think, a function that ARM wasn't around in the industry from a merchant angle. But now, we see these the silicon guys, the chip guys moving to ARM architecture. So my question to you is, has the move to internal silicon been economically profitable proposition for Apple? Or is it -- or is it a strategic one, where you simply need to own this and it's vital to your products for the consumer experience or maybe there's a path back to chip vendors at some point in time?
Tim Cook:
It's really enabled us to build products that we could not build without doing it ourselves. And as you know, we like to own the primary technologies in the products that we ship and arguably, the silicon is at the heart of the primary technologies, and so, no, I don't see going back. I am happier today than I was yesterday, than I was last week that we made the transition that we've made, and I see that benefit every day of it.
Harsh Kumar:
Thanks, Tim.
Tim Cook:
Yeah.
Suhasini Chandramouli:
Thank you, Harsh. We'll take the next question, please.
Operator:
Our next question is from Wamsi Mohan from Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Wamsi Mohan:
Yes. Thank you so much. Tim, over the last decade, pretty much you've gained a lot of share in China. As you look, your -- some of the domestic players are starting to re-emerge, especially in the high-end phone space. I know you touched on China. But how would you see Apple's positioning and opportunity for continued share gains, particularly in China? And how was the linearity in China from a demand perspective? And I have a follow-up, please.
Tim Cook:
In the September quarter, we set an iPhone record -- revenue record in China and we're very proud of that and we obviously grew. The market predictions that I've seen, we've had the market contracting. And so if that's -- if those are correct, then we gained share last quarter. And so we are very proud of that, I don't know what every quarter will hold. And obviously, we just give a bit of color on the current quarter. But over the long term, I view China as an incredibly important market and I'm very optimistic about it.
Wamsi Mohan:
Okay. Thanks, Tim. And as a follow-up, you obviously had a great Services quarter and part of your Services business has these licensing relationships with research partners, where you serve a very important distribution function for them. Can you talk about how you think about these relationships and potentially some of the options maybe Apple has to mitigate some of the risks, given some of the scrutiny on with some of the research partners? Thank you so much.
Luca Maestri:
They are important relationships. And as you know, we don't get into our commercial relationships in the call. I see them as important and we make decisions that are in the best interest of our users or what we feel is in the best interest of our users. And that's kind of what we've done in the past and how we've -- how we'll run the show in the future as well.
Wamsi Mohan:
Okay. Thank you, Tim.
Suhasini Chandramouli:
Thank you, Wamsi. Can we have the next question, please.
Operator:
Our next question comes from Krish Sankar with TD Cowen. Please go ahead.
Krish Sankar:
Yeah. Hi. Thanks for taking the question. I had two of them too. First one, Luca, thanks for the color on gross margin. And when I look at it over the last four quarters, even if on a year-over-year basis revenue declined, the gross margins have improved. And I understand Services definitely helped. I'm just kind of curious, when you look at on a go forward basis, are most of the big step functions and cost reductions like the Mac Silicon conversion, et cetera, that are done or is there more room for margin expansion from here? And then, I had a follow-up.
Luca Maestri:
Well, on the product side, as you know, we -- when we launch new products, the cost structures of those products tend to be higher than the products that they replace. It happens because we are always adding new technologies, new features, and then, we worked through the cost curve over the lifecycle of the product and we tend to get benefits as time goes by. The guidance that we provided for December reflects all that and so we're starting from a better position than a year ago or than, in the past, in general. There are other factors that play a role. For example, the mix of products that we sell. Not every product has the same gross margin profile, and so our guidance, our results are reflective of that. And also, within a specific product category, a lot depends on the kind of models that we sell because they have different margin profiles. I think one of the things that we've done well over the last few years is to offer more affordability solutions to our customers in the form of instalment plans, trading options, and spend -- low-cost financing in general. And what that has accomplished is reduced the affordability threshold for our customers and therefore, they can, buy at the top of our product ranges. That has been a big factor in the reason for our margin expansion. We don't provide guidance or color past the current quarter because there's so many different variables that affect gross margins, but we obviously feel very good about the trajectory that we've had in 2023 and now, the guidance that we provide for the beginning of our fiscal '24. And we need some of these things because, obviously, their foreign exchange environment has been difficult and has been a bit of a drag for us. But net-net, we're very pleased where we are.
Krish Sankar:
Got it. Thanks for that, Luca. And then, I have a follow-up for Tim. Obviously, you're seeing amazing momentum in India. I'm just kind of curious how do you look at -- when you look at the India growth opportunity on these hardware units, how to think about ASP relative to that versus like the rest of the geographies? And is there a way to compare or contrast India, growth momentum versus China maybe a decade ago or so at the same point in the rollout of, the share gains in that geography?
Tim Cook:
Yeah. It's a great question. We had an all-time revenue record in India. We grew very strong double-digits. It's an incredibly exciting market for us and a major focus of ours. We have low share in a large market, and so it would seem there's a lot of headroom there. The ASPs, I haven't looked at them most recently, but I'm sure that they're lower than the worldwide. But that doesn't bother us at all. It just -- and in terms of the similarity, I would say, each country has its own journey. And I wouldn't want to play the comparison game. But we see an extraordinary market, a lot of people moving into the middle class, distribution is getting better, lots of positives. We put two retail stores there, as you know. They're doing better than we anticipated. It's still early going, but they're off to a good start and I couldn't be happier with how things are going at the moment.
Krish Sankar:
Thanks, Tim.
Suhasini Chandramouli:
Thank you, Krish. We'll now take our next question, please.
Operator:
Our next question is from Ben Reitzes with Melius Research. Please go ahead.
Ben Reitzes:
Hey. Thanks a lot. I appreciate the question. Tim, I appreciate all your commentary around China. It was great to kind of hear about the growth potential there, your optimism. I wanted to also ask about the supply chain and where is your priority? Do you have a priority to diversify your supply chain? How do you feel about Apple's supply chain around the world? And in particular, what do you think about further investments in the U.S. as well?
Tim Cook:
Our supply chain is truly global, and so we're investing all over the world, including in the United States, we were very focused on advanced manufacturing for the U.S. and have worked on a number of different projects in the U.S., whether that's our venture with Corning on the glass or Face ID module or semiconductors. And so all of these are our advanced manufacturing and I think exactly the kinds of things that the U.S. would be and are very, very good at. We also invested in other regions of the world and we're continually optimizing the chain. And so we -- the moment we learned something that didn't work exactly right, we are tweaking it. And so we're going to continue to do that. But at the end of day, it will still be a global supply chain.
Ben Reitzes:
Got it. Thanks.
Tim Cook:
Yeah.
Ben Reitzes:
Next one for Luca. Just really quick on the extra week dynamic. There was also last year an issue with the iPhone production, where there was the COVID lockdowns in China. Is it possible to give some color around what that -- I guess, having a normalized supply chain somewhat this year, what that benefit is this year and maybe contrast that with the 7 point hit from the extra week? Thanks a lot.
Luca Maestri:
Yeah. Thanks for the question, Ben. I mentioned during the prepared remarks the extra week is 7 points of revenue. We did have disruptions, supply disruptions last year on the phone, on the 14 Pro and Pro Max in the December quarter a year ago. And when we normalize for those two factors, and I said it during the call, we still expect to grow on iPhone. So you take into account the, the loss of the extra week, you compare it with the supply disruptions that are not going to repeat, hopefully, this year. And when you normalize for those two things, we still expect to grow on iPhone.
Ben Reitzes:
Thanks a lot everybody. Appreciate it, Luca.
Suhasini Chandramouli:
Thank you, Ben. And we'll take the last question now.
Operator:
Our last question comes from Richard Kramer with Arete Research. Please go ahead.
Richard Kramer:
Thank you very much. Tim, first off, if we look over the past two years, Apple sales are about $18 billion higher and R&D is up by about 8% -- $8 billion or over a third higher. Can you give us a sense of some of the main components or drivers behind that increase in innovation spend? Is it Apple Silicon, is it new products like Vision Pro or is it content to support new services? I think that's one of the top questions investors have. Thanks.
Tim Cook:
Sure. It's a number of things, Richard. It's the -- some things I can't talk about, its Vision Pro, it's AI and ML, it's the silicon investment that we're making, the transition with the Mac and other silicon. It's sort of all of those things and -- but I think you would find that the R&D expenditure in the aggregate looks very competitive versus others.
Luca Maestri:
And I would add, Richard, on this front. Some of the investments that we're making in R&D are also one of the drivers for the gross margin expansion. So I think it's important to think about it that way.
Richard Kramer:
That's great. And Luca, you mentioned -- or Tim mentioned college students choosing Mac. Then, you mentioned the record Services revenue. What other metrics do you think you could provide to help investors understand how Apple measures and increases customer lifetime value, especially when we see a lot of users entering the ecosystem with a relatively lower-priced products or even refurbished devices? So you're growing your ecosystem, but how do you think about growing customer lifetime value over the long run?
Luca Maestri:
Well, some of the metrics that I mentioned before, obviously, we look at the installed base of active devices. We see, we want to make sure that, the customers that we acquire remain with us and so we have good visibility over that, and we pay a lot of attention to the behavior of the installed base, both by product and by geography. And then, we look at the daily engagement in the ecosystem. So that's why we pay a lot of attention on things like transacting accounts, paid accounts, we want to see if, in fact, we are able to move our customers from a free model to a paid model over time. That's obviously very, very important for us. And so, on this, we keep track of all these things and that's -- and then what we do, because I think it's really important is that over time, we add new services and that, obviously, like, for example, the progress that we've made in payments in recent years, very, very important because we've attracted more and more people that are actually now using additional features on our devices and we are able to monetize that, right. So we take all that into account, we understand what happens when a customer joins us, when they buy a primary device versus a used device, we understand their behavior, in different markets and so on. So we have, I think, pretty good visibility. And I think the progress that we're making in Services, we did $85 billion in the last 12 months. It's -- that's a size of a Fortune 50 and significantly bigger than it was just a couple of years ago.
Richard Kramer:
Absolutely. Thanks very much.
Suhasini Chandramouli:
Thank you, Richard. A replay of today's call will be available for two weeks on Apple Podcasts, as a webcast on apple.com/investor and via telephone. The number for the telephone replay is 866-583-1035. Please enter confirmation code 0106234 followed by the pound sign. These replays will be available by approximately 5 PM Pacific Time today. Members of the press with additional questions can contact Josh Rosenstock at 408-862-1142 and financial analysts can contact me, Suhasini Chandramouli, with additional questions at 408-974-3123. Thank you again for joining us today.
Operator:
Once again, this does conclude today's conference. We do appreciate your participation.
Operator:
Good day, and welcome to the Apple Q3 Fiscal Year 2023 Earnings Conference Call. Today's call is being recorded. At this time, for opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn the call over to Saori Casey, Vice President of Finance. Please go ahead.
Saori Casey:
Thank you. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us. Speaking first today is Apple's CEO, Tim Cook; and he'll be followed by CFO, Luca Maestri. After that, we'll open the call to questions from analysts. Please note that some of the information you'll hear during our discussion today will consist of forward-looking statements, including, without limitation, those regarding revenue, gross margin, operating expenses, other income and expense, taxes, capital allocation and future business outlook, including the potential impact of macroeconomic conditions on the company's business and the results of operations. These statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results or trends to differ materially from our forecast. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in Apple's most recently filed annual report on Form 10-K and the Form 8-K filed with the SEC today, along with the associated press release. Apple assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date they are made. I'd now like to turn the call over to Tim for introductory remarks.
Tim Cook:
Thank you, Saori. Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining us. Today, Apple is reporting revenue of $81.8 billion for the June quarter, better than our expectations. We continued to see strong results in emerging markets, driven by robust sales of iPhone with June quarter total revenue records in India, Indonesia, Mexico, the Philippines, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the UAE. We set June quarter records in a number of other countries as well, including France, the Netherlands and Austria. And we set an all-time revenue record in Services driven by more than $1 billion paid subscriptions. We continued to face an uneven macroeconomic environment, including nearly 4 percentage points of foreign exchange headwinds. On a constant currency basis, we grew compared to the prior year's quarter in aggregate and in the majority of markets we track. We continue to manage deliberately and innovate relentlessly, and we are driven by the sense of possibility those efforts inspire. To that end, before I turn to the quarter in more detail, I want to take a moment to acknowledge the unprecedented innovations we were proud to announce at our Worldwide Developers Conference. In addition to extraordinary new Macs and incredible updates to our software platforms, we had the chance to introduce the world to spatial computing. We were so pleased to share the revolutionary Apple Vision Pro with the world, a bold new product unlike anything else created before. Apple Vision Pro is a marvel of engineering, built on decades of innovation only possible at Apple. It is the most advanced personal electronic device ever created, and we've been thrilled by the reaction from press, analysts, developers and content creators who've had the chance to try it. We can't wait to get it into customers' hands early next year. Now let me share more with you on our June quarter results beginning with iPhone. iPhone revenue came in at $39.7 billion for the quarter, down 2% from the year ago quarter's record performance. On a constant currency basis, iPhone revenue grew, and we had a June quarter record for switchers, reflecting the popularity of the iPhone lineup. iPhone 14 customers continue to praise the exceptional battery life and essential health and safety features, while iPhone 14 Plus users are loving the new larger screen size. And with Dynamic Island, Always-On display and the most powerful camera system ever in an iPhone, the iPhone 14 Pro lineup is our best ever. Turning to Mac. We recorded $6.8 billion in revenue, down 7% year-over-year. We are proud to have completed the transition of our entire Mac lineup to run exclusively on Apple silicon. We are also excited to have introduced the new 15-inch MacBook Air during the quarter, the world's best 15-inch laptop and one of the best Macs we've ever made. And we launched 2 new powerhouses in computing, Mac Studio with M2 Max and M2 Ultra and Mac Pro with M2 Ultra, which are the most powerful Macs we've ever made. iPad revenue was $5.8 billion for the June quarter, down 20% year-over-year, in part due to a difficult compare because of the timing of the iPad Air launch last year. Customers are loving iPad's versatility and exceptional value. There was a great deal of excitement from creatives when we brought Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro to iPad this spring. And with the back-to-school season in full swing, iPad has the power to help students tackle the toughest assignments. Across Wearables, Home and Accessories, revenue was $8.3 billion, up 2% year-over-year and in line with our expectations. Packed with features to empower users to live a healthier life, Apple Watch and Apple Watch Ultra continue to help people take the next step on their wellness journey. As I mentioned earlier, last quarter, we held our biggest and most exciting WWDC yet. We were thrilled to welcome developers from across the globe to Apple Park, both in person and virtually, and to share some stunning new announcements with the world. In addition to Apple Vision Pro and the new Macs that we introduced, we had the chance to reveal some truly remarkable new innovations to our software platforms. From exciting new features like Live Voicemail and StandBy in iOS 17, to new tools for users to work, play and personalize their experience in macOS Sonoma and iPadOS 17, to a fresh design and new workout capabilities in watchOS 10, there's so much coming later this year to empower users to get more out of their devices, and we think they're going to instantly love these new features. It was also an exciting quarter for Services where revenue reached $21.2 billion and saw a sequential acceleration to an 8% year-over-year increase, better than we expected. We set an all-time revenue record for total services and in a number of categories, including video, AppleCare, cloud and payment services. Since we introduced Apple Pay almost a decade ago, customers have been loving how easy it is to make purchases online, in apps and in stores. We're also pleased to see Apple Card build on the success of Apple Pay. Designed with our users' financial health in mind, Apple Card has become one of the most successful credit card programs in the U.S. with award-winning customer satisfaction. And this spring, we introduced a new high-yield savings account for Apple Card customers, which has become incredibly popular, with customers already making more than $10 billion in deposits. Meanwhile, Apple TV+ continues to provide a spectacular showcase of imaginative storytelling. Recently, fans welcomed new series like Hijack and Silo as well as returning fan favorites like Foundation and The Afterparty. In the few years since its launch, Apple TV+ has earned more than 1,500 nominations and 370 wins. That includes the 54 Emmy Award nominations across 13 titles that Apple TV+ received last month. It's also been an exciting time for sports on Apple TV+. Soccer legend Lionel Messi made his debut with Major League Soccer last month, and fans all over the world tuned in with MLS Season Pass. We are excited about our MLS partnership, and we're thrilled to see Messi suiting up with Inter Miami. And just in time for summer concert season, Apple Music launched new discovery features celebrating live music, including venue guides in Apple Maps and set lists from tours of major artists. These new features and others join a lineup of updates coming later this year to make Services more powerful, more useful and more fun than ever. Everything we do is in service of our customers, and retail is where we bring the best of Apple. During the quarter, we opened the Apple Store online in Vietnam, and we're excited to connect with more customers there. We also redesigned our first-ever Apple Store located in Tysons Corner, Northern Virginia, with inclusive, innovative and sustainable design enhancements. We opened a beautiful new store beneath our new London headquarters in the historic Battersea Power Station. And the performance of the stores we opened in India this spring exceeded our initial expectations. With every product we create, every feature we develop and every interaction we share with our customers, we lead with the values we stand for. We believe in creating technology that serves all of humanity, which is why accessibility has always been a core value that we embed in everything we do. On Global Accessibility Awareness Day, we unveiled some extraordinary new tools for cognitive, vision, hearing and mobile accessibility that will be available later this year, including Assistive Access, which distills apps to their most essential features, and Personal Voice, which allows users to create a synthesized voice that sounds just like them. Building technology and service of our customers also means protecting their privacy, which we believe is a fundamental human right. That's why we were pleased to announce major updates to Safari Private Browsing, Communication Safety and Lockdown Mode to further safeguard our users. And as part of our efforts to build a better world, we announced that we've more than doubled our initial commitment to our Racial Equity and Justice Initiative to more than $200 million. We will continue to do our part to support education, economic empowerment and criminal justice reform work. And while supporting efforts to advance equity and opportunity, we continue to build a culture of belonging at Apple and a workforce that reflects the communities we serve. Through our environmental work, we're making strides in our commitment to leave the world better than we found it. Last month, Apple joined with global nonprofit Acumen in a new effort to improve livelihoods in India through clean energy innovation, and we are as committed as ever to our Apple 2030 goal to be carbon neutral across our entire supply chain and the life cycle of our products. We've long held that education is the great equalizer. With that in mind, we're expanding Apple Learning Coach, a free professional learning program that teaches educators how to get more out of Apple technology in the classroom. Today, we welcome more than 1,900 educators across the U.S. to the program. By the end of the year, we'll offer Apple Learning Coach in 12 more countries. As we're connecting with teachers, we're also celebrating the graduations of students at our app developer academies around the world. From Detroit, to Naples, to Riyadh and more, we're excited to watch these talented developers embark on careers in coding and find ways to make a positive difference in their communities. Apple remains a champion of innovation, a company fueled by boundless creativity, driven by a deep sense of mission and guided by the unshakable belief that a great idea can change the world. Looking ahead, we'll continue to manage for the long term, always pushing the limits of what's possible and always putting the customer at the center of everything we do. With that, I'll turn it over to Luca.
Luca Maestri:
Thank you, Tim, and good afternoon, everyone. Revenue for the June quarter was $81.8 billion, down 1% from last year and better than our expectations despite nearly 4 percentage points of negative impact from foreign exchange. On a constant currency basis, our revenue grew year-over-year in total and in the majority of the markets we track. We set June quarter records in both Europe and Greater China and continue to see strong performance across our emerging markets driven by iPhone. Products revenue was $60.6 billion, down 4% from last year, as we faced FX headwinds and an uneven macroeconomic environment. However, our installed base reached an all-time high across all geographic segments, driven by a June quarter record for iPhone switchers and high new-to rates in Mac, iPad and Watch, coupled with very high levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty. Our Services revenue set an all-time record of $21.2 billion, up 8% year-over-year and grew double digits in constant currency. Our performance was strong around the world as we reach all-time Services revenue records in Americas and Europe and June quarter records in Greater China and rest of Asia Pacific. Company gross margin was 44.5%, a record level for the June quarter and up 20 basis points sequentially, driven by cost savings and favorable mix shift towards Services, partially offset by a seasonal loss of leverage. Products gross margin was 35.4%, down 130 basis points from last quarter due to seasonal loss of leverage and mix, partially offset by favorable costs. Services gross margin was 70.5%, decreasing 50 basis points sequentially. Operating expenses of $13.4 billion were below the low end of the guidance range we provided at the beginning of the quarter and decelerated from the March quarter. We continue to take a deliberate approach in managing our spend with strong focus on innovation and new product development. The results of these actions delivered net income of $19.9 billion, diluted earnings per share of $1.26, up 5% versus last year, and very strong operating cash flow of $26.4 billion. Let me now provide more detail for each of our revenue categories. iPhone revenue was $39.7 billion, down 2% year-over-year but grew on a constant currency basis. We set revenue records in several markets around the world, including an all-time record in India and June quarter records in Latin America, the Middle East and Africa, Indonesia, the Philippines, Italy, the Netherlands and the U.K. Our iPhone active installed base grew to a new all-time high, thanks to a June quarter record in switchers. This is a testament to our extremely high levels of customer satisfaction, which 451 Research recently measured at 98% for the iPhone 14 family in the U.S. Mac generated $6.8 billion in revenue, down 7% year-over-year. We continue to invest in our Mac portfolio. And this past quarter, we were pleased to complete the transition to Apple silicon for the entire lineup. This transition has driven both strong upgrade activity and a high number of new customers. In fact, almost half of Mac buyers during the quarter were new to the product. We also saw reported customer satisfaction of 96% for Mac in the U.S. iPad revenue was $5.8 billion, down 20% year-over-year and in line with our expectations. These results were driven by a difficult compare against the full quarter impact of the iPad Air launch in the prior year. At the same time, we continue to attract a large number of new customers to the iPad installed base with over half of the customers who purchased iPads during the quarter being new to the product. And the latest reports from 451 Research indicate customer satisfaction of 96% in the U.S. Wearables, Home and Accessories revenue was $8.3 billion, up 2% year-over-year, with a June quarter record in Greater China and strong performance in several emerging markets. We continue to see Apple Watch expand its reach with about 2/3 of customers purchasing an Apple Watch during the quarter being new to the product. And this is combined with very high levels of customer satisfaction, which was recently reported at 98% in the United States. Moving on to Services. We reached a new all-time revenue record of $21.2 billion with year-over-year growth accelerating sequentially to 8% and up double digits in constant currency. In addition to the all-time records Tim mentioned earlier, we also set June quarter records for advertising, App Store and Music. We are very pleased with our performance in Services, which is a direct reflection of our ecosystem's strength. First, our installed base of over 2 billion active devices continues to grow at a nice pace and establishes a solid foundation for the future expansion of our ecosystem. Second, we see increased customer engagement with our services. Both our transacting accounts and paid accounts grew double digits year-over-year, each reaching a new all-time high. Third, our paid subscriptions showed strong growth. This past quarter, we reached an important milestone and passed 1 billion paid subscriptions across the services on our platform, up 150 million during the last 12 months and nearly double the number of paid subscriptions we had only 3 years ago. And finally, we continue to improve the breadth and the quality of our current services. From 20 new games on Apple Arcade, to brand-new content on Apple TV+, to the launch of our high-yield savings account with Apple Card, our customers are loving these enhanced offerings. Turning to the enterprise market. Our customers are leveraging Apple products every day to help improve productivity and attract talent. Blackstone, a global investment management firm, is expanding its Apple footprint from their corporate iPhone fleet to now offering the MacBook Air powered by M2 to all of their corporate employees and portfolio companies. Gilead, a leading biopharmaceutical company, has deployed thousands of iPads globally to their sales team. Over the last 6 months, they have also doubled their Mac user base by making MacBook Air available to more employees with a focus on user experience and strong security. Let me now turn to our cash position and capital return program. We ended the quarter with over $166 billion in cash and marketable securities. We repaid $7.5 billion in maturing debt while issuing $5.2 billion of new debt and increasing commercial paper by $2 billion, leaving us with total debt of $109 billion. As a result, net cash was $57 billion at the end of the quarter. During the quarter, we returned over $24 billion to shareholders, including $3.8 billion in dividends and equivalents and $18 billion through open market repurchases of 103 million Apple shares. We continue to believe there is great value in our stock and maintain our target of reaching a net cash neutral position over time. As we move ahead into the September quarter, I'd like to review our outlook, which includes the types of forward-looking information that Saori referred to at the beginning of the call. We expect our September quarter year-over-year revenue performance to be similar to the June quarter, assuming that the macroeconomic outlook doesn't worsen from what we are projecting today for the current quarter. Foreign exchange will continue to be a headwind, and we expect a negative year-over-year revenue impact of over 2 percentage points. We expect iPhone and Services year-over-year performance to accelerate from the June quarter. Also, we expect the revenue for both Mac and iPad to decline by double digits year-over-year due to difficult compares, particularly on the Mac. For both products, we experienced supply disruptions from factory shutdowns in the June quarter a year ago and were able to fulfill significant pent-up demand in the year ago September quarter. We expect gross margin to be between 44% and 45%. We expect OpEx to be between $13.5 billion and $13.7 billion. We expect OI&E to be around negative $250 million, excluding any potential impact from the mark-to-market of minority investments, and our tax rate to be around 16%. Finally, today, our Board of Directors has declared a cash dividend of $0.24 per share of common stock payable on August 17, 2023, to shareholders of record as of August 14, 2023. With that, let's open the call to questions.
Saori Casey:
Thank you, Luca. [Operator Instructions]. Operator, may we have the first question, please?
Operator:
[Operator Instructions]. We will go ahead and take our first question from Shannon Cross with Credit Suisse.
Shannon Cross:
Tim, you mentioned -- and actually, Luca, too, you mentioned an uneven macro environment during the quarter several times on the call. I'm wondering if you can talk on a geographic basis about some of the trends you're seeing in iPhone. I'm specifically wondering how demand is trending within...
Luca Maestri:
Sure. Shannon, I'll answer it. I didn't get the end of your question.
Operator:
I think she has dropped.
Luca Maestri:
Okay. Well, let me answer the question for the part that I could follow. So on a geographic basis, we've had great performance for iPhone in emerging markets. We set June quarter records in many of the emerging markets. We grew in total double digits. And the performance was strong across the board in emerging markets from China, where our performance improved from minus 3% to plus 8% in the June quarter and we grew double digits in constant currency, to many other areas around the world from India, where, again, we set a June quarter record with very strong performance there, Indonesia, Southeast Asia, in general, Latin America, Middle East. And so it's been really good there. We -- also, as you can see from our geographic segments, we had a slight acceleration of performance in the Americas, primarily in the United States, but we declined there because the smartphone market has been in a decline for the last couple of quarters in the United States.
Shannon Cross:
Sorry about that. I'm not sure why I cut off. In terms of gross margin, you were at the high end of the range [Technical Difficulty] and you guided to 45% at the high end, which is, I think, higher than I remember in 20 years of covering you. So how should we think about puts and takes of gross margin? And it seems like there's like a perfect storm of good things. So I just -- maybe if you can talk about how you're thinking about it more holistically.
Luca Maestri:
I think you remember correctly, Shannon, because the 44.5% for the June quarter is an all-time record for us in June. We were up 20 basis points sequentially. It was driven by cost savings and a mix shift towards Services, which obviously helps company gross margins, partially offset by the seasonal loss of leverage. We have a commodity environment that is favorable to us. Our product mix is quite strong at this point. And so with the exception of foreign exchange, which continues to be a drag, and it was a significant drag on a year-over-year basis, yes, we are in a good position right now. We are in a good position for the June quarter. And as I mentioned, we expect similar level of gross margins for the same reasons, frankly, for the September quarter.
Operator:
Our next question comes from Wamsi Mohan of Bank of America.
Wamsi Mohan:
Luca, can you just give us a little more color around the guidance? Your overall revenue performance, you called out similar. Obviously, you absorbed a higher FX impact this quarter versus your guide. And you also noted Services acceleration. So just wondering, when you think about that comment on iPhone acceleration, is that on a reported basis? Is that constant currency basis? And is there something that's changing in terms of seasonality perhaps for you that is causing not as much step-up in product revenue as typical on a sequential basis? And I have a follow-up.
Luca Maestri:
Yes. So all our comments are in reported currency, not in constant currency in relation to the outlook. And we said acceleration sequentially for iPhone and for Services. But we're also pointing out -- and this is where I think, Wamsi, you're referring to some seasonality issues. We also said that for Mac and iPad, we expect to decline double digits. And the reason for that is that we have a very difficult compare versus last year. You remember that a year ago, in the June quarter, we had factory shutdowns for both Mac and iPad. And so we were able to fill the pent-up demand from those shutdowns during the September quarter. So an unusual level of activity that we had a year ago. And so now, obviously, the compare is difficult. So we expect both iPad and Mac to be down double digits, which offset the acceleration that I mentioned for iPhone and Services.
Wamsi Mohan:
Okay. And Tim, I was wondering if you could update us on what percent of iPhones are sold on some type of installment basis now versus full upfront payment on a global basis. And maybe some thoughts on if you expect similar promotional activity from carriers, especially in the U.S., that seem to be grappling with a lot of cash flow issues this particular year.
Luca Maestri:
Wamsi, I'll take it. We've done a really good job over the last few years with affordability programs around the world directly in our direct channel and with our partners around the world. The majority of iPhones, at this point, are sold using some kind of a program, trade-ins, installments, some kind of financing. And that percentage, which again, it's well over 50%, is very similar across developed and emerging markets. We want to do more of that because we think it really helps reduce the affordability threshold for our products. And we think it is also one of the reasons why our product mix has been very strong during the last couple of cycles. So we will continue to push on that front.
Operator:
Our next question is from David Vogt with UBS.
David Vogt:
I just wanted to follow up on 2 points that both you, Tim, and Luca made about growth and maybe commodities. So just to be clear, I know you're talking about an acceleration in iPhone, but the comp is about 2 points easier from FX. So I just want to understand, is that on a like-for-like basis, excluding the currency improvement of about 2 points from the June quarter to the September quarter? And from a commodity perspective, I know last quarter, you talked about buying a lot of inventory at favorable prices, which was an incredibly smart strategy. Where do you sit today? And what's sort of the timing or the duration of that commodity sort of backlog that you have as we think about next quarter and the subsequent quarters? How far does that get you out into the future from this favorable cost dynamic?
Luca Maestri:
Let me start again. I just want to be clear about the guidance, the outlook guidance that we provided. We're referring entirely to reported numbers. So they take into account the fact that we have a slight improvement in foreign exchange. So when I talk about similar performance, I refer to reported performance in the June quarter and then the reported performance in the September quarter. And again, we expect, on a reported basis, our iPhone performance to accelerate, our Services performance to accelerate, and iPad and Mac to decline double digits. On the commodity front, as I mentioned, the environment is favorable. We always make sure that we take advantage of the opportunities that are available in the market, and we will continue to do that going forward.
David Vogt:
Luca, any sense of how long that gives you a run rate today based on what you currently have? Can you give us a sense for at least the short-term tailwind?
Luca Maestri:
I don't want to speculate past the September quarter because that's the horizon where we provide guidance. And I've said that the guidance for September is 44% to 45%, which you know is historically very high. And so obviously, that reflects a favorable environment for us.
Operator:
Our next question is from Erik Woodring with Morgan Stanley.
Erik Woodring:
I have 2 as well. Maybe if we just start kind of big picture, Tim or Luca. I was wondering if you could just kind of share some incremental color on how you think the consumer is behaving today versus 90 days ago and maybe how that differs by region. Meaning, are there any signs that consumer is incrementally more willing to spend on things like consumer electronics? Or is there still relative caution in the market? Are there any regions where you're seeing more strength in the consumer? And how sustainable do you think some of that strength or weakness could be based on some of the KPIs you track? And then I have a follow-up.
Tim Cook:
Yes. David, it's Tim. If you sort of step around the world, we did exceptionally well in emerging markets last quarter and even better on a constant currency basis. And so emerging markets were -- was a strength. If you look at China, in China, we went from a negative 3% in Q2 to a plus 8% in Q3. And so in China, we had an acceleration. If you look at the U.S., which is in the -- obviously in the Americas segment, it is the vast majority of what's in there, there was also a slight acceleration sequentially, although the Americas is still declining somewhat year-over-year, as you can see on the data sheet. The primary reason for that is that it's a challenging smartphone market in the U.S. currently. And then in Europe, Europe saw a record quarter and -- for the June quarter, a record. And so some really good signs in most places in the world.
Erik Woodring:
Awesome. And then maybe, Luca, a question for you. I think it's been about 3 quarters now where we've seen OpEx either grow below historical seasonality or come in below your expectations. I think this is the first time we've seen R&D grow less than 10% year-over-year since fiscal 2Q 2007. So can you maybe just talk about some of the cost actions you're taking? And as you look forward, what are the indicators that you're really evaluating that would give you greater confidence in perhaps returning back to a more seasonal cadence of OpEx spending? Or is this just a new normal that we should be expecting? That's it for me.
Luca Maestri:
Obviously, we look at the environment, and we know that this has been an uncertain period for the last few quarters. And so we decided to be deliberate in what we do in terms of controlling our spend, and there's many areas across the company that we're working on and we've been quite effective at slowing down the spend. We slowed down also the hiring within the company in several areas. And we're very pleased with our ability to decelerate some of the expense growth taking into account the overall macro situation. We will continue to manage deliberately. You can see that we continue to grow our R&D costs faster than the rest of the company. SG&A is actually growing at a much slower pace because obviously, our focus continues to be in innovation and product development, and we'll continue to do that.
Operator:
Our next question is from Michael Ng with Goldman Sachs.
Michael Ng:
I just have 2 questions as well. First, it was encouraging to see the Services outperformance in the quarter, up double digits on an FX-neutral basis, and more Services acceleration next quarter on a reported basis. I was just wondering if you could just talk a little bit more about key underlying drivers for the confidence in the Services acceleration next quarter, understanding that FX a little bit. But anything to call out as it relates to things in Apple Search Ads that's helping. You're obviously making a lot of investments in Apple TV+ between MLS and the Canal+ deal. So any thoughts there would be great.
Luca Maestri:
Yes, Michael, you're correct. I mean clearly, we've seen an improvement in the June quarter, and we expect further improvement in the September quarter. In June, the performance was across the board. Tim and I mentioned we set records really across the board. We had all-time records in cloud, in video, in AppleCare, in payments and June quarter records in App Store, advertising and Music. So we saw improvement in all our Services categories. We think the situation will continue to improve as we go through September. And that's very positive because not only good for the financial results, but obviously, it shows a high level of engagement of our customers in the ecosystem, which is very important for us. And it's really the sum of all the things that I mentioned in my prepared remarks. It goes from the fact that our installed base continues to grow, so we've got a larger pool of customers, to the fact that our customers are more engaged as we have more transacting accounts and paid accounts on the ecosystem. And the subscriptions business is very healthy with growth of 150 million paid subscriptions just in the last 12 months. It's almost double to what we had 3 years ago. And of course, we are providing more and more content to our users. And so the combination of all these things gives us good confidence for September.
Michael Ng:
Great. And just as a related follow-up, it's about the hardware installed base and Services ARPU. I was curious when you talked about the Services strength, you talked about the 2 billion-plus installed base. When you think about the opportunity to increase the Services ARPU, do you really think about it internally on a per-active-iPhone user basis or on a per-device basis? Said differently, I'm just curious where you think about -- whether you think there's an incremental opportunity for those users that have multiple devices. Do you really see a big Services ARPU uplift in that respect?
Luca Maestri:
Well, we know that customers that own more than one device are typically more engaged in our ecosystem. And so obviously, they tend to also spend more on the Services front. I would say the biggest opportunity is that we know that there's a lot of customers that we have that are very familiar with our ecosystem. They are engaged in the ecosystem. But still today, they're using only the portion of the ecosystem that is free. And so we think that by offering better content and more content over time, we're going to be able to attract more of them as paid customers.
Operator:
Our next question is from Amit Daryanani with Evercore.
Amit Daryanani:
I have 2 as well. I guess, Luca, maybe if you can talk about Wearables a bit. The growth over there, I think, in constant currency was fairly impressive at plus 6%. Can you just touch on maybe what's driving that? And then how do we think about the Wearables segment heading into the September quarter? I know you talked about a bunch of other ones, but how do we think about Wearables into September as well?
Luca Maestri:
Sorry, Amit, I didn't get the -- what are you referring to?
Amit Daryanani:
Yes. Sorry. I was hoping you could talk a bit about the Wearables segment because the growth over there was fairly impressive. And then how do you think about it into September as well?
Luca Maestri:
Yes. On the Wearables front, we had really good performance in Greater China. And that's, again, very important for us. It was a June quarter record for Greater China. Very important for us because, again, it shows that the engagement with the ecosystem in a market that is so important for us like China continues to grow. It means that there's more and more customers that are owning more than the iPhone. Also, we continue to grow the installed base of the category very quickly because, as I mentioned, 2/3 of every buyer of Apple Watch during the course of the June quarter was new to the product. And so that is all additive to the installed base. So it's just great to see that the AirPods continue to be a great success in the marketplace for us. And so things are moving in the right direction there. It's become a very large business for us in Wearables, Home and Accessories. The last 12 months, we've done $40 billion of business, which is nearly the size of a Fortune 100 company. So it's become very important, and it's allowed us to diversify both our revenues and our earnings.
Amit Daryanani:
That's really helpful. And then if I could just follow up, the Europe growth, the growth in Europe at up 5% is totally notable as well. I think you have a few emerging markets that you put in Europe as well. But I would love to understand what's happening in Europe and if there's a way to think about sort of Western Europe or developed world versus emerging markets over there.
Luca Maestri:
Yes. It's been very good, primarily on the emerging market side of Europe. We include India and the Middle East and Central and Eastern Europe into the Europe segment. But as we mentioned at the beginning of the call, we had a number of markets that did very well, like France, like Italy, the Netherlands, Austria. So it was a good quarter for Europe.
Operator:
Our next question is from Harsh Kumar with Piper Sandler.
Harsh Kumar:
I have one for Luca and then later on one for Tim. So Luca, for some time now, for many quarters, you've had a currency headwind or foreign exchange currency headwind. It's conceivable that as rates start to come down, hopefully next year that the dollar weakens. Could you take us through the mechanism of how that will work on your revenues and for your costs?
Luca Maestri:
So we tend -- we try to hedge our foreign exchange exposures because we think it's the right approach for the company in terms of minimizing the volatility that necessarily happens from the movements of currencies. We cannot effectively hedge every single exposure around the world because in some cases, it is not possible. In other cases, it is prohibitively expensive. But we tend to cover all the major currency payers that we have. About 60% of our business is outside the United States. So it's a very, very large and, I would say, very effective hedging program. And so we set up these hedges, and they tend to roll over very regularly. And then we replace them with new hedges at the new spot rate. So the impact that we're going to have on revenue and cost will depend on where the spot rates are at different points in time. And therefore, because of the way the program works, tends to be a bit of a lag in both directions as the foreign exchange moves over time.
Harsh Kumar:
Understood. Very helpful. And for Tim, Tim, historically, for the last many years, carriers in at least the U.S., which I think is your largest market for iPhone, have had programs to help folks upgrade, whether they give a cash rebate or you bring in your old phone, something like that. I was curious, as you get into your peak December quarter, if you're aware of these programs are in place. And the reason why I'm asking is I think earlier, you mentioned that more than 50% of your phones are sold through some kind of program. I assume the number is even higher in the U.S.
Tim Cook:
I don't want to get into revealing specifics in the different carriers. But generally speaking, I would think that it would be quite easy to find a promotion on a phone, provided you're hooking up to a service and either switching services, carriers or upgrading your phone at the same carrier. I think both of those cases today that you can find promotions out there, and I would expect that you'd be able to do that in the December time frame as well.
Operator:
Our next question is from Aaron Rakers with Wells Fargo.
Aaron Rakers:
I have two as well. So first of all, I just want to kind of ask Tim. Strategically, as we think about the Services growth and kind of the content expansion behind that, I'm curious if you could help us maybe appreciate what you've seen from a sporting perspective in terms of the engagement with MLS, the engagement with Major League Baseball, and how strategically you're thinking about expansion in sports as a key driver of Services growth going forward.
Tim Cook:
We're focused on original content, as you know, with TV+. And so we're all about giving great storytellers the venue to tell great stories and hopefully get us all to think a little deeper. And sport is a part of that because sport is the ultimate original story. And for MLS, we're -- we could not be happier with how the partnership is going. It's clearly in the early days, but we are beating our expectation in terms of subscribers, and the fact that Messi went to Inter Miami helped us out there a bit. And so we're very excited about it.
Aaron Rakers:
Yes. And as a quick follow-up, I'm just curious, an update on -- you mentioned in your prepared remarks the continued growth that you've seen in India. I'm curious how we think about that market opportunity looking forward. Is there anything that you see evolving that could accelerate the opportunity for iPhone in that large mobile market?
Tim Cook:
We did hit a June quarter revenue record in India, and we grew strong double digits. We also opened our first 2 retail stores during the quarter. And it's -- of course, it's early going currently, but they're currently beating our expectation in terms of how they're doing. We continue to work on building out the channel and putting more investment in our direct-to-consumer offers as well. And so I think if you look at it, it's the second largest smartphone market in the world. And it's -- so we ought to be doing really well there. And where I'm really pleased with our growth there, we're still -- we still have a very, very modest and low share in the smartphone market. And so I think that it's a huge opportunity for us. And we're putting the -- all of our energies in making that occur.
Operator:
Our next question comes from Sidney Ho with Deutsche Bank.
Sidney Ho:
Your -- I just wanted to ask about the AI side of things. Your strategy on AI seems quite different than many of your peers, at least you don't talk too much about that, how much you invest in it. Maybe you can elaborate a little bit on that. But related to that, how do you see your investment in this area turning into financial performance in the future? Is it mainly through faster upgrade cycle, maybe higher ASP? Or are you thinking about maybe additional services that you can capitalize on that? And then I have a follow-up.
Tim Cook:
If you take a step back, we view AI and machine learning as core fundamental technologies that are integral to virtually every product that we build. And so if you think about WWDC in June, we announced some features that will be coming in iOS 17 this fall, like Personal Voice and Live Voicemail. Previously, we had announced lifesaving features like fall detection and crash detection and ECG. None of these features that I just mentioned and many, many more would be possible without AI and machine learning. And so it's absolutely critical to us. And of course, we've been doing research across a wide range of AI technologies, including generative AI for years. We're going to continue investing and innovating and responsibly advancing our products with these technologies with the goal of enriching people's lives. And so that's what it's all about for us. And as you know, we tend to announce things as they come to market, and that's our MO, and I'd like to stick to that.
Sidney Ho:
Okay. That's fair. Maybe as a follow-up is related to -- you talked about WWDC, where you actually introduced Vision Pro there. Clearly, a very big announcement there. How should we think about the revenue ramp related to the Vision Pro? Is there any catalysts that we should be thinking about that will drive an inflection of that product?
Tim Cook:
Yes. There's enormous excitement around the Vision Pro. We're excited internally. Everybody that's been through the demos are blown away, whether you're talking about press or analysts or developers. We are now shipping units to the developer community for them to begin working on their apps. And we're looking forward to shipping early next year. And so we could not be more excited with that. I'm using the product daily. And so we're not going to forecast revenues and so forth on the call today, but we're very excited about it.
Operator:
We will take our last question from Krish Sankar with TD Cowen.
Krish Sankar:
I have two of them as well. Number one, on iPhone, Tim, you mentioned about the record number of switchers in the quarter. I'm kind of curious how to think about, given the weak macro and consumer spending, how is the replacement cycle for iPhone? Is it similar, longer, shorter versus prior years? And can you talk a little bit about the demand linearity of iPhone during the June quarter? And then I have a follow-up.
Tim Cook:
Switchers were a very key part of our iPhone results for the quarter. We did set a record. We set a record in Greater China, in particular, and it was at the heart of our results there. And we continue to try to convince more and more people to switch because of our -- the experience and the ecosystem and -- that we can offer them. And so I think switching is a huge opportunity for us. In terms of the upgrade cycle and so forth, it's very difficult to estimate real time what is going on with the upgrade cycle. I would say, if you think about the iPhone results year-over-year, you have to think about the SE announcement in the year ago quarter, the iPhone SE announcement in the year ago quarter. And so that provides a bit of a headwind on the comp. But as Luca said, as he talked about how we're viewing Q4, the September quarter, we see iPhone accelerating in Q4.
Krish Sankar:
Got it. Very helpful, Tim. And then my final question is on your retail stores, you obviously have a very large retail footprint and many of your stores seem to have been open for over a year now. How is the foot traffic there? And how do you think about sales or the retail trends in the June quarter and implications for the back half of this year on a seasonality basis?
Tim Cook:
I'm sorry, are you talking about our retail stores?
Krish Sankar:
Yes, yes, your retail stores.
Tim Cook:
Yes. The -- if you look at retail, it's a key part of our go-to-market approach, and it will be so key and such a competitive advantage with Vision Pro. It will give us the opportunity to launch a new product and demo to many people in the stores. And so it has many advantages in it. And we continue to roll out more stores. As you know, we just opened 2 in India last quarter. We're -- there's still a lot of countries out there that don't have Apple stores that we would like to go into. And so we continue to see it as a key part of how we go to market and love the experience that we can provide customers there.
Saori Casey:
A replay of today's call will be available for two weeks on Apple Podcasts, at a webcast of apple.com/investor and via telephone. The number for the telephone replay is 866-583-1035. Please enter the confirmation code 2553017, followed by the pound sign. These replays will be available by approximately 5 p.m. Pacific Time today. Members of the press with additional questions can contact Josh Rosenstock at 408-862-1142. Financial analysts can contact me, Saori Casey, with additional questions at 408-974-3123 while Suhasini Chandramouli is on her maternity leave. Thank you again for joining us.
Operator:
Once again, this does conclude today's conference. We do appreciate your participation.
Operator:
Good day, and welcome to the Apple’s Q2 Fiscal Year 2023 Earnings Conference Call. Today's call is being recorded. At this time, for opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn the call over to Suhasini Chandramouli, Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Suhasini Chandramouli :
Thank you. Good afternoon and thank you for joining us. Speaking first today is Apple's CEO, Tim Cook; and he'll be followed by CFO, Luca Maestri. After that, we'll open the call to questions from analysts. Please note that some of the information you'll hear during our discussion today will consist of forward-looking statements, including, without limitation, those regarding revenue, gross margin, operating expense, other income and expense, taxes, capital allocation, and future business outlook, including the potential impact of macroeconomic conditions on the company's business and results of operations. These statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results or trends to differ materially from our forecast. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in Apple's most recently filed annual report on Form 10-K and the Form 8-K filed with the SEC today, along with the associated press release. Apple assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements or information, which speak as of their respective dates. I'd now like to turn the call over to Tim for introductory remarks.
Tim Cook:
Thank you, Suhasini. Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining us. Today, we're reporting revenue of $94.8 billion for the March quarter, which was better than our expectations. We set an all-time record for Services and a March quarter record for iPhone. We were particularly pleased with the performance we saw in emerging markets and achieved all-time records in Mexico, Indonesia, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the UAE, as well as a number of March quarter records, including in Brazil, Malaysia and India. This result is a testament, first and foremost to our teams around the world who are engaged every day in the work of bringing new innovations to life. It speaks to the incredible power of Apple products and services to enrich people's lives in indispensable ways. And whether it's in the design lab in Cupertino, or in one of the brand new retail stores in India, I am constantly inspired by the way our people come together to make a real difference in the world. During the March quarter, we continued to face foreign exchange headwinds, which had an impact of more than 500 basis points, as well as ongoing challenges related to the macroeconomic environment. Revenue was down 3% year-over-year as a result, while on a constant currency basis, we grew in total and in the vast majority of the markets we tried. Despite these challenges, we continue to manage for the long term and to push the limits of what's possible, always on behalf of the customers who depend on our products whether it's students exploring new frontiers, developers dreaming up their next big idea, or artists taking their creativity to a whole new level. Let me share how these results showed up across our lineup of products and services. Let's start with iPhone, which set a new March quarter record with revenue of $51.3 billion. The iPhone 14 and 14 plus continue to delight users with their long lasting battery and advanced camera. And our pro users continue to rave about the most powerful camera system ever in an iPhone. This March, we were excited to expand emergency SOS via satellite to six new countries, bringing this important safety feature to even more users. We now offer this vital service in 12 countries, and I'm grateful for every note I've received from around the world about the life saving impact of our safety features. Now let's turn to Mac, which recorded $7.2 billion in revenue for the March quarter in line with our expectations. As we noted during our last call, Mac faced a very difficult compare because of the incredibly successful rollout of our M1 chip throughout the Mac lineup last year. And like our other product lines, Mac is facing some macroeconomic and foreign exchange headwinds as well. That said, the advancements we've made in power efficient performance continue to amaze our users. Our M2 Mac Mini customers are raving about the pro level powerhouse packed into an ultra-compact design, and users are marveling at the power and speed at the heart of every M2 powered MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, which allowed them to sustain even the most demanding workloads. iPad revenue was $6.7 billion, which was also in line with our expectations. Similar to Mac, iPad revenue performance was impacted by macroeconomic challenges, foreign exchange headwinds, and a difficult compare with last year when we launched the M1 powered iPad Air. iPad's versatility continues to be its greatest strength as we're helping students learn on the same family of devices artists use to create their next masterpiece. Across wearables, home and accessories, revenue was $8.8 billion. With its exceptional range of game changing health and safety features, Apple Watch becomes more and more indispensable every day. Apple Watch Ultra is attracting adventures, athletes and everyday users with its breakthrough features built for endurance and exploration. And with summer travel season soon heating up, there's no better companion in the air or on the road than AirPods, the best and most popular headphones in the world. Meanwhile, Services set an all-time record with $20.9 billion in revenue for the March quarter. We achieved all time revenue records across App Store, Apple Music, iCloud and payment services. And now, with more than 975 million paid subscriptions, we're reaching even more people with our lineup of services. Apple TV Plus continues to draw praise from customers and reviewers alike. During the past quarter, fans tuned in to incredible new series like Shrinking and The Big Door Prize and got to welcome Ted Lasso back into their homes for a third season. Movies like Tetris are captivating viewers with many more to come, including Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon later this year. Three years since its launch, Apple TV Plus programming has been celebrated across the globe, with over 1,450 nominations and more than 350 wins. Recently, we were thrilled to cheer on The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, which won an Academy Award for best Animated Short Film. The first season of our historic tenure partnership with Major League Soccer is well underway with MLS season pass, we've created the ultimate destination for soccer fans, offering subscribers the ability to watch every match with no blackouts. And with baseball season in full swing, Apple TV Plus subscribers can watch their favorite teams with the return of Friday night baseball. This quarter, we launched Apple Music Classical, a standalone app that gives something special to classical music lovers. Apple Music Classical packs the largest library of classical music on Earth into a thoughtful and intuitive design that strikes all the right notes. Whether you're listening with AirPods or HomePod, the premium sound experience of Apple Music Classical will leave you with a feeling of being front row at the symphony just behind the conductor. In March, we also launched Apple Pay Later designed with users privacy and financial health in mind. Apple Pay Later allows users to split purchases into multiple payments with no interest or fees. And last month, we introduced Apple Card Savings Accounts to give users even more value out of their daily cash Apple Card Benefit. At Apple, our customers are at the center of everything we do. Nowhere is that more evident than retail, where our teams are dedicated to sharing the best of Apple with our customers. And we're constantly innovating to deliver exceptional experiences and meet our customers where they are. In the US, we launch Shop with a specialist over video, a new way for customers to learn about iPhone and find the one that's just right for them. And as I noted earlier, in a milestone for Apple, we just opened our first two Apple stores in India, in Mumbai and Delhi. I was there to see it for myself, and I couldn't have been more delighted by the excitement and enthusiasm of the customers, developers, creators and team members I got to spend time with. I've had the chance to connect with customers and teams all around the world in recent months, so many people shared with me that they were fans of Apple, not just because of the innovations we create, but because of the values that guide us, and that means a great deal to us. We're constantly striving to make a positive difference in people's lives and be a force for progress. We're investing in education to give students the skills they need to shape the future. We're helping to create pathways of opportunity for communities of color through our Racial Equity and justice initiative. And every day we're building an even more inclusive and diverse Apple rooted in our culture of belonging. To better understand how our work intersects with our values, look no further than what we're doing for the environment. We just celebrated Earth Day in April, and during that month, Apple announced that its global manufacturing partners now support over 13 gigawatts of renewable energy, a nearly 30% increase in just the last year. This translates to 17.4 million metric tons of avoided carbon emissions, the equivalent of removing nearly 3.8 million cars from the road. We're all investing up to an additional $200 million in our Restore Fund, which is designed to support innovative, scalable, nature based carbon removal projects, with the goal of removing 1 million metric tons of carbon every year. These are just the latest steps on our journey toward our 2030 goal to be carbon neutral across our supply chain and lifecycle of our devices. At the same time, we're advancing renewable energy across our supply chain, we're also sourcing more recycled materials in our products. Last month, we announced our plans to have all Apple design batteries include 100% certified recycled cobalt by 2025, and we remain committed to one day using only recycled and renewable materials in our products. We have a deep sense of mission here at Apple. We believe in the power of innovation to build a better world. We are determined to do our best work on behalf of our customers and to give them the tools that can enrich lives. So we will manage for the long term, just as we always have, with our eyes to the horizon, with limitless creativity, and with a deep belief that we can achieve anything we put our minds to. With that, I'll turn it over to Luca.
Luca Maestri:
Thank you, Tim, and good afternoon, everyone. Revenue for the March quarter was $94.8 billion, down 3% from last year and better than our expectations. Foreign exchange had a negative impact of over five percentage points on our results, in line with what we had expected. On a constant currency basis, our revenue grew year-over-year in total and in the majority of the markets we track. In addition to the records in emerging markets that Tim mentioned, we also set March quarter records in Australia, Canada, Spain and Switzerland, among others. Products revenue was $73.9 billion, down 5% from last year, due to challenging compares on Mac and iPad. iPhone, however, reached a March quarter revenue record thanks to very strong performance in emerging markets from South Asia and India to Latin America and the Middle East. During the quarter, our installed base of active devices continued to grow at a nice pace thanks to extremely high levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty, and reached an all-time high for all major product categories and geographic segments. Our Services set an all-time revenue record of $20.9 billion, up 5% year-over-year, on top of growing 17% in the March quarter a year ago. We reached an all-time services revenue record in Greater China and March quarter records in Americas, Europe and Rest of Asia Pacific. Company gross margin was 44.3%, up 130 basis points from last quarter, driven by cost savings and favorable mix shift towards services partially offset by leverage. Products gross margin was 36.7%, decreasing 30 basis points sequentially due to seasonal loss of leverage and mix, partially offset by favorable costs. Services gross margin was 71%, up 20 basis points sequentially. Operating expenses of $13.7 billion were at the low end of the guidance range we provided at the beginning of the quarter and continued to decelerate from the December quarter. We are closely managing our spend, but remain focused on long term growth with continued investment in innovation and product development. Net income was $24.2 billion. Diluted earnings per share were a $1.52, unchanged versus last year, and we generated very strong operating cash flow of $28.6 billion. Let me now provide more detail for each of our revenue categories. iPhone revenue set a March quarter record of $51.3 billion, up 2% year-over-year despite significant foreign exchange headwinds and a challenging macroeconomic environment. We set March quarter records in several developed and emerging markets with India, Indonesia, Turkey and the UAE doubling on a year-over-year basis. Our active installed base of iPhone grew to a new all-time high and was up in all our geographic segments. We are very pleased by the results of the latest survey of US Consumers from 451 Research, which measured customer satisfaction at 99% for the iPhone 14 family. Mac revenue was $7.2 billion, down 31% year-over-year and in line with our expectations. These results were driven by the challenging macroeconomic environment coupled with a difficult compare against last year's launch of the completely reimagined M1 MacBook Pros. Despite this, the installed base of active Macs reached an all-time high across all geographic segments and we continue to see strong upgraded activity to Apple silicon. Also, the latest survey of US Consumers from 451 Research reported customer satisfaction at 96% for Mac. iPad generated $6.7 billion in revenue, down 13% year-over-year and in line with our expectations. This performance was due to two key factors, a tough compare against the launch of iPad Air powered by the M1 chip in the year ago quarter and headwinds from the macroeconomic environment. The iPad installed base reached a new all-time high in all geographic segments thanks to exceptional customer loyalty and a high number of new customers. In fact, over half of the customers who purchased iPads during the quarter were new to the product. Wearables, home and accessories revenue was $8.8 billion, down 1% year-over-year as the category experienced the impact from the macroeconomic environment. However, we did set March quarter records both in the US and in Greater China. We continue to see strength in our Watch installed base, which set a new all-time record, thanks to very high customer loyalty and new two rates, nearly two thirds of customers purchasing an Apple Watch during the quarter were new to the product. Moving to Services, we reached a new all-time revenue record of $20.9 billion. And in addition to the all-time records Tim mentioned earlier, we set March quarter records for advertising Apple Care and Video. Despite these records, as we saw in recent quarters, certain services offerings such as digital advertising and mobile gaming continue to be affected by the current macroeconomic environment. Stepping back, however, the continued growth in Services is the reflection of our ecosystem strength and the positive momentum we are seeing across several key metrics. First, our growing installed base of over 2 billion active devices represents a great foundation for future expansion of our ecosystem. We continue to grow across every major product category and geographic segment, thanks to very high levels of customer loyalty and satisfaction. Second, we saw increased customer engagement with our services during the quarter. Both our transacting accounts and paid accounts grew double digits year-over-year, each setting a new all-time record. Third, paid subscriptions showed strong growth. We now have more than $975 million paid subscriptions across the Services on our platform, up 150 million during the last 12 months and nearly double the number of paid subscriptions we had only three years ago. And finally, we continue to improve the breadth and the quality of our current services offerings from new content on Apple TV Plus to great new features available in Apple Pay and Apple Music, which we believe our customers will love. Turning to the enterprise market, we see business customers continuing to invest in the Apple platform to drive higher employee productivity and satisfaction. In Brazil, Boticario Group, the world's largest cosmetics franchiser, originally starting with iPhone, 12 employees manage operations across a network of retail stores, franchisees and resellers. As it continues to digitize its business, Boticario has chosen to move all software development in house and adopted Mac as the standard device for all of their developer teams across the world. In small business, we see an increasing number of customers relying on Apple hardware, software and services to power their businesses forward, from accepting payments on iPhone, to tracking inventory on Mac or iPad, to managing employee devices with Apple Business Essentials. As we celebrate National Small Business week here in the US, we are proud to continue supporting the small business community. Let me now turn to our cash position and capital return program. We ended the quarter with over $166 billion in cash and marketable securities. We repaid $2.3 billion in maturing debt and increased commercial paper by about $300 million, leaving us with total debt of $110 billion. As a result, net cash was $57 billion at the end of the quarter. During the March quarter, we returned over $23 billion to shareholders, including $3.7 billion in dividends and equivalents and $19.1 billion through open market repurchases of $129 million Apple shares. Given the continued confidence we have in our business now and into the future, today our Board has authorized an additional $90 billion for share repurchases as we maintain our goal of getting to net cash neutral over time. We're also raising our dividend by 4% to $0.24 a share, and we continue to plan for annual increases in the dividend going forward. As we move ahead into the June quarter, I'd like to review our outlook, which includes the types of forward looking information that Suhasini referred to at the beginning of the call. We expect our June quarter year-over-year revenue performance to be similar to the March quarter, assuming that the macroeconomic outlook does not worsen from what we are projecting today for the current quarter. Foreign exchange will continue to be a headwind and we expect a negative year-over-year impact of nearly four percentage points. For Services, we expect our June quarter year-over-year revenue growth to be similar to the March quarter, while continuing to face macroeconomic headwinds in areas such as digital advertising and mobile gaming. We expect gross margin to be between 44% and 44.5%. We expect OpEx to be between $13.6 billion and $13.8 billion. We expect OINE to be around negative $250 million excluding any potential impact from the mark-to-market of minority investments and our tax rate to be around 16%. Finally reflecting the dividend increase I mentioned earlier, today, our Board of Directors has declared a cash dividend of $0.24 per share of common stock payable on May 18, 2023, to shareholders of record as on May 15, 2023. With that, let's open the call to questions.
Operator:
[Operator Instructions] We will go ahead and take our first question from Erik Woodring of Morgan Stanley.
Erik Woodring:
Hey, good afternoon, guys. Thank you so much for taking the questions. Tim, maybe if we start with you. If we go back to the December quarter and the shutdowns, the production shutdowns around the time I think the question a lot of us were asking was how should we think about the deferral of demand versus destruction of demand? March quarter was quite strong 2% year-over-year iPhone growth. And so as we sit here in May, how have you seen that customers that weren't able to purchase during the December quarter behave? Meaning, are you seeing that they deferred purchases to March and June? Could they be deferring purchases to later and hopes of buying a new iPhone? Just how should maybe we think about the cadence of that and then I have a follow up. Thanks.
Tim Cook:
Yes. Hi, Erik. It's hard to quantify this, but we do believe we did recapture some amount of sales in the March quarter as we did see the iPhone performance accelerate relative to the December quarter. The production levels for the whole quarter were where we wanted them to be. So supply was not an issue during Q2.
Erik Woodring:
Okay, perfect. Thank you for that color. And then, Tim, maybe to follow up, it's been three or four quarters now that you've mentioned emerging markets like India and others. And I imagine, having just opened two new stores in the country, clearly an important market for you. So maybe can you just talk about why you see India as such an important market and others, how you think about monetization trends in the country and specifically what you have to do within the country to really ensure that India becomes maybe a more material mix of your business? And that's it for me. Thanks so much.
Tim Cook:
Yes, sure. Looking at the business in India, we did set a quarterly record, grew very strong, double digits year-over-year. So it was quite a good quarter for us, taking a step back, India is an incredibly exciting market. It's a major focus for us. I was just there, and the Dynamism in the market, the vibrancy is unbelievable. Over time, we've been expanding our operations there to serve more customers, and three years ago, we launched the Apple Store online, and then, as you just mentioned, we launched two stores just a few weeks ago, and they're off to a great start, one in Mumbai and one in Delhi. We've got a number of channel partners in the country as well that we're partnering with, and we're very happy with how that's going overall. Overall, I couldn't be more delighted and excited by the enthusiasm I'm seeing for the brand there. There are a lot of people coming into the middle class, and I really feel that India is at a tipping point, and it's great to be there. On other emerging markets, we had a stellar quarter in emerging markets overall, as I had mentioned, with records set in a number of different places, including Indonesia and Mexico, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, UAE, and then quarterly records in Brazil, India and Malaysia. And so it was a great quarter for emerging markets in general, despite the headwinds of the currency that Luca mentioned. And so we're putting efforts in a number of these markets and really see, particularly given our low share and the dynamics of the demographics, et cetera, a great opportunity for us in those markets.
Operator:
Our next question is from Mike Ng of Goldman Sachs.
Mike Ng:
Hey, good afternoon. Thank you very much for the question. It was encouraging to hear about the record installed base across iPhone and across all devices. It's been, I think, double digit growth over the last few years across the active devices. I was just wondering, is that a good way to think about the installed base growth going forward? And then for the iPhone installed base specifically, I was just wondering if you could provide a little bit of texture around how you think about the growth there, whether regionally or by first, smartphones versus switchers. And then I have a quick follow up.
Tim Cook:
Yes. If you look at the installed base of active devices now, overall it's more than $2 billion. As you know, we announced in January that we surpassed that. And this quarter, our Q2 rather we set new records across each of the geographic segments and each of the major product categories. And that's despite declines in current quarter sales, in particular in Mac and iPad. This is a huge asset for us, and it's a testament to the overall customer satisfaction and engagement and loyalty of our customers. And so we view this as a major asset for us. The iPhone base is well over a $1 billion active devices. We see this as upgrade rates, and these sorts of things may change quarter-to-quarter depending upon macroeconomic. But if you back up and look at the installed base, we feel great about the size of it and the rate that it's growing.
Mike Ng:
Great. Excellent. And then it was also encouraging to see the number of devices per iPhone user continue to grow. I was just wondering if you could talk about the opportunity to continue to increase that number of Apple devices per iPhone user and if you have any color around how the monetization per user may differ from those, for lack of better words, super users versus those that may not be as deep into the ecosystem. Thanks.
Tim Cook:
We try really hard to design our products in such a way that they work seamlessly together, and so whether that's the watch or the Mac, so that you can start working on one device and finish it on the other. And so there are a good deal of people out there that have multiple Apple devices, and I think this is a testament to the customer satisfaction and loyalty that we've been able to get from the incredible design that our engineering teams do on our products.
Operator:
Our next question is from Shannon Cross of Credit Suisse.
Shannon Cross:
Thank you very much. Thank you for taking my question. Tim, can you talk a bit about AI? It's obviously more than the topic of the day. It seems like the topic of the year. Just how you think about it through your products and services. I know you use it in different ways, but also if you can just give us any thoughts you have on generative AI and I don't know where you see it going, not sure what you want to say on it, but I'm really curious for your take. Thank you.
Tim Cook:
Yes, thanks for the question, Shannon. As you know, we don't comment on product roadmaps. I do think it's very important to be deliberate and thoughtful in how you approach these things. And there's a number of issues that need to be sorted, as is being talked about in a number of different places. But the potential is certainly very interesting. And we've obviously made enormous progress integrating AI and machine learning throughout our ecosystem and we weaved it into products and features for many years as you probably know. You can see that in things like fall detection and crash detection and ECG, these things are not only great features, they're saving people's lives out there. And so it's absolutely remarkable. And so we are, we view AI as huge and we'll continue weaving it in our products on a very thoughtful basis.
Shannon Cross:
Okay. Thank you. And then can you talk a bit about your shift of manufacturing and diversification of manufacturing footprint? I'm curious. Obviously, you have a very tight network in China. So how is it going to move to some of these other regions? Are you seeing any impact from a margin perspective or just any thoughts you have on what you've seen as you started to shift more and more outside of China? Whether it's growth or it's actual production? Thank you.
Tim Cook:
Our supply chain is truly global and we're investing all over the world. We're investing in the US. We're investing in a number of other countries as well. So we make products everywhere. We'll continue to invest everywhere, and we'll continue to look for ways to optimize the supply chain based on what we learn each and every day and week and so forth, to ensure that we can deliver the best products and services for our customers. If you sort of step back and look at how we've performed over the last three years on the supply chain, despite this parade of horribles, if you will, between the pandemic and the chip shortages and macroeconomic kind of factors, the supply chain has been incredibly resilient, and we feel good about what we are and what our plans are.
Operator:
Our next question is from Wamsi Mohan of Bank of America.
Wamsi Mohan:
Yes. Thank you. Tim, you had called out on December quarter earnings that Pro models were significantly constrained. Do you see a catch up on the Pro model specifically in the March quarter? And was the mix better than typical? And do you see that mix renormalizing here in the June quarter? And maybe you can comment on the channel inventory levels as well for iPhones, and I have a follow up.
Tim Cook:
Sure. It's hard to quantify Wamsi, but we do believe we did recapture some amount of sales in the March quarter, and obviously we had to set the channel at the right levels. And we're very comfortable with the channel inventory that we have on a forward basis. So we do think there were some, but it's difficult to quantify it.
Wamsi Mohan:
Okay. Thanks, Tim. And Tim, as a follow up, you launched so many services around Apple Pay most recently, you mentioned Buy Now Pay Later high yield savings account. Where do you see the expansion and the payments ecosystem over time? And do you look at the payments ecosystem as a standalone revenue opportunity? Or is it more about making the devices even more inseparable from us? Thank you.
Tim Cook:
What we're trying to do with our payments work is that sort of like we've done on the watch, where we're focused on helping people live a healthier day on our financial products. We're helping people have a better financial health and so things like the Apple Card and the fact that it has no fees, like the savings account, which has, as you mentioned, it's very attractive yield. So we're trying to help our users, but these things have to stand on their own, obviously. But we're very user focused, and so we're listening to them at what things provide them pinch points and orchestrate our roadmaps around that. Buy Now Pay Later is another one that we've just gotten out of the shoot. But on the savings account specifically, we are very pleased with the initial response on it. It's been incredible.
Operator:
Our next question is from David Vogt of UBS.
David Vogt:
Great. Thanks for taking my question. Tim, I just wanted to go back to maybe kind of dig into the restocking of inventory in the channel versus what we're hearing from a demand perspective that appears to be a little bit softer in the March quarter from some of your larger carriers. That exhibited relatively weak upgrade rates. So I just want to kind of get a sense for where you're seeing demand signals today vis-à-vis how you were thinking about it maybe a month ago or even three months ago. And is there sort of an acceleration in demand or any sort of signals that you might want to share with us at this point? And then I have a follow up.
Tim Cook:
I don't want to go into what we're seeing in Q3 other than the guidance that Luca has given. But for Q2, I think you're probably referencing primarily US carriers. And if you look at our geographic distribution of our performance, it was lower in the Americas, which is primarily predominantly the United States. And a part of that is, I believe it's macroeconomic. A part is that there was more promotional activity in the year ago quarter. And so I think that's what you're seeing there, where our results were really stellar during this quarter, was really in the emerging markets, and we couldn't be prouder of the results that we had there.
David Vogt:
Great. That's helpful. And then just quickly on Services, are you seeing anything in terms of consumers behavior other than sort of the macro that you mentioned and tough comps on digital advertising and mobile gaming? Are you seeing users of all the disparate services change and what they're using and how they're using it and time spent with an Apple Service? Now that we're technically, hopefully fully past COVID, with China almost fully reopened, I'm just trying to get a sense for how user or consumer behavior has changed over the last three to six months. Thanks.
Luca Maestri:
David, it’s Luca. As you said, of course we got the issue around the macroeconomic environment, particularly in advertising and in mobile gaming, but outside of those areas the behavior of customers continues to be pretty consistent. We are doing particularly well, obviously in some of the services that we've launched more recently, like payments where our growth rates are very strong as the adoption of Apple Pay and Apple Card and now the new services that Tim mentioned, the adoption continues to increase. Cloud is an area that continues to grow very consistently. Users want to store more photos and videos and more content on their devices and so they adopt our cloud services and in general the model in the App Store around paid subscriptions continues to grow very strongly. I mentioned we now have more than 975 million paid subscriptions on the platform and that's almost twice as much what we had only three years ago. So obviously, the growth in subscriptions is very strong.
Operator:
Our next question is from Samik Chatterjee of JPMorgan.
Samik Chatterjee:
Hi, thanks for taking my questions. I guess maybe I can follow up on David's question here on services. And in the past, pre-pandemic the growth rate there was more about sort of mid-teens. The growth rates today, where you stand, even if I back out FX impact is more about low double digit. So one of the questions that we get often from investors and want to get your thoughts on is even as the installed base growth seems to have accelerated, are these more cyclical drivers that are depressing growth at this point from returning to that level or do you see more of a rollout on the monetization that you have need to do to get back to those growth levels. and I have a follow up, please.
Luca Maestri:
Samik, that the areas where we are seeing the impact on the macroenvironment, as I mentioned, is digital advertising. As you know, obviously the macroenvironment is not helping on that front. And mobile gaming, where we've seen a bit of a slowdown, partly due to the macroenvironment, partly due to the fact that we had very elevated usage during the COVID years. But outside of those areas, we continue to see very healthy growth rates.
Samik Chatterjee:
Okay. And maybe if I can just follow up and this is more of a macro question. I don't know if Luca, you or Tim want to take this, but obviously the macro is not sort of helpful at this point. But what you're sort of implying in terms of your guide is momentum for your products remains pretty stable. You're actually guiding to a modest uptick FX for the overall business. I mean, what are you seeing in terms of customer sort of spending trends? And overall, does the consumer sort of continue to deteriorate in terms of spending patterns? And is your sort of momentum here just a function of share gains? How should we think about sort of where the consumer is versus what your products are doing independent of that?
Luca Maestri:
Part of Samik is what Tim was talking about. We're having great momentum in emerging markets, and those are markets where our share is low, gives us a great opportunity to grow over time. It also helps us with the growth of the installed base, because you can imagine that in places where our market share is low, we tend to add a lot of switchers people that are new to the Apple ecosystem. That increases the install base. And over the longer term, it obviously improves our ability to monetize on services as well.
Operator:
Our next question is from Amit Daryanani of Evercore.
Amit Daryanani:
I have to as well. I guess, first off on gross margins for the June quarter. They seem to be holding up fairly well, especially given the fact that sales are going down on a sequential basis. So, Luca, I'm wondering if you can just touch on what's driving the strength in gross margin sequentially. It's offsetting the lack of leverage, if you may. And then I also noticed that the range of your gross margin guide is 50 basis points, it's typically 100. What does that entail? What does that mean?
Luca Maestri:
So you're right. I mean we are guiding to a fairly stable level of gross margins at a very high level. We're very happy with the gross margins that we're having this cycle. For the first time in several quarters, foreign exchange, we expect foreign exchange to be flat on a sequential basis at the gross margin level. Unfortunately, it's still a headwind at the revenue level, but at gross margin level, sequentially, we expect foreign exchange not to be a factor. And so the seasonal loss of leverage that you're referring to, we expect to be offset by cost savings. And so that should give us that level of margins. As you know, you were asking about the 50 basis points. We have guided to 50 basis points of a range before as well, this year in particular, because of the 14th week during the December quarter, we're a bit late in the calendar year, right. And so we have a bit more visibility around margins for the June quarter.
Amit Daryanani:
Got it. That's helpful. And then I guess, Tim, if I just go back to the India discussion a bit, perhaps you could just contrast what you're seeing in India at today versus what you saw in China maybe a decade or so ago. Is that a reasonable ramp to think India would have, or could it be different from the lessons you've seen in China?
Tim Cook:
I think each country is different and has their own journey, so I hesitate to compare too much. But what I do see in India is a lot of people entering the middle class, and I'm hopeful that we can convince some number of them to buy an iPhone and we'll see how that works out. But right now, it's working out well.
Operator:
Our next question is from Krish Sankar of TD Cowen.
Krish Sankar:
Hi, thanks for taking my question. The first question I had is for Tim. Tim, you're primarily been a consumer centric company, but it seems like the line is blurring with the iPhone, iPad, the hardware products being used for corporate applications. So is there a way to segment how much of your revenues today are coming from enterprise versus consumer? And does the slower corporate IT spend impact your outlook for iPhone, iPad, Mac, et cetera, and then I have a follow up.
Tim Cook:
Internally, we have our estimates for how much is enterprise versus consumer. And the enterprise business is growing. We have been focusing a lot on BYOD programs and there's more and more companies that are leaning into those and given employees the ability to select which is plays to our benefit, I believe, because I think a lot of people want to use a Mac at work or an iPad at work. And so but we're certainly primarily a consumer company in terms of our revenues, obviously.
Krish Sankar:
Got it, Tim. Thanks for that. And then just as a follow up, obviously a lot of questions on the India retail opening. I'm just kind of curious. You also mentioned that you hope to convert a lot of folks into iPhone there. Where do you think the biggest opportunity? Is it like primarily a hardware business like the iPhone, iPad wearables, et cetera? Or do you think there is a service opportunity in India longer term too? Thank you very much.
Tim Cook:
I think there's an opportunity across the board, including in services. Obviously, the ARPUs are lower in India for whether you're talking about TV and movie streaming or music, the ARPUs are much lower than other regions. But if you look at it over a long arc of time, I think there's a good opportunity across the board.
Operator:
Our next question is from Aaron Rakers of Wells Fargo.
Aaron Rakers:
Yes, thanks for taking the questions. I guess my first question is that I want to go back to kind of the geographical dynamics. I'm curious, as we all think about the reopening attributes of China, just how you would characterize the shaping of demand you saw through the course of this last quarter and kind of how you're thinking about the impact of that reopening playing out over the next couple of quarters.
Tim Cook:
If you look at China, our revenue came in at negative three for the quarter year-over-year, but we actually grew on a constant currency basis, and we also accelerate rated as compared to the December quarter, which, as you know, had 14 weeks in it and was a negative seven on a reported basis. And so we were pleased with how we did and with the acceleration that we saw with the reopening, and we'll see how we do this quarter. But if you look at the top selling smartphones in urban China, based on a survey from Kantar, we have four out of the top five. And I think in all of the third party data I've seen on the market itself, in the smartphone space, we believe we gained share during Q2. So we feel good about it. Also, China has a lot of very good metrics in terms of new buyers. For example, on the Mac, about six out of ten customers are buying the Mac for the first time. Same thing on iPad. If you look over at the watch, it's more than three out of four customers are buying the watch for the first time. And so the buyer metrics, if you will, are very, very good. And our services business hit an all-time record in China during the quarter.
Aaron Rakers:
Very helpful, Tim. As a quick follow up, I want to go back to Amit’s question on gross margin. You talked about FX, the lessening impact there. I'm just curious when you look at your gross margin, obviously got mixed attributes, kind of potentially continuing to drive that higher. But I'm curious on the current environment, how you would characterize the component pricing dynamics and what you're thinking about in this current quarter's Guidance.
Luca Maestri:
The environment on the component side is favorable. We've seen component prices decline during the March quarter, and we expect the same during the June quarter.
Operator:
Our next is from Sydney Ho of Deutsche Bank.
Sydney Ho:
Great. Thanks for taking my question. I was hoping you can talk about the linearity of the March quarter and perhaps the first four and a half weeks of the current quarter. It looks like things are slowing down quite a bit elsewhere, but if my math is right, your fiscal third quarter guidance implied product revenue will be a little bit lower than seasonal average on a sequential basis, any color would be helpful. Thanks.
Luca Maestri:
We said that we expect our performance during the June quarter at the revenue level to be similar to the one that we just reported for the March quarter. Keep in mind, we always have differences in the launch timing across our products, and also that especially over the last few years, we've seen a certain amount of supply disruptions. Sometimes it was COVID related, sometimes it was related to specific component shortages. Just to remind you, in the June quarter a year ago, at the full quarter impact of the launch for both of the iPhone SE and the iPad Air, which leads to a more difficult compare. So I think it's important to keep those things in mind.
Sydney Ho:
Okay, that's helpful. Maybe a quick follow up. You talk about Apple Pay Later. How has the feedback been so far? And how do you expect the adoption of that service over the next few quarters? Thank you.
Tim Cook:
The feedback for both Apple Pay Later and the savings products have both been really good. And we think both of them help customers live a better or healthier financial life. And so we're very excited about the first days of both of them.
Operator:
Our next question is from Harsh Kumar of Piper Sandler.
Harsh Kumar:
Yes. Hey, guys. Thanks for squeezing me in. Tim, you're one of the largest chip companies. You're not a component maker. You actually use your own products. But we almost never hear in any context of you guys being a beneficiary, Apple being a beneficiary for either the Chip Act money or the R&D tax credit that's being proposed. I was just curious if you are eligible for any of those. And then I've got a follow up.
Tim Cook:
I don't see Apple participating in the Chips Act directly, but we would be a beneficiary indirectly because some of our partners would hopefully be recipients of it and therefore put in additional capacity. And so on that sort of indirect basis, we would have a benefit.
Harsh Kumar:
Understood. And thanks for clarification. Luca, I wanted to clarify your comments about June. When you're saying June performance will be similar to March, I assume on a year-on-year basis, which would be June should be down about two something odd percent. Is that a fair way? And then my question that I wanted to ask, maybe another one for Tim was where do you think is the largest opportunity in your services offering? You're doing a great job, you just set a record. But surely there must be areas where you think you can do better.
Luca Maestri:
Yes. So to your question around the June performance yes, on a year-over-year basis, so comparable to the March quarter on year-over-year basis.
Tim Cook:
Harsh, I think we can do better on everything. And so I wouldn't just point to one of them. If you look at the number of active devices and the growth of active devices, I think, our services are underpenetrated in a number of different ways. And so the way that I look at it is there's opportunity in many of them.
Suhasini Chandramouli :
All right. Thank you, Harsh. A replay of today's call will be available for two weeks on Apple podcasts, as a webcast on apple.com/investor and via telephone. The number for the telephone replay is 866-⁠583-⁠1035. Please enter confirmation code 493-⁠4362, followed by the pound sign. These replays will be available by approximately 05:00 P.M. Pacific time today. Members of the press with additional questions can contact Josh Rosenstock at 488-⁠62-⁠1142 and financial analysts can contact me with additional questions at 408-⁠862-⁠5119. Thanks again for joining us.
Operator:
Once again, this does conclude today's conference. We do appreciate your participation.
Operator:
Good day, everyone, and welcome to the Apple Q1 Fiscal Year 2023 Earnings Conference Call. Today's call is being recorded. And now at this time, for opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn the call over to Tejas Gala, Director of Investor Relations and Corporate Finance. Please go ahead.
Tejas Gala:
Thank you. Speaking first today is Apple's CEO, Tim Cook; and he'll be followed by CFO, Luca Maestri. After that, we'll open the call to questions from analysts. Before turning the call over to Tim, I would like to remind everyone that the December quarter spanned 14 weeks, while the March quarter, as usual, has 13 weeks. Please note that some of the information you'll hear during our discussion today will consist of forward-looking statements, including, without limitation, those regarding revenue, gross margin, operating expenses, other income and expense, taxes, capital allocation and future business outlook, including the potential impact of COVID-19 on the company's business and results of operations. These statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results or trends to differ materially from our forecast. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in Apple's most recently filed annual report on Form 10-K and the Form 8-K filed with the SEC today, along with the associated press release. Apple assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements or information which speak as of their respective dates. I'd now like to turn the call over to Tim for introductory remarks.
Timothy Cook:
Thank you, Tejas. Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining us. Today, we're reporting revenue of $117.2 billion for the December quarter. We set all-time revenue records in a number of markets, including Canada, Indonesia, Mexico, Spain, Turkey and Vietnam, along with quarterly records in Brazil and India. As a result of a challenging environment, our revenue was down 5% year-over-year. But I'm proud of the way we have navigated circumstances, seen and unforeseen, over the past several years, and I remain incredibly confident in our team and our mission and in the work we do every day. Let me discuss the 3 factors that impacted our revenue performance during the quarter. The first was foreign exchange headwinds, which had a nearly 800 basis point impact. On a constant currency basis, we grew year-over-year and would have grown in the vast majority of the markets we track. The second factor, which we described in a November 6 update was COVID-19-related challenges, which significantly impacted the supply of iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max and lasted through most of December. Because of these constraints, we had significantly less iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max supply than we planned, causing ship times to extend far beyond what we had anticipated. As we always have every step of the way throughout the pandemic, we continued to prioritize people and worked with our suppliers to ensure the health and safety of every worker. Production is now back where we want it to be. The third factor was a challenging macroeconomic environment as the world continues to face unprecedented circumstances, from inflation to war in Eastern Europe, to the enduring impacts of the pandemic. And we know that Apple is not immune to it. But whatever conditions we face, our approach is always the same. We are thoughtful and deliberate. We manage for the long term. We adapt quickly to circumstances outside our control while delivering with excellence in the things we can. We invest in innovation, in people and in the positive difference we can make in the world. And we do it all to provide our customers with technology that will enrich their lives and help unlock their full creative potential. It's a wonderful thing to be a part of, and it's so rewarding for all of us at Apple when we hear how much our customers are loving what we create. Let me talk now about what we saw across our product categories. Starting with iPhone. Revenue came in at $65.8 billion for the quarter, down 8% year-over-year. However, on a constant currency basis, iPhone revenue was roughly flat. Our customers continue to rave about the astounding camera capabilities and unprecedented battery life and the groundbreaking suite of health and safety features. The iPhone 14 lineup pushes the limits of what users can do with a smartphone. During the quarter, Mac revenue came in at $7.7 billion, which was in line with what we had expected. We had a difficult compare because this time last year, we had the extremely successful launch of the redesigned M1 MacBook Pros. We also faced a challenging macroeconomic environment and foreign exchange headwinds. We remain confident in and focused on the long-term opportunity for Mac. Just last month, we introduced new MacBook Pro models powered by our latest developments in Apple silicon, M2 Pro and M2 Max. These chips enable unprecedented performance and do so with less energy, which is not only good for the environment but gives the newest MacBook Pro the longest battery life ever in a Mac. We also introduced the M2-powered Mac mini, which will supercharge productivity for users of all kinds and leave them stunned by just how powerful a Mac mini can be. During the quarter, iPad revenue grew 30% to a total of $9.4 billion. The very strong growth was due in part to a favorable compare to the December quarter a year ago when we experienced significant supply constraints. Customers continue to praise our new lineup for its versatility, whether it's the new iPad Pro now powered by the M2 or the newly designed iPad 10th Generation with its stunning liquid retina display and beautiful colors. Revenue for Wearables, Home and Accessories was $13.5 billion, which was down 8% year-over-year driven by foreign exchange headwinds and a challenging macroeconomic environment. We remain excited about the long-term opportunity in the category. As an example, a few weeks ago, we announced the next-generation HomePod, which is an indispensable addition to the smart home. This powerful smart speaker relies on advanced computational audio to produce an incredible listening experience. We're also helping users make their homes safer with sound recognition. This feature, arriving later this spring, allows HomePod to send a notification directly to a user's iPhone if a smoke or carbon monoxide alarm sound is identified. We continue to hear wide praise for Apple Watch Series 8 and Apple Watch Ultra, which has set a new standard for what's possible with a wearable. From a whole host of health and safety features to incredible new capabilities for extreme athletes, there is something for everyone in these amazing products. Customers are excited about some phenomenal new features we've made available across many of our products as well. One of the highlights is emergency SOS via satellite, which launched for iPhone 14 customers in the U.S. and Canada in November and for customers in France, Germany, Ireland and the U.K. in December. This is a feature we hope our users will never need, but it is incredibly heartening to get e-mails from people describing the life-saving impact our new safety features have had on them. We're always looking for new ways to empower people to create and collaborate. In December, we released Freeform, a brand-new app that lets users take their ideas wherever they want, anywhere they are, all while collaborating in real time. Freeform has already received praise from reviewers for its flexibility and simplicity as it works seamlessly across iPhone, iPad and Mac. Today, we are very excited to announce that we've achieved a truly incredible milestone. Thanks to our deep commitment to innovation, incredible customer loyalty and satisfaction and a large number of switchers, we now have more than 2 billion active devices as part of our growing installed base, double what it was just 7 years ago. This is an incredible testament to our products and services and the strength of our ecosystem. We set an all-time revenue record of $20.8 billion in services, which was better than what we had expected. We achieved double-digit revenue growth from App Store subscriptions and set all-time revenue records across a number of categories, including cloud and payment services. All told, Apple now has more than 935 million paid subscriptions. Apple has also just begun a historic 10-year partnership with Major League Soccer. Just yesterday, we launched MLS Season Pass, which will give fans in more than 100 countries access to every live MLS regular season game as well as the playoffs and MLS Cup, all with no blackouts. And while we're providing more content to sports fans than ever before, Apple TV+ continues to showcase powerful characters and moving storytelling. We were thrilled to celebrate the holidays alongside our Apple TV+ subscribers with the hit movie Spirited. And we're delighted to see how much people are enjoying new and returning series like Shrinking, Slow Horses and Truth Be Told. And we have some great upcoming movies in Sharper and Tetris, along with Emmy Award winner Ted Lasso returning this spring. During the quarter, we made some great updates to Fitness+ as well, expanding our catalog of more than 3,500 workouts and meditations to include a new kickboxing category and a new sleep theme for meditations. Our latest artist spotlight series features the music of the incomparable Beyonce, and we're excited to take a stroll with guests appearing on our fifth season of Time to Walk. And we continue to build on our decades-long commitment to helping small businesses thrive when we announced Apple Business Connect. This new tool gives business owners even more control over how billions of people see and engage with their products and services every day. Businesses of all sizes can now customize key information for users across Apple Maps, Messages, Wallet, Siri and other apps. Meanwhile, in retail, we celebrated 25 years of the Apple online store and also opened Apple Pacific Centre in Vancouver and Apple American Dream in New Jersey. And I'm grateful to all the teams who helped our customers throughout the busy holiday season. At Apple, we spend a lot of time focused on creating an unparalleled experience for our customers and every product and service that we offer. We're also just as dedicated to leading with our values in everything we do. As part of that work, we strengthened our deep commitment to privacy and security, giving users 3 new tools to protect their most sensitive data
Luca Maestri:
Thank you, Tim, and good afternoon, everyone. As Tim mentioned, revenue for the December quarter was $117.2 billion, down 5% from last year. A number of factors had a significant impact on our results. First, we faced a very difficult foreign exchange environment, which affected our performance by nearly 800 basis points. In other words, we grew revenue on a constant currency basis. And in fact, we did so in the vast majority of markets. Second, the macroeconomic environment this past quarter was markedly more challenging than 12 months ago. Third, we experienced significant supply shortages for iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max in November and through December. On the other hand, we had the positive impact of the 14th week in the quarter that Tejas just mentioned at the beginning of the call. Products revenue was $96.4 billion, down 8% from last year due to the factors I just called out. At the same time, however, our installed base of active devices grew double digits and achieved all-time records in each geographic segment and in each major product category. We're proud to now have over 2 billion active devices in our installed base. This continued growth in the installed base is due to extremely strong levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty and a high number of customers who are new to our products. The installed base growth also helped our services set an all-time revenue record of $20.8 billion, up 6% over a year ago. We achieved this new milestone despite more than 700 basis points of negative impact from foreign exchange. We reached all-time services revenue records in the Americas, Europe and rest of Asia Pacific and a December quarter record in Greater China. We also set records in many Services categories, including all-time revenue records for cloud services, payment services and music and December quarter records for the App Store and AppleCare. Company gross margin was 43%, up 70 basis points from last quarter due to leverage and favorable mix, partially offset by foreign exchange. Products gross margin was 37%, up 240 basis points sequentially. And Services gross margin was 70.8%, up 30 basis points sequentially, both due to the same factors that impacted total company gross margin. Operating expenses of $14.3 billion were significantly below the guidance range we provided at the beginning of the quarter and grew at a slower pace than in the past as we took actions to respond to the current macro environment. Net income was $30 billion. Diluted earnings per share were $1.88, and we generated very strong operating cash flow of $34 billion. Let me now get into more detail for each of our revenue categories. iPhone revenue was $65.8 billion despite significant foreign exchange headwinds, supply constraints on iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max and a challenging macroeconomic environment. In spite of these circumstances, we set all-time iPhone revenue records in Canada, Italy and Spain, and saw strong growth in several emerging markets, including all-time iPhone revenue records for India and Vietnam. Importantly, the installed base of active iPhones continues to grow nicely and is at an all-time high across all geographic segments. In emerging markets, in particular, the installed base grew double digits, and we had record levels of switchers in India and in Mexico. Our customers continue to love their experience with our products with the latest survey of U.S. consumers from 451 Research indicating customer satisfaction of 98% for the iPhone 14 family. Mac revenue was $7.7 billion, down 29% year-over-year and in line with our expectations. There were 3 key drivers for our Mac results. First, we had a challenging compare against last year's launch of the completely reimagined MacBook Pros, our first notebooks with M1 Pro and M1 Max. Second, we believe that the macro environment impacted our Mac performance. And third, we faced significant foreign exchange headwinds. At the same time, however, the installed base of active Macs reached an all-time high across all geographic segments, and we continue to see very strong upgraded activity to Apple silicon. Customer satisfaction with Mac remains very strong at 96% based on the latest survey of U.S. consumers from 451 Research. iPad revenue was $9.4 billion, up 30% year-over-year despite significant FX headwinds. This performance was driven by 2 key items. First, during the December quarter a year ago, we experienced significant supply constraints, while this year, we had enough supply to meet demand. Second, we launched our new iPad and the iPad Pro powered by the M2 chip during the quarter. The iPad installed base reached a new all-time high, thanks to incredible customer loyalty and a high number of new customers. In fact, over half of the customers who purchased iPads during the quarter were new to the product. Wearables, Home and Accessories revenue was $13.5 billion, down 8% year-over-year. The year-over-year decline was driven by significant FX headwinds and a challenging macroeconomic environment. However, our installed base of devices in the category set a new all-time record thanks to the largest number of customers new to our smartwatch that we've ever had in a given quarter. In fact, nearly 2/3 of customers purchasing an Apple Watch during the quarter were new to the product. Moving to Services. We generated $20.8 billion in revenue, a new all-time record in total and for many Services offerings in spite of a difficult foreign exchange environment, and macroeconomic headwinds impacting certain categories such as digital advertising and mobile gaming. In constant currency, we grew Services revenue double digits on top of growing 24% during the December quarter a year ago. We remain focused on the large long-term opportunity in this category, and we continue to observe several trends that reflect the strength of our ecosystem. For example, we saw increased customer engagement with our Services during the quarter. Both our transacting accounts and paid accounts grew double digits year-over-year, each setting a new all-time record. Paid subscriptions also continued to grow nicely. We now have more than 935 million paid subscriptions across the services on our platform, up more than 150 million during the last 12 months alone and nearly 4x what we had just 5 years ago. And we continue to increase the reach and improve the quality of our offerings. For instance, Apple Pay is now available to millions of merchants in nearly 70 countries and regions. And we saw a record-breaking number of purchases made using Apple Pay globally during the holiday shopping season. Finally, our installed base of over 2 billion active devices represents a great foundation for future expansion of our ecosystem, and it continues to grow even during difficult macroeconomic conditions, which speaks to the exceptionally high levels of customer loyalty and satisfaction and our ability to attract new customers to our platform. The growth is coming from every major product category and geographic segment, with strong double-digit increases in emerging markets such as Brazil, Mexico, India, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam. Turning to the enterprise market. we are seeing continued adoption of our Services for business like Apple Business Essentials, AppleCare, Tap to Pay and Apple Financial Services. For example, Mars Incorporated has expanded its use of AppleCare for Enterprise to provide timely device support and assurance for iPads deployed across their manufacturing sites. Meanwhile, HCA Healthcare has leveraged Apple Financial Services to manage the annual refresh of its entire fleet of iPhones. This not only ensures that their staff stay current on the latest Apple technology, but also provides them with significant annual savings in the process. Let me now turn to our capital return program and our cash position. We returned over $25 billion to shareholders during the December quarter as our business continues to generate very strong cash flow. This included $3.8 billion in dividends and equivalents and $19 billion through open market repurchases of 133 million Apple shares. We ended the quarter with $165 billion in cash and marketable securities. We repaid $1.4 billion in maturing debt and decreased commercial paper by $8.2 billion, leaving us with total debt of $111 billion. As a result, net cash was $54 billion at the end of the quarter, and we maintain our goal of becoming net cash-neutral over time. As we move into the March quarter, I'd like to review our outlook, which includes the types of forward-looking information that Tejas referred to at the beginning of the call. Given the continued uncertainty around the world in the near term, we are not providing revenue guidance, but we are sharing some directional insights based on the assumption that the macroeconomic outlook and COVID-related impacts to our business do not worsen from what we are projecting today for the current quarter. In total, we expect our March quarter year-over-year revenue performance to be similar to the December quarter. This represents an acceleration in our underlying year-over-year business performance as the December quarter benefited from an extra week. Foreign exchange will continue to be a headwind, and we expect a negative year-over-year impact of 5 percentage points. For Services, we expect revenue to grow year-over-year while continuing to face macroeconomic headwinds in areas such as digital advertising and mobile gaming. For iPhone, we expect our March quarter year-over-year revenue performance to accelerate relative to the December quarter year-over-year revenue performance. For Mac and iPad, we expect revenue for both product categories to decline double digits year-over-year because of challenging compares and macroeconomic headwinds. We expect gross margin to be between 43.5% and 44.5%. We expect OpEx to be between $13.7 billion and $13.9 billion. We expect OI&E to be around negative $100 million, excluding any potential impact from the mark-to-market of minority investments, and our tax rate to be around 16%. Finally, today, our Board of Directors has declared a cash dividend of $0.23 per share of common stock payable on February 16, 2023, to shareholders of record as of February 13, 2023. With that, let's open the call to questions.
Tejas Gala:
Thank you, Luca. [Operator Instructions]. Operator, may we have the first question, please.
Operator:
[Operator Instructions]. Certainly. We will go ahead and take our first question from David Vogt with UBS.
David Vogt:
So Tim, and maybe this is for Luca as well. You talked about the supply chain returning back to normal after a very difficult October, November, but we're still seeing some disruptions across tech products, whether it's enterprise or consumer-facing. How do you think about your supply chain and maybe the levels of inventory or builds that you might need as we go forward to sort of insulate your business from these sort of episodic disruptions? Have you changed your view? And if so, how does that affect ultimately margins and sort of your balance sheet and cash flow items going forward?
Timothy Cook:
This is Tim, David. From a supply point of view, we did see disruption from early November through most of December. And from a supply chain point of view, we're now at a point where production is what we need it to be. And so the problem is behind us. In terms of going forward in the supply chain, we build our products everywhere. There are component parts coming from many different countries in the world, and the final assembly coming from 3 countries in the world on just iPhone. And so we continue to optimize it. We'll continue to optimize it over time and change it to continue to improve. I think when you sort of zoom out and back up from it, the last 3 years have been a pretty difficult time between COVID and silicon shortages and the like. And I think it's -- I think we have had a very resilient supply chain in the aggregate. In terms of supply for this quarter, which I think was one of your points, I think we're in decent supply on most products for the quarter currently.
Operator:
Our next question is from Shannon Cross of Credit Suisse.
Shannon Cross:
Luca, I wanted to dig a bit more into the commentary on gross margins. The guidance, especially at 43.5% to 44.5%, is obviously quite strong. So I'm wondering what's helping you out there, assume mix and some other things. And then how should we think about what currency and hedge is going to do as we look forward? And then I have a follow-up.
Luca Maestri:
Shannon, yes, I mean, we've had good margin for the December quarter to start with. We reported 43%. Obviously, in December, we have the benefit of leverage because of the seasonality of the business, but we also had favorable mix across the board. Of course, foreign exchange is an issue right now. In the December quarter on a sequential basis, foreign exchange was a negative 110 basis points for us. And on a year-over-year basis, it's 300 basis points. So obviously, the FX environment has changed a lot during the last 12 months. For March, yes, we've seen a margin expansion, 43.5% to 44.5%. We're doing a lot of work around cost, of course. Mix will continue to help, both within categories and services mix as we move away from the holiday season. But we're doing a lot of work on the cost structure, and that is paying off. Foreign exchange is still a negative, about 50 basis points sequentially, but it's mitigating. The last couple of weeks, the dollar has weakened a bit. And so hopefully, as we go through the year, hopefully, things will improve. But for now, as you correctly state, we are in a good position on margins.
Shannon Cross:
And then, Tim, can you talk a bit about China? What you're seeing -- obviously, you've had the issues with production, but I mean more on the demand side. As we've gotten through Chinese New Year and the opening, I'm just wondering, are you seeing the Chinese consumer come back? What are they buying? And how are you thinking about your position there?
Timothy Cook:
Shannon, last quarter, we declined by 7% on a reported basis, but we actually grew on a constant currency basis. And that was despite some significant -- the supply constraints that we talked about earlier. And obviously, the sort of the COVID restrictions throughout China that happened in various different places throughout the country also impacted the demand during the quarter. When you look at the opening that started happening in December, we saw a marked change in traffic in our stores as compared to November. And that followed through to demand as well. And I don't want to get into January. We've obviously -- January is included in the guidance, or the color rather, that Luca provided earlier. But we did see a marked change from December compared to November.
Operator:
Our next question is from Erik Woodring of Morgan Stanley.
Erik Woodring:
Maybe, Tim, first one for you. That 2 billion installed base -- device installed base figure, that's up, I believe, 200 million units year-over-year. That implies the strongest annual gain in new devices in your installed base basically as far back as you've provided those data points. And so I guess my 2 questions are
Timothy Cook:
Yes. The installed base is now over 2 billion active devices, as you mentioned. And we set records across each geographic segment and major product category. And so it was a broad-based change. Two -- I'll correct one thing you said, it's up over 150 million year-over-year. The last report we reported to be over 1.85. And so it's 150 million, which we're very proud of. We also saw strong double-digit in several of the emerging markets, which is very important to us. For example, India and Brazil as just 2 examples. So very, very strong. And obviously, it bodes well for the future.
Erik Woodring:
And then, Luca, obviously, the December quarter was negatively impacted by the production challenges. Can you just maybe unpackage where channel inventory levels are today kind of across the iPhone broadly? And then what the data that you're seeing so far this quarter is telling you about iPhone demand deferral versus kind of iPhone demand destruction and perhaps pushing some upgrades later into the year rather than into the March quarter? And that's it for me.
Timothy Cook:
Yes. Erik, I'll take that one as well. The channel inventory levels on iPhone, we obviously ended the December quarter below our target range given the supply challenges on iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max. But as you think about this, keep in mind that a year ago, we also exited the December quarter below our target inventory range because of supply challenges in the year ago quarter. Not related -- not the same issue, but just as a point. And so that hopefully gives you some flavor of that. In terms of what we're seeing in January, we've included in our color that Luca provided kind of our thinking. It's very hard to estimate the recapture because you have to know exactly what would have happened and how many people bought down. And it takes a while to get that -- to get those reports in during the quarter. And so we've made our best guess at it. In terms of the sizing of the constraint in Q1, what we estimate, although not with precision, is that we would -- I thought we believe iPhone would have grown during the quarter had it not been for the supply shortages. So hopefully, that provides you a little bit of color.
Operator:
Our next question comes from Aaron Rakers of Wells Fargo.
Aaron Rakers:
I have two as well, if I can. I guess the first kind of question, just going back on the gross margin line. Pretty good guidance into this March quarter. I'm curious if you unpack that a little bit specific around what you're seeing as far as maybe benefits from component pricing in the guidance, if you're embedding any of that at this point.
Luca Maestri:
Yes. Of course, with our guidance, we try to capture every aspect of our cost structure. And obviously, components are a big portion of that. So definitely, that's included. And keep in mind, again, that foreign exchange -- I mentioned earlier, I think to Shannon, that the sequential negative on FX is 50 basis points, versus a year ago, it's 270 basis points. Obviously, the U.S. dollar has moved a lot over the last 12 months. So obviously, we need to find offsets and more to the negative FX in order to be able to provide this kind of guidance. And so obviously, components are a big part of that.
Aaron Rakers:
Yes. And then kind of from a strategic perspective, given kind of the things that we're seeing out in some of your peer group, I'm curious, Tim, how you think about the role of AI in your strategy as far as particularly in the Services segment, whether you're not -- you see opportunities to excel monetization abilities within the paid subscriber base and whether or not AI, is it something that you're implementing a bit more strategically there.
Timothy Cook:
Yes. It is a major focus of ours. It's incredible in terms of how it can enrich customers' lives. And you can look no further than some of the things that we announced in the fall with crash detection and fall detection or back a ways with ECG. I mean these things have literally saved people's lives. And so we see an enormous potential in this space to affect virtually everything we do. It's obviously a horizontal technology, not a vertical. And so it will affect every product and every service that we have.
Operator:
Our next question comes from Amit Daryanani of Evercore.
Amit Daryanani:
I guess the first one I have is, Tim, I think based on your earlier comments that iPhones would have grown ex the production issue that implied that maybe it's a $7 billion or so impact that you had in December quarter from the production challenges on the high-end models. I'm sure it's tough to see what happens this time around. But I think historically, when you've had production issues or things like this happen, what has the consumer behavior being typically? Do they tend to go down towards the lower end models and get the phone they want quickly? Or do they just defer the production? Just from a historical perspective, I think do you typically recover what's deferred out or no?
Timothy Cook:
It's very hard to estimate is the real answer because you have to know a lot of data, and it's usually only in hindsight that you have a more reasonable view of it. And so we put our best views in the color that Luca provided. That's kind of what I would say.
Amit Daryanani:
All right. And then I guess maybe if I think about Services as you go forward. I know you had really good growth in Services, I think, over the last several years. But as you go forward in Services, what do you think drives the growth more so? Is it the expansion of your installed base? Or is it more going to be driven by ARPU going higher for you? I'm just curious, how do you think about those 2 buckets as you go forward?
Luca Maestri:
Amit, there's a number of things, and I've mentioned a few of them during the call. The first step is always the installed base. Installed base is the engine for Services growth. And the fact that the installed base is growing very nicely, and it's growing in a lot of emerging markets, it's growing even faster, that gives us a larger addressable pool of customers. So that's incredibly important. The second one is that we are seeing that the level of engagement of our customers already in our ecosystem continues to grow. We -- I mentioned that both transacting accounts and paid accounts grew double digits. And so that bodes very well for the future. And we have a lot of transacting accounts that kind of moved to paid accounts over time. The other aspect that is very important for us is to continue constantly to improve the reach and the quality of our services. And I give the example of Apple Pay, which it's a great example because we started off primarily in the United States. Now we've taken it to 70 markets, millions of merchants. And so obviously, payment services are -- continue to set new highs all the time for us. And then as you've seen over the last few years, we also launched new services over time, and that obviously contributes to the growth. We're very excited. And when we look at the behavior of our installed base, we think it's very promising for the continued growth of our Services business.
Operator:
Our next question comes from Harsh Kumar of Piper Sandler.
Harsh Kumar:
Tim, I had a quick question on emerging markets. Seems like you're making a lot of strides in India. Potentially wanted to understand the kind of share you have in China and India. And relative to that, what would be your aspirational but sort of achievable share in iPhones in those territories, whether it's units or revenues? And I was hoping to draw on your experience and maybe what you've seen in other countries where you've had some longer presence.
Timothy Cook:
And looking at the business in India, we set a quarterly revenue record and grew very strong double digits year-over-year. And so we feel very good about how we performed, and that was -- that's despite the headwinds that we've talked about. Taking a step back, India is a hugely exciting market for us and is a major focus. We brought the online store there in 2020. We will soon bring Apple retail there. So we're putting a lot of emphasis on the market. There's been a lot done from a financing options and trade-ins to make products more affordable and give people more options to buy. And so there's a lot going on there. We are, in essence, taking what we learned in China years ago and how we scale to China and bringing that to bear. And I don't have the exact market shares in front of me, but I think you would see that from a market share point of view that we grew around the world last quarter despite -- on iPhone despite the challenges that we've had on the supply side. And I wouldn't expect to have a difference in those 2 markets.
Harsh Kumar:
Understood. And for my follow-up, I had a sort of interesting theoretical question on pricing. Assuming we get the CHIPS Act passed, and there's a whole bunch of manufacturing that happens in U.S. and other territories that are potentially somewhat more expensive than the ones you might be now, have you -- has the company done any studies to gauge the elasticity of demand relative to small price increases in your products?
Timothy Cook:
We have experience in that, but I wouldn't necessarily draw the same conclusion that you have in terms of the cost of the product. I -- we don't know at this point exactly what that will be, but we're all in, in terms of being the largest customer for TSMC in Arizona. I'm very proud to take part in that. That's what I would say about that.
Operator:
Our next question comes from Wamsi Mohan of Bank of America.
Wamsi Mohan:
Tim, you've done a phenomenal job of driving consumer choice towards higher-end products within your portfolio. How would you compare this cycle for iPhones if you were to segment the Pro versus non-Pro models versus the cycles from the past few years? And do you think this move to higher ASPs is sustainable? Or do you think it reverses in a tighter consumer spending environment? And I have a follow-up.
Timothy Cook:
The Pro has been a -- the 14 Pro and the 14 Pro Max have done extremely well up until the point where we had a supply shortage and couldn't provide them -- couldn't provide the total of the demand. And so it's definitely a strong Pro cycle. I think there's a number of reasons for that, but the most important one is always the product. And I think the innovations and the product speak for themselves. And we feel very good about the product that we announced back in September and are happy to now be at a point where we're shipping to the demand.
Wamsi Mohan:
And Tim, do you think that this move to sort of higher ASPs that has happened over the last few years is sustainable? Or could it sustain in this very tough macro environment that you've cited?
Timothy Cook:
I wouldn't want to predict, but I would say that the smartphone for us, the iPhone has become so integral into people's lives. It contains their contacts and their health information and their banking information and their smart home and so many different parts of their lives, their payment vehicle and -- for many people. And so I think people are willing to really stretch to get the best they can afford in that category.
Wamsi Mohan:
Okay. Great. And Tim, you clearly emphasize the focus and importance of the installed base. If we think about the absolute grit of the installed base from 1 billion to 2 billion over 7 years from a device standpoint, how should we think about the penetration of services or the growth in paying customers on services or that time frame? Is that penetration rate increasing or decreasing? How fast is that growing relative to the growth of the overall installed base?
Luca Maestri:
Wamsi, it's Luca. Yes, of course, we keep track of that. It's really important for us. Over the last 7 years, as we doubled the installed base, we've seen a growing engagement of our customers on the platform. That happens, first of all, by customers transacting on the platform and then moving to paid accounts. So starting to pay for some of the services. That percentage of paid accounts tends to grow over time. We've seen it in developed markets. We see it in emerging markets. And that is due to some of the reasons that I was explaining earlier, including the fact that we made it easier for our customers to get engaged on the platform. For example, we offer multiple payment methods in many countries. And we've made it easier to explore for more services because we've added a lot of services on the platform over the last 7 years. So to your question, of course, higher engagement means a higher percentage of paid accounts over time.
Operator:
Our next question comes from Richard Kramer of Arete Research LLP.
Tejas Gala:
Operator, can we move on to the next?
Operator:
Next, we'll hear from Jim Suva of Citigroup.
James Suva:
Tim and Luca, you both mentioned earlier on the Q&A a little bit about India. I was wondering if we're now entering a situation of even more opportunity because we've exited COVID, we've exited countries with different COVID criteria. We've also seen India build out its higher speed transmissions. And your market is -- shares tremendously underrepresented there. And it appears with the supply chain, you're looking at diversifying kind of operational risk not specific to any country, but just overall. Now you look at potentially opening up stores and stuff. Am I right that, that's the way you look at it is it's even more prime for opportunity now than ever? And once you start opening up stores there, you could just see a complete green shoot of adoptions or any additional commentary on your view on India as now we've navigated COVID and supply chain and so many challenges over the past 2 years?
Timothy Cook:
Yes. Jim, we actually did fairly well through COVID in India. And I'm even more bullish now on the other side of it, or hopefully, on the other side of it. And that's the reason why we're investing there. We're bringing retail there and bringing the online store there and putting a significant amount of energy there. I'm very bullish on India.
James Suva:
And then as my quick follow-up, you had mentioned that Services, not necessarily specific to India, but Services overall were better than expected. And of course, supply chain was more challenged than expected. So what was the bridge factor of Services being better than expected on upside? Was it like advertising or apps or paid monthly subscriptions? Or what were kind of the things that really surprised you to the upside on Services?
Luca Maestri:
It was -- Jim, it's Luca. It's primarily the -- this level of engagement we saw, which then reflects into the, as you said, the paid subscriptions. We saw very good results in our cloud services business in payment services. Music was very strong. So we had a number of categories that set new records, all-time records. And they did a bit better than we were expecting at the beginning of the quarter. And so Tim mentioned that during, I think, his prepared remarks that when you look at it in constant currency, we grew services double digits. And that was on top of a 24% increase a year ago. So it's very sustained growth that we're seeing.
Operator:
Our next question will come from Krish Sankar of Cowen and Company.
Krish Sankar:
I have 2. The first one, Tim and Luca, you mentioned how the macro did soften, and it has an impact. And as consumers tighten their belt, when you look across your hardware products and service businesses, where are you seeing the biggest impact and where are you seeing the least impact from the softening macro? And then I had a quick follow-up.
Timothy Cook:
We think there were some impact across the products and in Services. Probably, the ones that we saw the most impact on were Mac and Wearables. You can see that in those numbers. And probably, the least would have been iPhone.
Krish Sankar:
Got it. Got it. Very helpful, Tim. And then just a quick follow-up on the Mac. The PC industry is expecting a decline in PC shipments this year also. How do you think about the Mac relative to kind of like where the PC industry as a whole is expecting the shipments to end up? Is there any color you can give on that?
Timothy Cook:
The industry is very challenged, as you say. It's -- the industry is contracting. I think from us, though, is -- and I don't know how this year will play out, so I don't want to predict the year. But over the long run, we have a market that is a reasonable-sized market, a big market. And we have low share, and we have a competitive advantage with Apple silicon. And so strategically, I think we're well positioned in the market, albeit I think it will be a little rough in the short term.
Tejas Gala:
A replay of today's call will be available for 2 weeks on Apple Podcasts, as a webcast on apple.com/investor and via telephone. The number for the telephone replay is 866-583-1035. Please enter confirmation code 6541285, followed by the pound sign. These replays will be available by approximately 5 p.m. Pacific Time today. Members of the press with additional questions can contact Josh Rosenstock at 408-862-1142. Financial analysts can contact me with additional questions at 669-227-2402. Thank you again for joining us.
Operator:
And once again, this does conclude today's conference. We do appreciate your participation.
Operator:
Good day, and welcome to the Apple Q4 Fiscal Year 2022 Earnings Conference Call. For your information, today's call is being recorded. At this time, for opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn the call over to Tejas Gala, Director of Investor Relations and Corporate Finance. Please go ahead.
Tejas Gala:
Speaking first today is Apple's CEO, Tim Cook; and he'll be followed by CFO, Luca Maestri. After that, we'll open the call to questions from analysts. Before turning the call over to Tim, I would like to remind you that approximately once every six years, we add a week to the December quarter to realign our fiscal periods with the December calendar. So this December quarter will span 14 weeks rather than the usual 13 and will end on December 31. Please note that some of the information you'll hear during our discussion today will consist of forward-looking statements, including, without limitation, those regarding revenue, gross margin, operating expense, other income and expense, taxes, capital allocation and future business outlook, including the potential impact of COVID-19 on the company's business and results of operations. These statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results or trends to differ materially from our forecast. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in Apple's most recently filed annual report on Form 10-K and the Form 8-K filed with the SEC today, along with the associated press release. Apple assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements or information, which speak as of their respective dates. I'd now like to turn the call over to Tim for introductory remarks.
Tim Cook:
Thank you, Tejas. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining the call today. Over the past year, despite a range of challenges facing the world, our teams have come together in incredible ways to drive unparalleled innovation and deliver again and again for our customers. For the September quarter, we reported record revenue of $90.1 billion, which was better than we anticipated despite stronger-than-expected foreign currency headwinds. We set an all-time revenue record for Mac and September quarter records for iPhone and Wearables, Home and Accessories. Services notched a September quarter record as well with revenue of $19.2 billion and more than 900 million paid subscriptions. We reached another record on our installed base of active devices, thanks to a quarterly record of upgraders and double-digit growth in switchers on iPhone. Across nearly every geographic segment, we reached a new revenue record for the quarter. And we continue to perform incredibly well in emerging markets with very strong double-digit growth in India, Southeast Asia and Latin America. I'm also happy to report that during the quarter, silicon-related supply constraints were not significant. I want to acknowledge that we are still living through unprecedented times. From war in Eastern Europe to the persistence of COVID-19, from climate disasters around the world to an increasingly difficult economic environment, a lot of people and a lot of places are struggling. Through it all, we've aimed to help our customers navigate through the challenges while giving them the tools to drive progress for themselves and their communities. At Apple, creativity and collaboration have always been at the core of who we are. That spirit of ingenuity and teamwork helped us provide our customers with incredible innovations this year and led to another yearly revenue record. In fiscal 2022, Apple achieved revenue of $394 billion, representing 8% annual growth. We set records for iPhone, Mac, Wearables, Home and Accessories and Services while growing double digits in emerging markets and setting records in the vast majority of markets we track. Customers are loving our iPhone 14 lineup. Loaded with camera upgrades for sharper photos, Action Mode for smoother videos and new safety features like Crash Detection and Emergency SOS via Satellite, iPhone is even more indispensable to our daily lives. iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Plus come with a new dual-camera system, industry-leading durability, incredible power and amazing battery life. And our iPhone 14 Pro models are packed with even more groundbreaking innovations, including a new camera system as well as always-on display and the Dynamic Island, which offers a whole new way to interact with iPhone. Just yesterday, our most advanced iPad and iPad Pro ever landed in stores. With its all-screen design, advanced cameras and faster wireless connectivity, the tenth generation iPad looks and performs better than ever. For creatives, iPad Pro, now turbocharged by the blazingly fast M2 chip, is the perfect device to make something amazing. Our Mac customers have already been raving about the power of M2 since the arrival of our newest MacBook Air and MacBook Pro this summer. Their incredible long battery life, stunningly rich display and lightning fast speeds are a signature part of the Mac experience and helped drive an all-time record revenue for Mac during the September quarter. In Wearables, Home and Accessories a wave of innovation spurred 10% year-over-year revenue growth during the September quarter. New features in Apple Watch Series 8, including temperature sensing capabilities, retrospective ovulation estimates and crash detection are helping to keep customers healthier and safer. And the updated Apple Watch SE is a great way for users to start their Apple Watch journey, delivering advanced features at a new low price. The biggest, brightest and boldest Apple Watch ever made, Apple Watch Ultra pushes the boundaries of what a smartwatch can do. Packed with innovations like advanced navigation tools and the new Oceanic+ app, which turns it into a dive computer, Apple Watch Ultra has something for athletes and adventures on land and sea. The second generation of AirPods Pro powered by the new H2 chip are receiving rave reviews for delivering an unmatched wireless earbud audio experience, while canceling up to twice as much noise over the previous model. There's no better place to discover the rich spatial audio capabilities of AirPods Pro than Apple Music, the largest music catalog anywhere now with more than 100 million songs. And there's no other company that fuses best-in-class hardware with cutting-edge software and services to create a truly integrated and seamless experience. With iOS 16, we're giving customers more ways to personalize their iPhones through a customizable lock screen and focus filters. New features in Messages and Mail enable users to connect and collaborate like never before. Stage Manager in iPadOS 16 and macOS Ventura, helps users stay more productive with smoother multitasking. And watchOS 9 is empowering customers to live a healthier day through updates to the Sleep App, a new FDA-cleared AFib history feature and the new Medications app. Across our Services, we continue to see enthusiasm and strong engagement from our subscribers. Apple TV+ hits like Severance, Bad Sisters and Blackbird have taken center stage on screens around the world. And baseball fans were glued to their seats this season watching Friday Night Baseball. Meanwhile, Apple TV+ productions continue to earn accolades. At the 74th Primetime Emmy Awards in September, Apple brought home 9 statues, including a second consecutive win for Best Comedy Series for Ted Lasso. And soon, we're going to give audiences an even better entertainment experience when the all-new Apple TV 4K hit stores next week. We're also bringing Fitness+ to more customers than ever by making our entire library of over 3,000 studio-style workouts and meditations available to iPhone users in 21 countries, even those without an Apple Watch. These updates are arriving just in time for a new Artist Spotlight series with workouts featuring the music of Taylor Swift and a new workout program, Yoga for Every Runner featuring and design with one of the world's top ultramarathon athletes, Scott Jurek. While Fitness+ helps subscribers stay active, Apple Card is designed with our customers' financial health in mind. For the second year in a row, Apple Card has been ranked highest in customer satisfaction for midsized credit card issuers by J.D. Power. And our users' favorite Apple Card benefit just got even better with the upcoming addition of a new high-yield savings account to help them save and grow their daily cash rewards. Turning to retail. Last month, our team members welcomed customers to the all-new Apple Jamsil in South Korea. And through today at Apple Creative Studios, we partnered with non-profits in cities around the world to help young diverse creatives pursue their passions and connect with local mentors. And our retail teams have done exceptional work, helping customers explore our latest products and features. As we approach the holiday season with our product lineup set, I'd like to share my gratitude to our retail, AppleCare and channel teams for the work they are doing to support customers. At Apple, we're proud of the ways we are able to help customers be productive, get healthy, stay safe and unlock their creative potential. We also understand we have important responsibilities to the communities we serve. That's why we continue to invest in education, racial equity and justice and the environment. And we are making important progress toward a more inclusive and diverse workforce. Through our Community Education Initiative, we're working alongside more than 150 partners to help students around the world learn new science and technology skills. This summer, we joined with community partners to support coding academies across the United States from Code Academy in Nashville to One Summer Chicago to the Coding 5K Camp for Girls right next door in San Jose. We've also just expanded our racial equity and justice initiative into the UK for the first time. Alongside the South Pink Center, we're helping aspiring creators develop their own voices and position themselves for long-lasting careers. Back in the US, we welcomed a new class of Black, Latino and indigenous entrepreneurs to Apple's second Impact Accelerator. This group of innovators is focused on using green technology to mitigate the effects of climate change and serve communities most affected by it. At Apple, we care deeply about protecting the planet for future generations. To that end, in support of our 2030 environmental goals, we have asked all of our suppliers to become carbon-neutral across their entire Apple-related footprint by the end of the decade. We are also providing them with resources based on what we learned achieving net-zero carbon in our own global operations. Across our entire product lineup, we also continue to source more materials through recycling while taking less from the Earth. Every iPhone 14 is made with 100% recycled rare-earth elements in all magnets, including those used in MagSafe. And in a first for Apple Watch and iPad, we're using recycled gold in the plating of multiple printed circuit boards in our newest devices. While we're working to reduce the footprint of our hardware, we're making changes to our software to be more environmentally-friendly with the soon-to-be released Clean Energy charging feature for iPhone. Our 2030 goal is a reflection of our relentless focus on the future at Apple. The world continues to be unpredictable as old challenges evolve and new ones emerge. What remains constant is the ability of our teams to create great products, services and experiences while being a force for good in the world. Whatever challenges lie ahead in the new year, we're moving forward, as we always have, investing for the long-term to deliver incredible innovations for our customers like only Apple can. And now, I'll hand it over to Luca for more details on our performance.
Luca Maestri:
Thank you, Tim, and good afternoon, everyone. We are very pleased to report record financial results for the September quarter that capped another record fiscal year for Apple despite a challenging and volatile macroeconomic backdrop. We reached a September quarter revenue record of $90.1 billion, up 8% year-over-year despite over 600 basis points of negative foreign exchange impact, with new September quarter records in the Americas, Europe, Greater China and rest of Asia Pacific. Importantly, in constant currency, we grew nicely in each of our geographic segments, with strong double-digit growth outside the US. Products revenue was $71 billion, up 9% over last year despite FX headwinds and a record for the September quarter. And it was a September quarter revenue record for iPhone and Wearables, Home and Accessories and an all-time revenue record for Mac. Overall, our installed base of active devices continue to grow nicely. It reached an all-time high for all major product categories and geographic segments at the end of the quarter, thanks to extremely strong customer satisfaction and loyalty and a high number of customers that are new to our products. Our Services set a September quarter revenue record of $19.2 billion, up 5% over a year ago despite over 600 basis points of negative impact from foreign exchange. We reached September quarter revenue records in the Americas, Europe, Greater China and rest of Asia Pacific and also in many Services categories, including all-time revenue records for cloud services and payment services. Company gross margin was a September quarter record at 42.3%. It was down 100 basis points from last quarter due to unfavorable foreign exchange and a different mix, partially offset by leverage. Products gross margin was 34.6%, up 10 basis points sequentially, with improved leverage and favorable mix partially offset by foreign exchange. Services gross margin was 70.5%, down 100 basis points sequentially, primarily due to foreign exchange. Net income of $20.7 billion, diluted earnings per share of $1.29 and operating cash flow of $24.1 billion were all September quarter records. Let me now get into more detail for each of our revenue categories. iPhone revenue grew 10% year-over-year to a September quarter record of $42.6 billion, despite significant foreign exchange headwinds. We set September quarter records in the vast majority of markets we track, and our performance was particularly impressive in several large emerging markets, with India setting a new all-time revenue record and Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia and Mexico more than doubling year-over-year. Thanks to our strong iPhone lineup, we set a quarterly record for upgraders and grew switchers double digits. This level of sales performance, along with unmatched customer loyalty, drove the active installed base of iPhones to a new all-time high across all geographic segments. And the latest survey of US consumers from 451 Research indicates iPhone customer satisfaction of 98%. It was a great quarter for Mac. We achieved an all-time revenue record of $11.5 billion, up 25% year-over-year, despite significant FX headwinds. There were three key items that helped drive this performance. First, we benefited from the launch of our new MacBook Air and MacBook Pro powered by the M2 chip. Second, we were able to satisfy pent-up demand that carried forward from the significant supply constraints we faced during the June quarter. Third, as our supply position improved, we were able to fill the channel. Importantly, our investment in the category has attracted both upgraders and customers new to Mac and helped our installed base reach an all-time high. In fact, we set a quarterly record for upgraders, while nearly half of customers buying Macs during the quarter were new to the device. iPad revenue was $7.2 billion, down 13% year-over-year due to significant negative foreign exchange and a challenging compare due to the launch of new iPads a year ago. Despite this, the iPad installed base reached a new all-time high, thanks to incredible customer loyalty and a high number of new customers. In fact, over half of the customers who purchased iPads during the quarter were new to the product. Wearables, Home and Accessories revenue was $9.7 billion, growing 10% year-over-year, driven by the launch of Apple Watch and new AirPods Pro. This level of safe performance along with very strong new tool rates, drove our installed base of devices in the category to a new all-time record. For instance, two-thirds of customers purchasing an Apple Watch during the quarter were new to the product. Moving to Services, as I mentioned, we set a September quarter record in aggregate and in most geographic segments, generating $19.2 billion in revenue in spite of very large foreign exchange headwinds. It is important to remember, that we achieved double-digit constant currency growth in Services on top of growing 26% during the September quarter a year ago. However, certain services were impacted by macroeconomic headwinds, including foreign exchange. Digital advertising and gaming are areas where we've seen some softness. Throughout the quarter, we continued to observe several trends that reflect the strength of our ecosystem and our long-term opportunity in the category. First, our continued installed base growth across each geographic segment and each major product category represents a great foundation for future expansion of our ecosystem. Second, we saw increased customer engagement with our Services during the quarter. Both our transacting accounts and paid accounts grew double digits year-over-year, each setting a new all-time record. The percentage of accounts that pay for our services continues to increase, and we still see plenty of opportunity ahead of us. Third, paid subscriptions showed very strong growth. We now have more than 900 million paid subscriptions across the Services on our platform, up more than 155 million during the last 12 months alone and double what we had just three years ago. We continue investing in new content and features, across our service offerings. For example, we added several popular sports titles to Apple Arcade. We're also excited about our global partnership with Major League Soccer, where starting next season, fans can stream every single MLS match through the Apple TV app. This momentum helped us achieve over $78 billion in Services revenue during fiscal 2022, a new record and up 14% year-over-year. We continue to invest confidently and believe strongly in the long-term potential of our Services business, which is already the size of a Fortune 50 business on its own, and has nearly doubled during the last four years. It was not only a record year for Services but also for our entire company. During the past four quarters, we grew our business by 8% or $29 billion, reaching more than $394 billion of revenue. We grew diluted earnings per share by 9% and generated over $111 billion of free cash flow, up 20% year-over-year. It was also a strong year for our enterprise business, as we set new annual records for iPhone, iPad and Mac during fiscal 2022 and grew strong double-digits year-over-year as our devices and services continue to help more-and-more companies empower their employees and serve their customers. For instance, Ford Manufacturing employees are using iPad and iPhone to help further improve the quality of its game-changing Ford F-150 Lightning electric trucks. iPhone's powerful A-series chip and advanced camera systems, along with third-party iOS apps, are enabling Ford to automate the visual quality inspection process in real-time to help address issues before they impact customers. And Cisco expanded its Macs as a choice program and is now offering it to all its employees to help attract and retain top talent. And when given this choice, employees have chosen Macs twice as often as other options. In addition, many enterprise customers are taking advantage of the high residual value of our products and simple trade-in process to standardize the refresh cycles for their fleets of Apple devices. This allows employees to upgrade to the latest devices regularly while making it highly predictable and cost effective for the business. Let me now turn to our cash position. Our business continues to generate very strong cash flow, which enabled us to return over $29 billion to shareholders during the September quarter. This included $3.7 billion in dividends and equivalents and $25.2 billion through open market repurchases of 160 million Apple shares. We ended the quarter with $169 billion in cash and marketable securities. We repaid $2.8 billion in maturing debt and decreased commercial paper by $1 billion while issuing $5.5 billion of new debt, leaving us with total debt of $120 billion. As a result, net cash was $49 billion at the end of the quarter as we continue to make progress toward our goal of becoming net cash neutral over time. As we move ahead into the December quarter, I'd like to review our outlook, which includes the types of forward-looking information that Tejas referred to at the beginning of the call. Given the continued uncertainty around the world in the near term, we are not providing revenue guidance but we are sharing some directional insights based on the assumption that the macroeconomic outlook and COVID-related impacts to our business do not worsen from what we are projecting today for the current quarter. Overall, we believe total company year-over-year revenue performance will decelerate during the December quarter as compared to the September quarter for a number of reasons. First, we expect nearly 10 percentage points of negative year-over-year impact from foreign exchange. Second, on Mac, in addition to increasing FX headwinds, we have a very challenging compare against last year, which had the benefit of the launch and associated channel fill of our newly redesigned MacBook Pro with M1. Therefore, we expect Mac revenue to decline substantially year-over-year during the December quarter. Specifically on Services, we expect to grow but to be impacted by the macroeconomic environment increasingly affecting foreign exchange, digital advertising and gaming. We expect gross margin to be between 42.5% and 43.5%. We expect OpEx to be between $14.7 billion and $14.9 billion. We expect OI&E to be around negative $300 million, excluding any potential impact from the mark-to-market of minority investments and our tax rate to be around 16.5%. Finally, today, our Board of Directors has declared a cash dividend of $0.23 per share of common stock, payable on November 10, 2022, to shareholders of record as of November 7, 2022. With that, let's open the call to questions.
Tejas Gala:
Thank you, Luca. We ask that you limit yourself to two questions. Operator, may we please have the first question?
Operator:
We'll go ahead and take our first question from Shannon Cross calling from Credit Suisse. Please go ahead.
Q – Shannon Cross:
Thank you very much. It's great to talk to you on the call again. I'm wondering, can you just talk a bit about how you're thinking about this iPhone generation? On the positive side, you've raised prices. It seems to be mixing up. On the negative side, investors are concerned about impacted demand from the higher prices, what Huawei meant to you in prior years versus what could happen now. There are just some pressures out there. So I'm curious if you can kind of talk to what you're seeing initially in iPhone demand and how you think it will move through. With the caveat that I understand, things are pretty uncertain out there. And then I have a follow-up. Thank you.
Tim Cook:
Shannon, it's Tim. Welcome back. iPhone grew 10% in the Q4 timeframe to $42.6 billion. Customer demand was strong and better than we anticipated that it would be. And keep in mind that this is on top of a fiscal year of 2021 that had iPhone revenue grow by 39%, and so it's a tough compare as well. And so we were happy with it. In terms of the new products, the 14 and the 14 Pro and Pro Max, the -- it's still very early. But since the beginning, we've been constrained on the 14 Pro and the 14 Pro Max and we continue to be constrained today. And so we're working very hard to fulfill the demand. It's difficult to say what the mix will be until we can satisfy the demand because we don't really -- we're not able to determine the accurate mix until then. And so we -- but we're working very hard to do that. We were really pleased with the broadness of the iPhone strength last quarter. We had three of the top four smartphones in the U.S. and the UK, the top three in Urban China, the top six in Australia, four out of the top five in Germany and the top two in Japan. And customer satisfaction for the iPhone remains very, very strong at 98%. And so we feel very good about how we performed in Q4. And certainly, the start of this generation would suggest that we're going to be constrained for a little while on the 14 Pro and 14 Pro Max. But we're working very hard to try to remedy that.
Shannon Cross:
Thank you. And then, Luca, can you talk a bit about gross margin puts and takes? Just how we should think about, I mean, 10 basis points of currency this coming quarter is, I don't want to say unprecedented, but maybe it is. So I know you have hedges, but how do we think about it flowing through? And then what other -- components seem to be very favorable. But what else should we throw into the mix as we look forward?
Luca Maestri:
Yeah. Well, let me start with gross margin in Q4 and then I'll get to Q1. It was a September quarter record for the company. We did 42.3%, and that is in spite of, as you mentioned, very significant negative FX in -- for example, for Q4, on a sequential basis, FX was negative 70 basis points and on a year-over-year basis it was negative 170 basis points. Essentially every currency around the world has weakened against the dollar. Now, we have guided Q1 to 42.5% to 43.5% in spite of the fact that we have, on a year-over-year basis, 330 basis points of negative exchange. Sequentially, it's 120 basis points unfavorable. So obviously, the strong dollar makes it difficult in a number of areas. Obviously, our pricing in emerging markets makes it difficult, and the translation of that revenue back into dollars is affected. But on the positive side, we are seeing commodities behave fairly favorably for us. And so we believe we can offset the foreign exchange – the negative foreign exchange that we're seeing. And I think that the guidance that we provided reflects that. It takes into account, of course, FX. It takes into account some level of inflationary pressures. But I think the outcome is, I think, is a good one.
Shannon Cross:
Great. Thank you very much.
Tejas Gala:
Thanks, Shannon. Can we have the next question, please?
Operator:
Yes, sir. Our next question is coming from Erik Woodring with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead, sir.
Erik Woodring:
Hey, guys, thanks very much for taking my questions. I have two as well. Maybe if we could just start. Luca, we saw quite the divergence in iPad and Mac performance this quarter. Both were relatively constrained from a supply perspective. So maybe can you just elaborate on some of the most impacted -- important factors that contributed to kind of the divergence in performance and whether after we get through the December quarter, those can reverse or normalize? And then I have a follow-up.
A – Tim Cook:
Yeah, Erik, it's Tim. I'll take your question. On – if you look at the Mac, the Mac, it was the best quarter we've ever had in the history of the company. It was helped by the product launch of the MacBook Air with M2. It was helped that in the previous quarter, in the June quarter, if you remember, we lost output from the factory for a significant portion of the quarter. And so we had a backlog exiting our Q3 headed into Q4. We were able to satisfy all of that demand during Q4 and filled the channel for the Mac. And so that led to an incredible Mac quarter. If you look at iPad, iPad had sort of the opposite happening from a launch point of view. The comp from a year ago, we launched iPads in September. We launched iPads this year in October. The other point to remember is that the iPad Pro had just launched before the quarter started in the year-ago quarter so it was our first full quarter of iPad Pro. So it was an exceptionally strong iPad quarter a year ago, and the launches were really key to that performance. And so that's the reason iPad contracted during this quarter.
Erik Woodring:
Okay, that's helpful. Thank you, Tim. And then maybe, Luca, if I were just to ask you, obviously, Tejas at the beginning of the call talked about the 14-week quarter. Maybe can you just elaborate a little bit on how you think that 14-week quarter impacts different line items, whether it's products or certain segments within the product business or the Services stand-alone? Just where we should see that 14-week quarter provide a bit more of a tailwind versus maybe not have an impact at all? And that's it for me. Thanks.
Luca Maestri:
In general, we have a few more days in the quarter that we're going to -- are going to affect both our revenues and our costs. Not every week is equal because obviously, we have certain peaks during the course of the quarter. Think about Black Friday or the Christmas holiday. But, in general, we're adding a few days of sale and additional OpEx as well on the cost front. So that's what happens to us every approximately six years as we need to align our weekly calendar to the fiscal calendar.
Erik Woodring:
Super. Thanks, guys.
Tejas Gala:
Thanks, Erik. Can we have the next question, please?
Operator:
Yes, sir. The next question is coming from Ben Bollin calling from Cleveland Research.
Ben Bollin:
Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for taking the question. Tim, I was hoping we could talk a little bit about services, pieces within the portfolio. It looks like there's been some price adjustments as of late with respect to Music, TV+ and the One bundle. I'm curious how you think about balancing the consumer price versus your own costs and kind of the associated follow-through. And then I have a follow-up.
Tim Cook:
Yes. If you look at the price increase that you referenced, Ben, on Monday of this week, we announced a price increase on Apple Music and on Apple TV+ and then the corresponding Apple One, that is the consolidated bundle that includes both of those. On -- there's really two different situations here. With Music, the cost of licensing increased. And so we are paying more for music. The good thing about that is the artist will also get more money for their songs that are enjoyed on streaming. And so there's some bit of good news there, I suppose. And then on Apple TV+, if you look at when we first priced it, we only had a very few shows. We were at the beginning. We are very focused on originals only, and so we had four or five shows or so in the beginning and priced it quite low. We now have a lot more content and are coming out on -- with more each and every month. And so, we've increased the price to represent the value of the service. And of course, Apple One is just the consolidation of those two price changes.
Ben Bollin:
Okay. And then, another item. Any preliminary thoughts around capital intensity into fiscal 2023? Last couple of years, CapEx has been relatively stable. Can you talk to the big constituents of the CapEx figure and maybe any moving pieces and how we could think about that to 2023? Thank you.
Luca Maestri:
Yes, Ben. So when we look at our CapEx, as you correctly said, I mean, we've been fairly stable, and I think our capital intensity is really very good. We have three major buckets in CapEx for the company. We have certain dedicated tools for the manufacturing facilities. We had some spend around data centers, and we have spend around our office facilities around the world. We obviously monitor all of them. There is nothing unusual that we see for the next 12 months.
Ben Bollin:
Okay. Thanks, guys.
Tejas Gala:
Thanks, Ben. Can we have our next question, please
Operator:
Yes, sir. Our next question is coming from Kyle McNealy calling from Jefferies. Please go ahead.
Kyle McNealy:
Hi, thanks very much. Just wanted to see if you could give us a sense for what drove the Wearables result and the strength there this quarter. Was it from the maybe strong iPhone attach rates or the new products that you have available that were announced this quarter, or maybe you're still getting some benefit from customers that are more willing to come into the store now and try things on versus the pandemic when that was kind of shut down?
Tim Cook:
Yes. Kyle, it's Tim. The -- if you look at Wearables, we grew 10%, which we were very happy with. If you look at the individual pieces of that, Apple Watch was a contributor. And in particular, the new lineup was a contributor, including the Apple Watch Ultra and the Apple Watch Series 8 and the SE. The Ultra is -- was supply constrained and continues to be supply constrained during this quarter thus far. And so we're working hard to satisfy the demand bearing, get those products to customers. We also announced and launched the AirPods Pro in September. And the reviews for the product have just been off the charts in terms of the noise cancellation features and the sound quality. We're getting great, great reviews from there. In terms of what played the other way, the headwinds, obviously, FX was a headwind that affected Wearables, Home and Accessories, just like it affected the rest of our products and services. And we also had effect from the business in Russia, obviously, or the impact there. So that's sort of the pro and the con. The other thing that I should mention is that about two-thirds of the Apple Watches that we sold were to customers that had not previously owned an Apple Watch. And so the -- we're still very much selling to new customers here, which is very, very good for the future.
Kyle McNealy:
Okay, great. One more quick one on Mac. I wanted to see if you could quantify at all how much the channel fill and how much came from satisfying back orders from the June period for Mac. We're just trying to get a sense for where the baseline is, if there's any sense you can give us on that. What would it have grown if not for those factors? Anything you can give us would be great. Thanks.
Tim Cook:
Yes. I would just say that all three of the reasons that I gave were key in achieving the 25%. The M2 MacBook Air, the launch of the new product, the -- satisfying the back orders from the previous quarter and then filling the channel, all of those were key contributors.
Kyle McNealy:
Okay, Tim. Thanks.
Tejas Gala:
Thanks, Kyle. Can we have our next question, please
Operator:
Yes, sir. The next question is coming from Mr. Jim Suva calling from Citigroup.
Jim Suva:
Thank you and it's great to see that you talked about your suppliers going carbon-neutral, something -- a small statement I really took to heart. Thank you. My question is on the Services. Could it possibly be impacted more by FX than product, meaning the Jim Suva family has Apple One and TV+ and all that, and we pay typically on annual, but then when we go into the store to buy new Watches and iPad, the price is adjusted more quickly. So could it be that Services growth was impacted a little bit more by FX and down the road, we could see growth reaccelerate, or am I just reading too much into the FX impact that could be different from Services versus product? Thank you.
Luca Maestri:
Jim, it's Luca. No, you're right. Obviously, the FX impact on our business depends on the geographic mix of the sales that we do. And so yes, it can be -- Services and products can have slightly different effects on foreign exchange. And so, if we look at our Services business in constant currency, we would have grown double digits. And so we're very pleased with that. As I mentioned, there were some areas that we could see some softness in digital advertising. Of course, you know that part, and gaming on the App Store was affected. But we were very happy with what we saw in terms of the behavior of our customers with the engagement with Services. And I mentioned a number of things during the prepared remarks, the fact that, obviously, that installed base is growing, that's a positive and it's a great foundation for the future. We are seeing more transacting accounts and more paid accounts, they're both growing double digits. Paid accounts are growing faster than transacting accounts, so the penetration of paid accounts is increasing. We have a great subscription business, 900 million paid subs now on the platform and growing very fast. We doubled in 3 years. So when we look at all those dynamics, that's the part that is really interesting to us because we really believe that the engine for Services growth is there and foreign exchange is a temporary thing and – but the fundamentals are very good.
Jim Suva:
Thank you. Congratulations for your team.
Tejas Gala:
Thanks Jim. Can we have the next question, please.
Operator:
The next question is coming from Amit Daryanani from Evercore. Please go ahead.
Amit Daryanani:
Thanks for taking my question. I have 2 as well. The first 1 really is around the iPhone trajectory. There's been a fair amount of focus in terms of what's going to happen to iPhone demand, given the macro worries. It would be really helpful to understand though, given the strength you're seeing, where do you think channel inventory is for iPhones today versus where it would be from a historical perspective? And do you see the channel getting to an optimal level by end of December quarter? Because evenly right now given the lead time data, it looks like your revenue trajectory in iPhones is more driven by the supply you have versus demand. So any color on the channel inventory would be helpful.
Tim Cook:
Yes. If you look at where we ended, Amit, in the September quarter, we exited below our target inventory range on iPhone and that's -- that in and of itself is not too unusual in the quarter. We start the ramp and demand is robust and so forth. And so I wouldn't call it that abnormal from the past.
Q – :
Got it. And then I guess, Tim, you folks have been talking about digital advertising a fair bit over the last few quarters, I think. Is there any metrics, any vectors you can talk about kind of to give us a sense of how big those businesses or what vectors are you focused on? And really, if you could talk about, do you think Apple can build an advertising business at scale without sacrificing consumer privacy?
Tim Cook:
So our -- first and foremost, we focus on privacy and so we would not do anything that stepped away from that. We feel that privacy is a basic fundamental human right, and so that's sort of the lens that we look at it under. Our specific advertising business is not large and relative to others and so forth. But we don't release the exact numbers on it, but it's clearly not large.
Tejas Gala:
Thanks, Amit. Can we have the next question, please.
Operator:
Yes, sir. We'll now move on to Mr. Harsh Kumar calling from Piper Sandler. Please go ahead.
Harsh Kumar:
Yeah. Hey, thanks guys, First of all, fellows congratulations on stellar performance. There's a lot of large-cap companies that are getting ripped around, so we appreciate the steady cadence here. Tim, I wanted to ask you about inflation pressures and labor problems here in the US and globally. And maybe talk about what steps can Apple take to mitigate those? And maybe Luca, on that end, FX is becoming a pretty significant headwind. I was curious what -- if at all, if there's anything that can be done to mitigate that.
Tim Cook:
I'll let Luca talk about FX. In terms of the people piece, we're focused on taking care of our teams and offering them the best benefits and best compensation so that we can empower them to do the best work of their lives. And so that's what we're focused on in terms of our teams. In terms of inflation, there's clearly wage inflation. There's inflation related to logistics as well. If you compare it to pre-pandemic kind of levels, that has not returned to pre pandemic levels by any means. And there's certain silicon components that are -- have inflationary pressure as well. And so that's not an all-inclusive list of where we see it, but it gives you some ingredients of where we see inflation pressure. And we've obviously taken that into consideration in the gross margin guidance that Luca gave earlier in the call.
Luca Maestri:
Yes. And on foreign exchange, you're right. I mean, it's obviously a very significant factor that is affecting our results, both revenue and gross margin. What do we do about situation like this, one where we have a very strong dollar? Of course, we hedge our exposures. We try to hedge them in as many places as possible around the world. For example, I think we've been probably the first company that started hedging our exposure in China several years ago. There may be a few currency, small ones, where we don't hedge because the cost is prohibitive or the market is not there. But in general, we tend to hedge because it gives us significant level of margin stability. Obviously, over time, that protection reduces because the hedges roll over and we need to buy new contracts. But that's the primary tool that we use to offset some of the FX pressure. Of course, when we launch new products, in particular, we look at the FX situation. And in some cases, for example, customers in international markets had to -- they saw some price increases when we launched the new products, which is not something that, for example, US customers have seen. And that's unfortunately the situation that we're in right now with the strong dollar. So that's the way we try to deal with that. I have to say that one of the things that we've really appreciated the most during the quarter was the fact that in spite of this very strong dollar and the difficult FX environment, we have seen very strong performance in many international markets, particularly some very large emerging markets where even in reported currencies, so in US dollars, we're seeing very strong double-digit growth in places like India, Indonesia, Mexico, Vietnam, many places where we've done incredibly well. And obviously, in local currency, those growth rates are even higher. It's important for us to look at how these markets perform in local currency because it really gives us a good sense for the customer response to our products, the engagement with our ecosystem and in general, the strength of the brand. And I have to say, in that respect, we feel very, very good about the progress that we're making in a lot of markets around the world.
Harsh Kumar:
Thanks, Tim and Luca. I had a follow-up. Luca, in your prepared remarks for the guidance, you mentioned that for the December quarter, you expect the performance to decelerate relative to September. So September was a year-over-year about, call it, 8%. Should I think that, that 8% number will go down on a year-over-year basis as we look at December? Maybe you could provide some color on what you're thinking. And are we still looking -- are we looking at a positive number, or are we thinking maybe that the growth rate will be negative on a year-over-year basis?
Luca Maestri:
What we said is that we're going to be decelerating from September, so September was 8%, so it's going to be a lower percentage than 8%. We're not providing guidance for the reasons that we've explained. There's a lot of uncertainty there. And so we see how the quarter progresses. Keep in mind the 10 points of exchange. Certainly, in normal times, we will be talking about very different numbers, but that's where we are right now.
Harsh Kumar:
Thank you guys.
Tejas Gala:
Thanks, Harsh. Can we have the next question please.
Operator:
Yes, sir. Next question is coming from Krish Sankar calling from Cowen & Company. Please go ahead.
Krish Sankar:
Yeah. Hi. Thanks for taking my question. I had two of them. First one, either for Tim or Luca, on cash and capital allocation. Given there's some correction and valuation for some of the private and public companies, does it change your thought process on the time line to get to cash-neutral? In other words, would you be more aggressive with acquisitions, or you think holding on to more cash due to interest income becomes more attractive versus your prior investment goals? And then I had a quick follow-up.
Tim Cook:
This is Tim. In terms of acquisitions, we averaged about one per month, I believe, in across fiscal year 2022. And so we're constantly looking in the market. And what's out there. And what things would be synergistic. And which things would provide either intellectual property or talent or preferably both that we would need. And so we're constantly looking at acquisitions of all sizes.
Luca Maestri:
In terms of cash deployment, obviously, we like to look at the capital return program over the long arc of time. And we have done, since the beginning of the program we've done over $550 billion of buyback at an average repurchase price of $47. So the program has been incredibly successful. We are still in a position where we have net cash. And we said all along, we want to get to cash-neutral at some point. Our cash generation has been very, very strong over the years, particularly last year. I think, I mentioned in the prepared remarks, we did $111 billion of free cash flow. That's up 20% year-over-year. And so we will put that capital to use for investors.
Krish Sankar:
Got it, got it, very helpful, Tim and Luca. And then a quick follow-up for Luca on the December guidance, thanks for the color on that. I'm just kind of curious, the extra week in the quarter, is that not helping offset some of the FX, or in other words, the 10 percentage point negative impact from FX will be much higher if that's a 13-week quarter?
Luca Maestri:
No, I wouldn't say that because those are percentages. So yeah, no, the 10 points wouldn't be different. 13 or 14 weeks would be the same.
Krish Sankar:
Got it. Got it. Thanks a lot Luca.
End of Q&A:
Tejas Gala:
Thank you, Krish. A replay of today's call will be available for two weeks on Apple Podcasts, as a Webcast on apple.com/investor and via telephone. The number for the telephone replay is 866-583-1035. Please enter confirmation code 7086300, followed by the pound sign. These replays will be available by approximately 5:00 p.m. Pacific Time today. Members of the press with additional questions can contact Josh Rosenstock at 408-862-1142. Financial analysts can contact me with additional questions at 669-227-2402. Thank you again for joining us.
Operator:
Once again, this concludes today's conference. We do appreciate your participation.
Operator:
Good day, and welcome to the Apple Q3 FY 2022 Earnings Conference Call. Today's call is being recorded. At this time, for opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn the call over to Tejas Gala, Director of Investor Relations and Corporate Finance. Please go ahead.
Tejas Gala:
Thank you. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us. Speaking first today is Apple's CEO, Tim Cook; and he'll be followed by CFO, Luca Maestri. After that, we'll open the call to questions from analysts. Please note that some of the information you'll hear during the discussion today will consist of forward-looking statements, including, without limitation, those regarding revenue, gross margin, operating expenses, other income and expense, taxes, capital allocation and future business outlook, including the potential impact of COVID-19 on the company's business and results of operation. These statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results or trends to differ materially from our forecast. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in Apple's most recently filed annual report on Form 10-K and the Form 8-K filed with the SEC today, along with the associated press release. Apple assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements or information, which speak as of their respective dates. I'd now like to turn the call over to Tim for introductory remarks.
Tim Cook:
Thank you, Tejas. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Today, Apple is reporting another record June quarter with revenue of $83 billion, which was better than we expected despite supply constraints, strong foreign exchange headwinds and the impact of our business in Russia. We set June quarter records in the Americas, in Europe and in the rest of Asia Pacific region. We also saw June quarter revenue records in both developed and emerging markets with very strong double-digit growth in Brazil, Indonesia and Vietnam and a near doubling of revenue in India. We saw great enthusiasm for our products and services, resulting in an all-time record for our installed base of active devices. Our supply constraints were less than we anticipated at the beginning of the quarter, coming in slightly below the range we discussed during our last call. We know that this is a time of significant challenge around the world for all of us confronting new variants of COVID-19, to those experiencing a prolonged humanitarian crisis in Ukraine and everyone dealing with the consequences of an uncertain economic environment. We know that much of the world is living through uneasy times, and it is all the more reason why we are working hard to help our customers navigate the world as it is while empowering them to create the world as it can be. Turning to iPhone. We set a June quarter record for both revenue and switchers to iPhone. With its advanced performance, capability and ease of use, customers continue to find that iPhone remains the gold standard for smartphones. And they've been raving about the iPhone 13 lineup's extraordinary camera quality with features like cinematic mode and macro photography to create eye-catching content. We were also proud to celebrate the 15th anniversary of iPhone, a device that continues to change the world in profound ways with each new innovation. Last month, Apple unleashed a wave of innovation, including the completely redesigned MacBook Air and a new 13-inch MacBook Pro. Both of these systems are powered by M2, our next generation of Apple silicon for Mac. M2 delivers a faster CPU, GPU and neural engine along with higher memory bandwidth and new capabilities like Pro Res acceleration. And it continues the tremendous pace of innovation in Apple silicon for the Mac. We continue to have supply constraints with Mac, but we're encouraged by the strong response from customers to our incredible lineup. iPad, like Mac, continued to see strong demand during the June quarter despite ongoing supply constraints. Customers and developers have been especially excited about the new features we're bringing to iPad with iPadOS 16. This update was one of the many announcements we made at a truly extraordinary WWDC, where we shared a range of new features that give customers more control of their experience than ever before. This includes the ability to edit or delete sent messages, a new way of organizing apps on iPad and Mac, and an all-new customizable lock screen on iPhone and so much more. Today, iOS 16, iPadOS 16, MacOS Ventura and watchOS 9 are all in public beta, and we couldn't be more excited to see what our community of developers creates with them. We unveiled new innovations and accessibility such as door detection and live captions that support users with disabilities with navigation, health, communication and more. We also announced Apple Pay Later, which gives customers more flexibility to make purchases with their Apple devices. And with our next generation of CarPlay, we're improving the driving experience with deeper integration into vehicle hardware, allowing drivers to control their music, change the temperature and monitor their fuel levels, all from a single integrated platform. In the Wearables, Home and Accessories category, the innovation infused across our products continues to win over new customers. Apple Watch remains a great way for health-conscious customers to track their overall wellness and fitness. And we're bringing them even more data about their workouts, sleep cycles and medications with updates soon to arrive on watchOS 9. We were also pleased to get FDA approval for a new feature that will let users with irregular heart rhythms track the time they spend in Afib. Turning to Services. Customers continue to engage enthusiastically with our content across news, fitness, music, gaming and more. Services revenue rose to $19.6 billion, a June quarter record and a 12% increase year-over-year, which was in line with our expectations. We're proud of how Apple TV+ productions like Severance and Black Bird have captured the popular imagination, and we're looking forward to more exceptional content developed by extraordinary creators throughout the year. In 2.5 years since launch, Apple TV+ has now earned 250 wins and over 1,100 award nominations and counting. Just this month, we learned that Apple TV+ earned 52 Emmy Award nominations across 13 titles. In our last call, I mentioned Friday Night Baseball on Apple TV+, which is already delighting baseball fans. And last month, we announced a 10-year deal to present Major League soccer matches around the world, giving global soccer fans a whole new way of viewing their favorite sport. One of the best parts of WWDC was welcoming developers to Apple Park while continuing to connect with developers all over the world. This year, we had an incredible group of developers and more opportunities to learn from one another than ever before. It was a truly special experience and a reminder of the economic miracle the App Store represents. We are proud of the fact that the iOS app economy supports more than 2.2 million jobs here in the United States and many more around the world. It's been wonderful to see earnings by small developers more than double over the past 2 years. And as we're supporting developers, we're also doing our part to protect customers. In 2021, we prevented nearly $1.5 billion in fraudulent transactions by stopping over 1.6 million risky and vulnerable apps and app updates. Now I want to turn to retail. This quarter, we opened the doors to Apple's first store in the Hubei province in China, welcoming the community to a beautiful new space. And earlier today, we opened Apple Brompton Road, our fifth store in Central London. We also expanded today at Apple Creative Studios to reach even more young creatives from underrepresented communities to help them realize their potential and bring their best ideas to life. I'd like to take this opportunity to express my appreciation to our team members working in Apple Stores, customer care centers and channel partner stores and to our Apple Care teams for their incredible work supporting customers wherever they are. Creating innovative products and services that enrich people's lives is our mission. Leading with our values and everything we do gives that mission purpose. That includes a commitment to the environment where we continue our aggressive pursuit of our 2030 goals. It includes our focus on diversity and inclusion, where we are committed as ever to making progress. And it includes our work to promote racial equity and justice. We recently announced that the Global Equity Innovation Hub, in partnership with Cal State Northridge, will provide new community grants to Hispanic-serving institutions to help the next generation of creators and innovators build skills and pursue high-demand careers in STEM. We also celebrated the graduation of the inaugural class of our Developer Academy in Detroit from a program designed to give students the skills they need to pursue jobs in the thriving iOS app economy. Leading with our values also means leading with a steadfast commitment to privacy and security. Last month, we announced the introduction of passkey, a next-generation credential that's intended to replace passwords. A passkey can't be phished nor can it be stolen by hackers in a data breach because the information is stored on your device and your device alone. And as part of our effort to combat targeted attacks against the highest risk targets like journalists and human rights activists, we introduced Lockdown Mode, which is designed to protect those most at risk of sophisticated digital attacks. And we're committed to doing our part to address the housing crisis across California. To date, we have deployed more than $1.3 billion to a number of initiatives, including ones that provide financial assistance to low and moderate income first-time home buyers develop new affordable housing and help support vulnerable populations. This quarter has ultimately been a reflection of our resilience and our optimism. As we look forward, we're clear-eyed about the uncertainty in the macro environment. Yet we remain ever focused on the same vision that has guided us from the beginning. We strive every day to be a place where imagination ignites innovation like nowhere else, where good people come together to achieve great things, where customers are the center of everything we do. And we'll continue to execute on that vision as we always have, led by a focus on excellence and a desire to leave the world better than we found it. And with that, I'll turn it over to Luca.
Luca Maestri:
Thank you, Tim, and good afternoon, everyone. We are very pleased to report June quarter financial results that continue to demonstrate our ability to innovate across hardware, software and services while operating our business effectively during very challenging economic circumstances. We set a June quarter revenue record of $83 billion, up 2% year-over-year despite supply constraints, over 300 basis points of foreign exchange headwinds and the impact of our business in Russia. Around the world, we set new June quarter records in the Americas, in Europe and rest of Asia Pacific. On the product side, revenue was $63.4 billion with a June quarter revenue record for iPhone. During the quarter, our installed base of active devices continue to grow well, thanks to our unmatched levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty and reached an all-time high for all major product categories and geographic segments. Our Services set a June quarter revenue record of $19.6 billion, up 12% over a year ago, with all-time revenue records in the Americas and the rest of Asia Pacific and June quarter records in Europe and Greater China. We also achieved June quarter revenue records in each major Services category, including all-time revenue records for Music, Cloud Services, Apple Care and Payment Services. Company gross margin was 43.3%, down 40 basis points from last quarter as seasonal loss of leverage and unfavorable foreign exchange were partially offset by favorable mix. Products gross margin was 34.5%, down 190 basis points sequentially, mainly driven by seasonal loss of leverage, mix and FX. Services gross margin was 71.5%, down 110 basis points sequentially due to a different mix and foreign exchange. Net income was $19.4 billion and diluted earnings per share were $1.20, while operating cash flow of $22.9 billion was a June quarter record. Let me now get into more detail for each of our revenue categories. iPhone revenue grew 3% year-over-year to a June quarter record of $40.7 billion despite foreign exchange headwinds as customer response to our iPhone 13 family continue to be strong. We set June quarter records in both developed and emerging markets. And the iPhone active installed base reached a new all-time high across all geographies as a result of this level of sales performance combined with unmatched customer loyalty. In fact, the latest survey of U.S. consumers from 451 Research indicates iPhone customer satisfaction of 98%. We also attracted a record number of switchers for the June quarter, with strong double-digit year-over-year growth. For Mac, we generated revenue of $7.4 billion despite supply constraints and negative effects. We continue to be excited about our long-term opportunity with Mac and redefining the PC experience with our relentless innovation. Our investment focus on Mac has helped drive significant growth in our installed base, which reached an all-time high during the June quarter as nearly half of the customers purchasing a Mac were new to the product. iPad revenue was $7.2 billion, down 2% year-over-year due to supply constraints and negative foreign exchange. Customer response to our iPad lineup continue to be strong across consumer, education and enterprise markets around the world. And the iPad installed base reached a new all-time high, with over half of the customers during the quarter being new to the product. Wearables, Home and Accessories revenue was $8.1 billion, down 8% year-over-year as we faced foreign exchange headwinds, different launch timing for Home and Accessories products and supply constraints as well as the overall macroeconomic environment. Despite this, our installed base of devices in the category hit a new all-time record, thanks to very strong customer loyalty and high new tool rates. For example, Apple Watch continues to extend its reach, with over 2/3 of customers purchasing an Apple Watch during the quarter being new to the product. Services had a June quarter revenue record of $19.6 billion, up 12% despite almost 500 basis points of FX headwinds as well as impacts from our business in Russia and the macroeconomic environment. We set June quarter revenue records in both developed and emerging markets and set all-time records in many countries around the world, including the U.S., Mexico, Brazil, Korea and India. The record level of performance of our Services portfolio during the June quarter reflects the strength of our ecosystem on many fronts
Tejas Gala:
Thank you, Luca. [Operator Instructions]. Operator, may we have the first question, please?
Operator:
[Operator Instructions]. We'll take our first question from Amit Daryanani with Evercore.
Amit Daryanani:
I guess two from my side. Maybe to start on the gross margin discussion, Luca. You said that implying gross margin will be down I think, 130, 140 basis points sequentially and down a bit year-over-year as well in September. Maybe just what are the puts and takes here. And then very specifically, can you actually just call what the FX headwinds are embedded in the September quarter gross margin, that would be helpful.
Luca Maestri:
Yes, Amit. We're guiding 41.5% to 42.5%. On a sequential basis, the decline is expected to be driven by, as you mentioned, foreign exchange but also mix, which will be partially offset by better leverage. We expect foreign exchange impact on a sequential basis to be 50 basis points. If you look at it from a year-over-year standpoint, we are in the ballpark of a year ago in spite of the fact that foreign exchange is going to be 130 basis points negative to a year ago. So clearly, foreign exchange is something that is affecting us but we think we're navigating that fairly well.
Amit Daryanani:
Fair enough. And then if I could just ask Tim the question. There's a lot of macro worries and high inflation impacting consumer demand. Certainly doesn't seem to be very visible in your performance and your expectations. So I'm wondering if you talk about, are you seeing any implications from recession fears or inflation fears to your end demand? And really just related to that, wearables decline was notable. Is that where you would typically see initial signs of consumer softening perhaps?
Tim Cook:
Thanks for the question. If you -- I'm not an economist and so I'll sort of narrow my comments to what we saw in the business. And if you look at the June quarter, we do believe that we saw macroeconomic headwinds that impacted our business and our results. And so one of those is clearly the FX, which Luca has mentioned, that was over 300 basis points on year-over-year growth rates. When you look at the product categories, on iPhone, there was no obvious evidence of macroeconomic impact during the June quarter besides FX, obviously. Mac and iPad were so gated by supply that we didn't have enough product to test the demand. And Wearables, Home and Accessories, as you mentioned and as Luca mentioned, we did see some impact there that we would attribute to a macroeconomic environment. When you then look at Services, there were some Services that were impacted, for example, like digital advertising was clearly impacted by the macroeconomic environment. And so it's a mixed bag in terms of what we believe that we saw. Overall, we are very happy with the results. And when you think about the number of challenges in the quarter, we feel really good about the growth that we put up for the quarter.
Operator:
We'll take our next question from Harsh Kumar with Piper Sandler.
Harsh Kumar:
Yes. First of all, congratulations. As these are tough times, you guys are putting up tremendous results so we appreciate that as investors. My question is, when I look at your Services business, I see a $20 billion business on a quarterly basis. And you keep adding -- as a company, you keep adding very interesting and transformative features such as payments, something like that every year. So I'm struggling to find a good way to think about how to model the growth of this business, considering that you add innovative features. So now that it's fairly matured as a business, what would be a good way for us to think about as investors to model the Services business? And I do have a follow-up.
Luca Maestri:
Well, as you know, we don't provide guidance past the current quarter. But I think the way to think about it, certainly the way we think about it is that there's a number of levers in our Services business to take into account. The first one is installed base. Installed base is the engine for our company and it continues to grow. As I mentioned, it has reached an all-time high across every geographic segment, across every product category. And so that's very important. Then the second lever is the customer engagement. And we know that our customers are getting more and more engaged over time. Transacting accounts, paid accounts, paid subscriptions are growing, so the level of engagement continues to grow. And then as you mentioned, the breadth and the quality of the services that we offer tends to grow over time. So these are all things that tend to help us over the long term. If you go back and you look at our growth rates over a number of quarters now, they've always been very good. Of course, the macro environment can have an impact on this business. Tim has mentioned, for example, digital advertising can be affected at times. During COVID, some of the compares have been a bit lumpy because there have been lockdowns and reopenings and so on. So it's very difficult to talk about a steady state growth rate for our Services business. But when we look at the entirety of what we are doing in the Services space, we feel very good about the future of the business.
Harsh Kumar:
Luca, very helpful. And for my follow-up, valuations have come down in the last 18 months or so for things and companies and targets that you might look at. I guess, particularly in the Services area, would there be an appetite on behalf of Apple to accelerate the growth of its Services business by looking at external products to acquire?
Tim Cook:
We always look and we ask ourselves if it's -- how strategic it is, and we never buy just to buy or buy just for revenue purposes. But we would buy something that is strategic for us. To date, we have concentrated on smaller IP and people acquisitions. But I wouldn't rule anything out for the future, and obviously, we are constantly surveilling the market.
Operator:
We'll take our next question from Erik Woodring with Morgan Stanley.
Erik Woodring:
I have two as well. Maybe Tim, if I start with you, I think there's a debate in the market that if you look back over time, there's been a 3-year cadence to iPhone cycles. We're 2 years into your 5G iPhone evolution. You're on track to grow units in '21 and '22. That implies there could be some pressure next year as upgrade rates slow. But your comments really suggest no slowdown. You're seeing double-digit growth in customers new to iPhone. So can you just walk us through some of the various factors you believe are driving this continued iPhone strength? And then I have a follow-up.
Tim Cook:
Today, the product and the innovation within the product that is driving it. And of course, the other key variables are some things that Luca mentioned earlier where the size of the installed base has been growing significantly. We also, just in this quarter, the June quarter, set a June quarter record for switchers with strong double-digit growth. And so this is fueling the additional installed base even more. And we continue to execute across some significant geographies where there's a very low penetration of iPhone. Some of those were called out in the opening remarks between Indonesia and Vietnam and India, where we did quite well, and iPhone tends to be the engine for those markets, particularly at the beginning of creating the market there for Apple products. And so we're really looking at all of these things from the installed base to the number of switchers to the geographic distribution. Of course, the most important thing for us is to maintain an incredible customer satisfaction and loyalty from the customers. And we're really pleased that it's currently at 98% for the latest iPhones. And so those are the things that underpin it. 5G has been an accelerant. And the 5G penetration, particularly if you look at it globally, is still quite low. In some geographies, it's obviously higher, but around the world, 5G penetration is still low. And so I think there's reason to be optimistic.
Erik Woodring:
Okay, that's helpful. And then maybe, Luca, for you. As we move from the June to the September quarter, maybe can you dig a level deeper and kind of help us understand some of the moving pieces in the Services business? Meaning where do you think we could see an acceleration or maybe a deceleration? And should we still expect double-digit growth? If you could just frame that for us, that would be great.
Luca Maestri:
Yes, Erik. I mentioned in my prepared remarks that we expect some deceleration from the 12% that we've had in the June quarter. Keep in mind, we're going to see, on a year-over-year basis, 600 basis points, 6% impact from foreign exchange so that is a big element for us. Also keep in mind that we're still lapping the impact of our business in Russia in these numbers. And Tim mentioned that there are some pockets of weakness, primarily in digital advertising that we will need to work through. But at the same time, our Services business a year ago grew a lot and so also the compare is a bit challenging. So we don't have a very specific number to give out today. Of course, we expect to grow. We will see how the quarter develops.
Operator:
We'll take our next question from Richard Kramer with Arete Research.
Richard Kramer:
Tim, you cited growth in Apple apps in the past, and clearly, the privacy policies you've taken have really reshaped the mobile ad market. Can you give us a sense of how you see Apple's role as an ad network and perhaps helping developers to monetize not just app sales but also growing ad monetization over time?
Tim Cook:
Yes. Richard, we view privacy as a fundamental human right. And so what we try to do with all of our features on privacy is put the decision back at the user where we believe it belongs as to whether they want to share their data or not. And so that was what was behind application tracking transparency and a number of other features. We're trying to empower the user to own their data and make their own choices. In terms of us selling ads, we have a search ad business across the App Store that we believe represents a great way for discovery for small and large developers. And so I see that we play a role in that.
Richard Kramer:
And then maybe my follow-up for Luca. Can you give us a sense, especially now that you're launching Pay Later, what steps you might be taking to improve affordability of Apple products? We know that it's going to be a tight time economically for people around the world. And how do you see the evolution of various payment plans out of the -- you see in the U.S. now into other markets, especially emerging markets?
Luca Maestri:
Yes. I mean, obviously, affordability is a very important topic for us. It's been for many years. Buy now, pay later is the latest that we are doing on this front. Fundamentally, we are working on 2 major initiatives for affordability. One is installment plans and installment plans have become more widespread around the world, not only here in the United States but in most markets, particularly in emerging markets. Incredibly important in terms of reducing the affordability threshold. And trading programs. Trading programs are available in a number of markets. We can do better in other markets. They're incredibly important because the residual value of our products is a huge differentiator for our users. After they use our devices, they can bring them back and they retain much more value than other platforms. And therefore, it's important for us to raise that awareness. And so we will continue to expand those programs around the world. So installments and trade-ins, very, very important on affordability.
Operator:
We'll take our next question from David Vogt with UBS.
David Vogt:
I just wanted to circle back on sort of the macro and sort of the demand signals that you're seeing versus sort of the supply chains that you're facing. I know that there's been a couple of U.S. carriers that have talked about some of their customers having some difficulty paying bills. And you mentioned in your prepared remarks that you saw sort of the record number of switchers in the quarter. So just wanted to kind of get a sense for what you're seeing in that particular channel without naming a specific customer. And are you seeing any sort of issues from a spin-down effect maybe because customers are having some difficulty because of inflation? And then I have a follow-up on Macs.
Tim Cook:
On the -- from an aggregate point of view, looking at it worldwide, looking at the data on iPhone for the June quarter, there's not obvious evidence in there that there's a macroeconomic headwind. I'm not saying that there's not one. I'm saying that the data doesn't show it where we can clearly see that in the Wearables, Home and Accessories area. And so I would differentiate those 2.
David Vogt:
Great. And then on the Mac business, I know that you are severely supply chain constrained. But is there a way to kind of think about the impact of the market overall on the Mac business versus the supply chain? It sounds like -- I guess, it sounds like it's almost effectively 100% supply chain constrained, but we're obviously hearing, like I'm sure you guys are seeing, anecdotal evidence and some quantifiable evidence that the broader PC market is slowing. And I think about 90 days ago, you were pretty confident with the new M2 chip that you could continue to grow throughout a potential drawdown in that particular market. Do you still feel that way? And if you can kind of share how you're thinking about the different sort of components of your growth versus the market.
Tim Cook:
Yes, I wouldn't want to project into this quarter. But for last quarter, what we saw was the -- when the COVID restrictions hit in the Shanghai corridor, we lost the primary source of supply for Mac units. And that was either running at a reduced rate or down completely for the majority of the quarter. And so it was a very big impact to the Mac business. We felt good, frankly, that we were able to, by the end of the quarter, get this back to where we were down 10 points. But the negative 10 I would classify as being driven by supply. And of course, FX feeds into this as well because of the translation issues around the world. There's also some impact because of the business in Russia. But those are the 3 kind of reasons that I would tell you. In terms of testing the demand, you can't really test the demand unless you have the supply. And we were so far from that last quarter that we have an estimate of what we believe demand was. But it is an estimate. We recognize how the industry is doing. We think that we've got a great story with the Mac with getting M1 out and now M2 out. We have a very, very strong offering for the back-to-school season and we'll see how we do this quarter. We'll report back in October.
Operator:
We'll take our next question from Ben Bollin with Cleveland Research.
Benjamin Bollin:
Tim, I was hoping you could share a little bit more about how you're thinking about the supply headwinds. You said less severe or less worse supply challenges into September. I'm interested when you think you find balance across products. And also, any thoughts on how or when that might influence replenishment of supply into your retail channels?
Tim Cook:
To give you a little more color on what we saw in the June quarter, we came in slightly below, from a constraint point of view, the $4 billion number that we had put, at the 4 to 8 are the low end of that range. And the majority of that constraint last quarter was coming out of the COVID restrictions that occurred, that resulted in plant closures and plants running at less than full utilization for some amount of the quarter, in some cases, the majority of the quarter. And then the other component that is the minority part of it is the silicon shortage that has affected our results for several quarters now. If you look into the future, the silicon shortage, we're not forecasting when that will end. We think that in the aggregate, our constraint numbers for the September quarter will be less than they were in the June quarter. But of the 2 -- there are these 2 components, and of course, we're optimistic about the COVID restriction piece of this.
Benjamin Bollin:
Okay. The other item. Tim, any thoughts on how you're thinking strategy is evolving with respect to progress in AR, VR in your existing products? Anything you're learning about content or how you're thinking about that opportunity?
Tim Cook:
We're thrilled right now to have over 14,000 ARKit apps in the App Store. And they're providing incredible AR experiences for millions of people. And that's utilizing iPhone and iPad. And of course, we are in the business of innovation so we're always exploring new and emerging technologies. But I wouldn't want to say anything beyond that.
Operator:
We'll take our next question from Wamsi Mohan with Bank of America.
Wamsi Mohan:
Luca, you mentioned revenues to accelerate year-over-year overall in September versus your June growth rate. Would you say that it would be reasonable to assume normal quarter-on-quarter seasonality of about $7 billion or so? Or would you say there are additional puts and takes this time around that could drive upside and downside to that? I know you noted 600 bps year-over-year on FX as potentially one of those. But maybe help us think through, on a sequential basis, how much of a normal versus abnormal seasonality we should expect? And I have a follow-up.
Luca Maestri:
Yes, Wamsi, as you know, as we said earlier, we're not providing guidance because of all the uncertainty out there. But we have given a few data points. So one of them, which you've mentioned, approximately 600 basis points of negative foreign exchange. I mean, you do a rough math, it's around $5 billion. That's a big number right there that is going to affect us, that we are having some impact from the situation in Russia and that is obviously different from normal seasonality as well. Our supply constraints, as Tim just said, are going to be lower than what we've seen in the June quarter but they're still going to be there. So when you look at those 3 headwinds and you combine them with the acceleration that we talked about, we feel that, that is pretty remarkable.
Wamsi Mohan:
Okay, Luca. And Tim, I wanted to follow up on your comment about the macro impact that you've seen on wearables. Your wearables portfolio is probably at the lowest ASP range across your product portfolio. As you're giving this guidance or directional guidance here, how much of an impact are you assuming in potentially any macro-related slowdowns across the rest of the portfolio? Why would investors not think that it would be prudent to assume some sort of creep-up of some of these -- some of the hesitation maybe that the macro environment is driving, particularly as it pertains to your higher ASP products?
Tim Cook:
Yes. Let me expand a little bit on Wearables, Home and Accessories so that I clearly communicate what we saw. We saw sort of a cocktail of headwinds on Wearables, Home and Accessories. We saw FX, which we've talked about. We saw supply constraints, which we've talked about. Of course, there was an impact from the business in Russia. But in addition to those things, which -- those things affected all the products to some degree, we also had a different launch timing for certain home and accessory products. Like in the year-ago quarter, I think, had AirTag in it. That's just 1 example of something that announced last year that didn't announce this -- that we didn't have a comparable announcement this year. And in -- so in addition to those 4 items, we believe, based on the data, that there was also a macroeconomic environment hit. And whether or not that is because they're lower ASPs versus the higher ASPs of a phone, I can't tell you that. I can just tell you that looking at the numbers, there does appear to be headwinds in addition to the 4 items that we can articulate and we believe those to be macroeconomic headwinds.
Operator:
We'll take our next question from Samik Chatterjee with JPMorgan.
Samik Chatterjee:
Great. And congrats on the results in this tough macro. I guess I wanted to start with China smartphone market here a bit. Tim, I thought you said in response to earlier question that you haven't really seen a material impact from the macro on iPhone yet. But wondering, did you see an impact of the COVID lockdowns there on demand itself? Or was there a snapback fall in that? If you can comment about the sort of exit run rate that you saw in that market, following the COVID shutdowns ending there. And I have a follow-up.
Tim Cook:
Yes, both things are true. We did see a lower demand based on the COVID lockdowns in the cities the COVID lockdowns affected. And we did see a rebound in those same cities toward the end of the quarter in the June time frame. And in particular, in the run-up to June 18, which as you know, is a major shopping holiday in China. We think that the net of that was still a negative, but some of it did rebound by June time frame. The restrictions begin to come off toward the beginning of June, if my memory is correct.
Samik Chatterjee:
Okay. And for my follow-up, I know you said you don't want to sort of predict the macro here or be an economist. But if I go back and look at the sort of OpEx for the last few years, you've been increasing that by a double-digit percentage. And just given the uncertainty that you've talked about in the macro further on this call a lot, how are you thinking about sort of that investment base going forward? Are you trying to look at areas that where you can sort of pull back? I mean, just in terms of how you're preparing for the uncertainty is I guess the question.
Tim Cook:
We believe in investing through the downturn. And so we'll continue to hire people and invest in areas, but we are being more deliberate in doing so in recognition of the realities of the environment.
Operator:
We'll take our next question from Jim Suva with Citigroup.
James Suva:
While I'm calling you on my iPhone 13 Max Pro and loving it, I just wanted to ask you, though, with replacement cycles, have you noticed any change now that we've been through like 2.5 years of COVID where people upgrading at a different rate and kind of post COVID, hopefully, upgrade cycles or replacement cycles, how we should kind of think about that? Obviously, when I drop and break my phone, I replace it immediately. But a normal replacement, have they changed at all? Any insights from that would be great.
Tim Cook:
It's challenging to measure the replacement cycle at any point in time with exact precision, and so I'm going to punt on the question a bit. However, our key task is to make a product that everybody loves and that they want to trade in their current phone to get. And so that's what we are focused on is innovating like crazy and giving somebody something that they really want and see themselves using.
James Suva:
Okay, that makes sense. Well, then maybe I can ask Luca a question more on the gross margins. As you look ahead, the supply chain issues, expedited shipping and all of that, do you think probably the September quarter is kind of the worst of FX and all those headwinds and things? Or is there a little bit of timing delays due to your contractual purchase commitments that you do, that maybe your suppliers are looking at higher costs and you're benefiting from some lower contracts or maybe that has already caught up? If you could give us some insights on the kind of longer-term nature of the directions or the gross margin impacts.
Luca Maestri:
Jim, I would say we provide guidance for the current quarter. But if we look ahead, there's always a couple of elements in gross margin that are a bit outside of our control and we need to be mindful of that. One of them is the foreign exchange environment. That is having an impact already for the September quarter, had an impact on June. And obviously, strong dollar tends to be a headwind for us. As you know, we have a hedging program and so we mitigate that impact. But over time, those hedges roll off and so it becomes more challenging for us. We'll see what happens with foreign exchange rates over time. That is going to be a variable that we need to track. The other one that has an impact on the aggregate gross margin is our mix of products and services. As you know, they have different margin profiles for very different reasons, different businesses, even different accounting treatment at times. And so that is also something that we will need to track over time. What matters to us, I think it goes back to Tim was saying earlier, is we want to make sure that people love our products and services, and we want all of them to be equally successful in the marketplace. Certainly, as you've seen over the last year, we've had a significant expansion in gross margins in spite of very difficult economic circumstances from COVID to inflation, interest rates going up and our margins have expanded. From a commodity standpoint, I think you were asking a question around components. Commodities are behaving okay. We're seeing some price pressure on some silicon components. But other than that, we've -- actually commodities are behaving well.
James Suva:
Congratulations to you and all your team members.
Tim Cook:
Thank you.
Operator:
We'll take our next question from Krish Sankar with Cowen and Company.
Krish Sankar:
And Tim, I apologize, it's also macro-related. You mentioned that it impacted digital advertising within Services. I'm just kind of curious, if the macro does worsen, do you worry about subscriber growth, App Store purchases, et cetera? And conversely, are there any parts of the Service business that you consider recession-proof, like maybe a buy now, pay later or something else? And then I have a quick follow-up for Luca.
Tim Cook:
We have incorporated all of our thoughts in the guidance that Luca gave, which says that we think in the aggregate, we're going to accelerate revenues in the September quarter as compared to the June quarter and will decelerate on the Services side. And so we see the digital advertising cloud, if you will, continuing in the current quarter.
Krish Sankar:
Got it, got it. Very helpful. And then a quick follow-up on the lockdown in China during the June quarter. Do you actually see any noticeable negative effects on your App Store revenue for the region or any positive effects like maybe more gaming downloads?
Tim Cook:
China had very good results on Services last quarter. And so they grew strong double digit better than the company average, and they set a new June quarter revenue record during the quarter.
Tejas Gala:
Thank you. A replay of today's call will be available for 2 weeks as a webcast on apple.com/investor and via telephone. The numbers for the telephone replay are 888-203-1112 or 719-457-0820. Please enter confirmation code 8820355. These replays will be available by approximately 5 p.m. Pacific Time today. Members of the press with additional questions can contact Josh Rosenstock at 408-862-1142. Financial analysts can contact me with additional questions at 669-227-2402. Thank you again for joining us.
Operator:
This concludes today's conference. We appreciate your participation.
Operator:
Good day and welcome to the Apple Q2 FY 2022 Earnings Conference Call. Today's call is being recorded. At this time for opening remarks and introductions I would like to turn the call over to Tejas Gala, Director of Investor Relations and Corporate Finance. Please, go ahead.
Tejas Gala:
Thank you. Good afternoon and thank you for joining us. Speaking first today is Apple's CEO, Tim Cook; and he'll be followed by CFO, Luca Maestri. After that we'll open the call to questions from analysts. Please note that some of the information you'll hear during today's discussion will consist of forward-looking statements, including, without limitation, those regarding revenue, gross margin, operating expenses, other income and expense, taxes, capital allocation and future business outlook, including the potential impact of COVID-19 on the company's business and results of operations. These statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results or trends to differ materially from our forecast. For more information please refer to the risk factors discussed in Apple's most recently filed annual Report on Form 10-K and the Form 8-K filed with the SEC today, along with the associated press release. Apple assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements or information, which speak as of their respective dates. I'd now like to turn the call over to Tim for introductory remarks.
Tim Cook:
Thank you, Tejas. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Apple is proud to report another record quarter, with a March quarter revenue record of $97.3 billion, up 9% from a year ago and better than we anticipated. iPhone, Mac and Wearables, Home and Accessories had their best ever March quarter and Services set an all-time record on the strength of subscription growth over the past year. Before I get into details, I want to take a moment to acknowledge the humanitarian tragedy unfolding in Ukraine. We're continuing to do everything we can to support our teams in the region and we are donating to humanitarian efforts on the ground. We've also committed to donating products to support refugees arriving here in the United States. I also want to speak to the unpredictable nature of the pandemic. We are excited to be welcoming employees back to the offices in the US and Europe. At the same time, we are monitoring COVID-related disruptions in China. Our thoughts are with all those in the path of the virus and we remain as committed as ever to doing our part to help protect people and their communities. These times remind us that we cannot know what the future may hold. But they remind us too, that technology infused with humanity makes a real difference in the world. And that's where our focus has remained, on driving the innovations that can enrich people's lives. Throughout the quarter, Apple continued its streak of unparalleled innovation at an unmatched pace. With Apple Silicon our teams are pushing the limits of what we once thought possible and we are seeing leaps and bounds in performance and efficiency. Last month we announced another breakthrough with M1 Ultra, the world's most powerful chip for a personal computer. The incredible customer response to our M1-powered Macs helped propel a 15% year-over-year increase in revenue, despite supply constraints. We now have our most powerful Mac lineup ever, with the addition of the entirely new Mac Studio. Paired with the new studio display, a 5K resolution display equipped with its own A13 Bionic chip, this new desktop and display transform any workspace into a creative powerhouse. As we release the groundbreaking M1 Ultra, we also expanded our iPhone offerings adding two beautiful green finishes to the iPhone 13 lineup and introducing the new 5G-enabled iPhone SE, which is great for our existing users who want a smaller iPhone and a great value for people buying an iPhone for the first time. They love how much power and performance we've injected into such an affordable device and rave about its incredible camera and its lightning fast speeds. In the March quarter, iPhone revenue grew 5% over the previous year despite a challenging compare as we saw strong demand from our customers for the iPhone 13 family. And with the all-new iPad Air supercharged by M1, iPad brings more power and more versatility across the entire iPad lineup. For customers around the world, iPad continues to be essential for education, creativity and entertainment. That's why we're continuing to see such a strong demand for iPad even while navigating the significant supply constraint we predicted at the start of the quarter. Turning to Wearables Home and Accessories, we are pleased to see these products continue to delight our users growing 12% year-over-year. Customers are enthusiastically taking charge of their health with Apple Watch Series 7 and Apple Watch SE. The rich sound, beautiful colors and compact design of HomePod mini continue to make it a hit with customers. And there's still no better companion to Apple Music than AirPods with spatial audio that transforms the way we listen putting our customers right in the center of the music. The seamless integration of hardware software and services is at the center of our work and philosophy at Apple. Apple Services are designed to be easy to use with expert curation that brings our users compelling content from talented developers, creators, storytellers and artists. These principles are reflected in all of the services we've developed which continue to generate incredible enthusiasm from our customers. Services revenue rose to $19.8 billion in the March quarter reflecting a 17% increase from a year ago. We were especially excited to cheer on CODA as it won the Academy Award for Best Picture making Apple TV+ the first streaming service to win in this category. We were honored to be stewards of this incredibly powerful deeply moving film. In a little over two years Apple TV+ shows and movies have earned over 240 awards and more than 960 nominations from Severance to WeCrashed to Pachinko new Apple originals are connecting with audiences and earning praise from critics. We're also winning over sports fans with Friday Night Baseball, which debuted earlier this month and They Call Me Magic, a four-part documentary that premiered last week tracing the life of the iconic Magic Johnson. Fitness+ is helping users channel their inner athlete with a range of workout routines for any fitness level. We recently introduced a postpartum routine designed by mothers for mothers. And with our Apple heart and movement study, we are helping researchers glean new insights into cardiovascular fitness. As our products and services entertain customers and help them stay healthy, we're also working to make their lives easier. Arizona for example is the first state to enable its citizens to securely add their driver's license and state IDs to Apple Wallet. More states in the territory of Puerto Rico will soon follow. We've also announced plans to introduce Tap to Pay on iPhone a simple and secure way for businesses to accept contactless payments launching across the US later this year. To meet the needs of customers wherever they are, our Apple retail teams are constantly adapting to better serve them. We opened a new store in the United Arab Emirates this quarter at a unique waterfront location with panoramic views of the Abu Dhabi skyline. And earlier this month we opened a new store in Korea, our third and largest store in the heart of Seoul. And across the US we marked the return of in-person today at Apple Sessions with a special program featuring music from pop icon Lady Gaga. I'd like to thank our team members working in Apple stores, customer care centers, channel partner stores and our Apple Care teams for bringing customers the best of Apple. As we look to the environment, we are making good progress on our commitment to achieve carbon neutrality across our products and supply chain by 2030. Through our Green Bonds program, we're investing in breakthrough technologies like low-carbon aluminum which we will be integrating into the new iPhone SE. And we were pleased to announce recently that we've nearly doubled the number of our top suppliers who have committed to accelerating the transition to clean energy. We are also investing in renewable energy projects in communities most impacted by climate change around the world. As we do our part to protect our planet, we're also prioritizing people. As part of our long-standing commitment to inclusion and diversity, we're continuing to build a better, stronger Apple, rooted in a culture where everyone belongs. Last month we published an update on the progress we've made with inclusion and diversity at Apple. We've hired more women than ever into leadership roles. And in the US nearly 60% of all leadership openings were filled by people from underrepresented communities in 2021. We also recently announced a $50 million Supplier Employee Development Fund that will help workers in our supply chain discover additional educational opportunities and build new skills. And through our Racial Equity and Justice initiative, we're continuing to advance our work to support underrepresented communities and help build a more just and equitable world. Before I hand it over to Luca, I want to acknowledge the challenges we are seeing from supply chain disruptions driven by both COVID and silicon shortages to the devastation from the war in Ukraine. We are not immune to these challenges, but we have great confidence in our teams, in our products and services and in our strategy. Fundamentally our work is about making technology that enriches people's lives and unlocks the full creative potential of humanity. And though the twists and turns of the future may be uncertain what is certain is that we will never stop striving to be a force for good in the world in everything we do and everything we are. With that I'll turn it over to Luca.
Luca Maestri:
Thank you, Tim and good afternoon everyone. We are pleased to report very strong financial results for the March quarter during which we set a revenue record of $97.3 billion, up 9% year-over-year. We also set new March quarter records in the Americas, in Europe and in Greater China. On the product side, revenue was $77.5 billion, up 7% over a year ago and a March quarter record. We grew in each of our product categories except iPad, which remains significantly supply constrained throughout the quarter. And we set March quarter records for iPhone, Mac and Wearables Home and Accessories. This level of sales performance combined with unmatched customer satisfaction and loyalty, helped our installed base of active devices, reach an all-time high for all major product categories, as well as geographic segments. Our Services set an all-time revenue record of $19.8 billion, up 17% over a year ago, with March quarter records in every geographic segment and services category. Company gross margin was 43.7%, down 10 basis points from last quarter. A seasonal loss of leverage and unfavorable foreign exchange were partially offset by favorable mix. Products gross margin was 36.4%, down 200 basis points sequentially, mainly driven by seasonal loss of leverage and FX. Services gross margin was 72.6%, up 20 basis points sequentially due to a different mix. Operating cash flow of $28.2 billion, net income of $25 billion and diluted earnings per share of $1.52 were all March quarter records. These strong March quarter results capped a record first half of the fiscal year in the midst of a challenging macroeconomic environment. We generated over $220 billion in revenue growing 10% year-over-year and set all-time records for iPhone, Mac, Wearables Home and Accessories and Services. These record sales results drove strong double-digit growth in operating income and earnings per share. Let me now get into more detail for each of our revenue categories during the March quarter. iPhone revenue grew 5% year-over-year to a March quarter record of $50.6 billion despite supply constraints. Thanks to our continued strong customer response to our iPhone 13 family and the launch of our new iPhone SE. We set March quarter records in both developed and emerging markets and the latest survey of US consumers from 451 Research indicates iPhone customer satisfaction of 99% for the iPhone 13 family. As a result of this level of sales performance combined with unmatched customer loyalty, the iPhone active installed base reached a new all-time high across all geographies. For Mac, revenue of $10.4 billion was a March quarter record despite supply constraints with 15% year-over-year growth, driven by strong demand for our M1-powered MacBook Pro. As Tim mentioned earlier, our continued innovation and investment in Apple Silicon has clearly shown in our Mac results as the last seven quarters have been the best seven quarter ever for Mac. Our investment focus on Mac has also helped drive significant activity in our growing installed base. In fact, we had a March quarter record for upgraders, while at the same time, nearly half of the customers purchasing Mac were new to the product. iPad revenue was $7.6 billion, down 2% year-over-year due to continued supply constraints. Customer response to our iPad lineup including our new M1-powered iPad Air, remains very strong and our installed base of iPads reached a new all-time high during the quarter, with over half of the customers purchasing an iPad during the quarter being new to the product. Wearables, Home and Accessories set a March quarter record of $8.8 billion, up 12% year-over-year. And we set March quarter revenue records in both developed and emerging markets. In particular, our Wearables business has doubled in three years and is mainly the size of a Fortune 100 business, as we continue to attract many customers who are new to Wearables. For instance, Apple Watch continues to extend its reach, with over two-thirds of customers purchasing an Apple Watch during the quarter being new to the product. Turning to Services. As I mentioned we reached an all-time revenue record of $19.8 billion, up 17%, with all-time records for the App Store, Music, Cloud Services and Apple Care and March quarter records for video, advertising and payment services. These impressive results reflect the impact of our continued investment in improving and expanding our Services portfolio and the positive momentum that we're seeing on many fronts. First, our installed base has continued to grow, reaching an all-time high across each geographic segment and major product category. Next, we continue to see increased customer engagement with our services. Our transacting accounts, paid accounts and accounts with paid subscriptions, all reached all-time highs during the March quarter in every geographic segment. Also, paid subscriptions continued to show very strong growth. We now have more than 825 million paid subscriptions across the services on our platform, which is up more than 165 million during the last 12 months alone. And finally, as Tim highlighted before, we continue to improve the breadth and the quality of our current service offerings while launching new services. In the enterprise market, many businesses and government organizations continue to turn to Apple for the latest technologies, to deliver innovative services to customers and employees. In March, Alaska Airlines began to replace the conventional airport self-service kiosks with iPad Pros for faster passenger check-in and self bag drop. Also, last month, the Western Australia Police Force completed the world's first commercial deployment of CarPlay across their entire fleet of vehicles, to complement the iPhone 13 issued to each officer. This allows officers to access critical information faster on the road and enhance public safety for the community. We also unveiled the general availability of Apple Business Essentials in the US, adding a new subscription services designed to help small businesses manage every aspect of their Apple device life cycle. Let me now turn to our cash position. As we continue to generate very strong cash flow, we ended the quarter with $193 billion in cash and marketable securities. We repaid $3.8 billion in maturing debt, while increasing commercial paper by $2 billion, leaving us with total debt of $120 billion. As a result, net cash was $73 billion at the end of the quarter. We returned nearly $27 billion to shareholders, during the March quarter. This included $3.6 billion in dividends and equivalents and $22.9 billion through open market repurchases of 137 million Apple shares. We also retired an additional 5 million shares in the final settlement of our 18th ASR. Given the continued confidence we have in our business now and into the future, today our Board has authorized an additional $90 billion for share repurchases, as we maintain our goal of getting to net cash neutral, overtime. We're also raising our dividend by 5% to $0.23 a share and we continue to plan for annual increases in the dividend going forward. As we move ahead into the June quarter, I'd like to review our outlook which includes the types of forward-looking information that Tejas referred to at the beginning of the call. Given the continued uncertainty around the world in the near-term, we are not providing revenue guidance, but we are sharing some directional insights, based on the assumption that the COVID-related impacts to our business do not worsen from what we are projecting today for the current quarter. We believe our year-over-year revenue performance during the June quarter will be impacted by a number of factors. Supply constraints caused by COVID-related disruptions and industry-wide silicon shortages are impacting our ability to meet customer demand for our products. We expect these constraints to be in the range of $4 billion to $8 billion which is substantially larger than what we experienced during the March quarter. The COVID-related disruptions are also having some impact on customer demand in China. With respect to foreign exchange, we expect it to be a nearly 300 basis point headwind to our year-over-year growth rate. Additionally, we paused, all sales in Russia during the March quarter. This will impact our year-over-year growth rate by approximately 150 basis points. Specifically related to Services, we expect to continue to grow double-digits, but decelerate from our March quarter performance, due to some of the factors I just described. We expect gross margin to be between 42% and 43%. We expect OpEx to be between $12.7 billion and $12.9 billion. We expect OI&E to be around negative $100 million excluding any potential impact from the mark-to-market of minority investments and our tax rate to be around 16%. Finally, reflecting the dividend increase I mentioned earlier, today our Board of Directors has declared a cash dividend of $0.23 per share of common stock, payable on May 12th 2022 to shareholders of record as of May 9th, 2022. With that, let's open the call to questions.
Tejas Gala:
Thank you, Luca. We ask that you limit yourself to two questions. Operator, may we have the first question, please?
Operator:
Absolutely. We'll take our first question from Katy Huberty with Morgan Stanley.
Katy Huberty:
Yes. Thank you. Congrats on the quarter. A couple of macro-related questions, just given everything that's going on in the market, the first is on how you're thinking about consumer spending, as we see more stock market volatility, rising interest rates, inflation. What metrics are you watching either internal to your business or external at the macro level to understand whether you'll ultimately start to see some demand impact particularly on the product side of your business? And then, I have a follow-up.
Tim Cook:
Katy, hi, it's Tim. We're obviously monitoring our daily sales very closely. From an inflation point of view, we are seeing inflation. It is or was evident in our gross margin last quarter and in our OpEx last quarter and it is assumed in the guidance that Luca gave for this quarter as well. So we're definitely seeing some level of inflation that I think everybody is seeing.
Katy Huberty:
And how are – just as a follow-up to that how are you thinking about how that might impact the consumers in your business and whether it influences their ability to purchase at the same level?
Tim Cook:
Well we're monitoring that closely and we've sort of – but right now our main focus frankly speaking is on the supply side.
Katy Huberty:
Okay. And as it relates to that in China, how should we think about lockdowns from an impact on supply and an impact on demand? And what products in your portfolio should we expect to be most impacted? Thank you.
Tim Cook:
Yes. Good question. For Q2 so the quarter that we just finished, the restrictions in China had not started yet. And so Q2, we did have supply constraints. They were significantly lower than what we had experienced during the December quarter. They were driven by industry-wide silicon shortages. And specifically, the issue that I talked about on previous calls with the legacy nodes. But looking ahead, we see two causes of supply constraints. One is the COVID-related disruptions; and there's the industry-wide silicon shortages that will continue. We've estimated the constraints to be in the range of $4 billion to $8 billion. And if you – these constraints are primarily centered around the Shanghai corridor. And the – on a positive front, almost all of the affected final assembly factories have now restarted. And so the range – the $4 billion to $8 billion range reflects various ramps of getting back up and running. We're also encouraged that the COVID case count that's been reported in Shanghai has decreased over the last few days. And so there's – there's some reason for optimism there.
Katy Huberty:
Thank you. Pretty amazing how the team has navigated all the cross currents. Congrats again on the quarter.
Tim Cook:
Thanks so much.
Tejas Gala:
Thank you, Katy. Can we have a next question please.
Operator:
Thank you. We'll take our next question from Amit Daryanani with Evercore.
Amit Daryanani:
Good afternoon. Thanks for taking my questions. I guess I have two as well. First of all I was hoping you just touched a little bit on the geographic growth vectors that you saw. And I think Americas grew really well 19%, 20%. But Europe and China had much more muted growth if you may. I know your compares are fairly difficult but I'm curious if anything you would call out in terms of spillover effect on the macro side from Russia, Ukraine in Europe that's seeing some impact to consumer spend or even in China. Just help us understand what happened geographically there.
Luca Maestri:
So Amit, as you said in the Americas, we had a very strong quarter up 19% very happy across the board there. Europe, again was a really good quarter for us. We grew 5% in spite of the fact that of course as you know during the month of March, we paused our sales in Russia. So we had an impact to our sales results there for a month of the quarter. But a number of European countries particularly in Western Europe did really-really well for us. And so it was a very good quarter for us pretty much in line with our expectations. Americas was better than our expectations. China was again a March quarter record for us. Keep in mind and this affected every geographic segment for us the different launch timing for the iPhone this year versus a year ago had an impact on the March quarter results because we launched the product later a year ago than we did this year. So some of the channel fill for the new products happened during the March quarter a year ago. Japan and Asia Pacific were affected by foreign exchange. Japan would have grown in line with company average in constant currency terms. Asia Pacific as well was affected by foreign exchange with the dollar appreciating against most currencies. And then again this difference in the launch timing for the iPhone made a difference. Keep in mind again the supply constraints that we had during the quarter our results would have been obviously better without the supply constraints. Overall we felt very good about the performance around the world.
Amit Daryanani:
If I could just follow up on the supply chain the $4 billion to $8 billion impact that you folks talked about. Do you think this is demand that's deferred out, or demand that's essentially destroyed because you have a product cycle that's going to come out in the year at some point soon this year? How do you think about demand deferred versus demand destroyed on that front? And then is there a sense of which product categories are most impacted by this versus not?
Tim Cook:
It will affect most of the product categories. And in terms of whether it's -- whether we can recapture or not we believe that there's a percentage of it that is recapturable and a percentage of it that is likely not where somebody needs something quickly. And that ratio or that percentage is very difficult to estimate. We obviously, try to do that internally in order to demand plan but it's not something that we share.
Amit Daryanani:
Got it. Thank you.
Tejas Gala:
Thanks Amit. Can we have the next question please.
Operator:
We'll take our next question from Chris Caso with Raymond James.
Chris Caso :
Yes. Thank you. Good evening. Also just wanted to dig in on the supply constraints a bit. And I guess one of the things you said is that the $4 billion to $8 billion range reflects some reopening of facilities during the quarter. I know obviously it's tough to predict as you go forward into the second half of launch of new products. But at that point would you expect the constraints to still be mainly on the component side? And then hopefully if things don't get worse in China then the facilities are open and the constraints are only the component constraints as you go into the second half of the year.
Tim Cook:
Yes. Chris it's hard to answer a question about unannounced products. And so I'll try to not do that. But the—
Chris Caso :
For all products yes.
Tim Cook:
The $4 billion to $8 billion is simply as I had mentioned that if you look at the Shanghai corridor -- we have some final assembly plants in this area. And almost all of them have restarted as the good news of it working with local officials. But we planned various ramps for these. And that's the range of 4% to 8% that we've estimated. Kobi is difficult to predict. For sure for sure.
Chris Caso:
As a follow-up I wanted to also follow on some of your comments regarding inflation and how Apple is dealing with it. Obviously component costs have been going up in many different areas. And then specifically in the semiconductor side costs have been going up but perhaps for some different reasons because of the additional cost of going up to new process nodes that it's higher than it has been in the past. How is Apple planning to deal with that? And is it possible for you to get through that without either raising prices on your product or affecting gross margins?
Tim Cook:
Well, some of what you said is in the results for the last quarter that we've announced. And obviously we've put our current thinking in the current quarter guidance that Luca listed earlier. There are component costs that are falling and ones that are rising. And so not all of them are moving in the same direction. And so we really try to manage to the net of these. And I think we're doing a reasonable job currently navigating the what is a challenging environment.
Tejas Gala:
Thanks Chris. Can we have the next question please?
Operator:
Thank you. We'll take our next question from David Vogt with UBS.
David Vogt:
Great. Thank you guys for taking my question. I just want to dig in a little bit on the product disruption the $4 billion to $8 billion. In the past you kind of gave us a sense for how it would affect each different product lines. And should we expect it to have similar pro rata impacts? And is there an opportunity to maybe reallocate resources to limit maybe some of the impact on the iPhone line and then maybe versus the iPad line? And then I have a quick follow-up.
Tim Cook:
It will affect most of the product categories. And we obviously will look to do any kind of optimization that we can do to minimize the effect on the user.
David Vogt:
Great. And then maybe just as a follow-up. You talked about potential COVID-related demand issues in China and taking at 150 basis points from Russia. But when you look at the other geographies is there anything that you can share with us whether it's in Western Europe or the US that you're seeing from a demand perspective that may be sort of out of the ordinary or outside of sort of the disruptions and the lack of product demand seems to be sort of where you would think it would be at this point in the cycle. Thank you.
Tim Cook:
We were happy with the iPhone growth last quarter, particularly when you think about the comp that it was going against because we had very different timing on the launches in the year ago quarter where we launched in Q1. And therefore naturally Q2 is at a different place on the new product curve. And so, it was a very difficult comp. And so we were pleased with it. And as Luca said, the Americas geography did quite well last quarter. And the US, of course, is the major geography within there. And so the US was quite strong last quarter.
David Vogt:
Thank you.
Tejas Gala:
Thanks, David. Can we have the next question please?
Operator:
We'll take our next question from Jim Suva with Citigroup.
Jim Suva:
Thank you. Tim and your entire company has done a great job at navigating through all the issues in the past several years whether it be COVID, power outages, trade wars, shipping challenges and all that. When we hopefully someday get past all of these and the supply constraints in society and turmoil hopefully across the world, do you start to reconsider the way you do the supply chain albeit just-in-time ordering and outsourcing so much of your chips? Or do you actually consider like holding more buffer inventory internally, because right now letting $4 billion to $8 billion go away it'd be nice to have that to be able to sell. So do you consider holding more buffer inventory or maybe even doing your own chips by outsourcing your own chips to control them more, or how should we think about strategically when hopefully the world is in a better place from today?
Tim Cook:
Well, I'm looking forward to that day as I know all of you are. Our supply chain is truly global. And so the products are made everywhere. And we do a lot in the U.S. We'll probably be doing even more here as more chips are produced here. And we continue to look at optimizing. We learn something every day and make changes. But when you back up and kind of zoom out and look to see how the supply chain has done within the environment that you eloquently talked about, I think it's been very resilient with -- the top issue we've had clearly is the silicon shortage that I think everybody is struggling with. And I think we've done a really good job of managing through the COVID piece of it. And so -- but we are learning and we're making some changes as we go, we don't have a tenure. And so, to the degree that we learn something that we should change, you can bet that we're doing that. In this business you don't want to hold a ton of inventory. And so you want to work on cycle times and so forth to do things very quickly and take strategic inventory in places where you need to buffer for interruptions and so forth. And so we're constantly thinking about where those places are. In today's world it's not really possible for us to have buffer on silicon. And so, today silicon rolls off the fab and it's into a final assembly plant very, very quickly and we try to make that as short a time as possible.
Jim Suva:
And then my quick follow-up. We've been talking about supply chain issues for multiple quarters now. Are you kind of hearing from your suppliers that maybe later half of this year, or is it actually going to go into kind of 2013 for some closer equilibrium time period?
Tim Cook:
Yeah. I wouldn't – you're talking about for the silicon shortage in particular I assume. I don't want to predict that, because the – that entails knowing how worldwide demand and supply are for the whole – for industries outside of even the industry we're in. And I don't proclaim to be an expert in that. That also heavily is influenced by how strong the economies are in the different markets. And so I think there are varying levels of outcomes. And what we're focused on is doing – trying to do very well regardless of how that question is answered.
Jim Suva:
Thank you. And congratulations to you and your entire team.
Tim Cook:
Thanks so much.
Tejas Gala:
Thanks, Jim. Can we have the next question, please.
Operator:
We'll take our next question from Samik Chatterjee with JPMorgan.
Samik Chatterjee :
Hi. Thanks for taking my question and congrats on the results as well. I'll stick to two more micro level questions here. Firstly, Tim you talked about the iPhone SE three demand that you the product that you just launched. I was hoping you could compare what you're seeing in terms of momentum to previous iPhone SE cycles? Particularly I think in the past North America has been the largest region in terms of demand what are you seeing with the current product in terms of demand by geography? And I have a quick follow-up for Luca? Thank you.
Tim Cook:
Yeah. We don't get to that level of granularity because we view it to be sensitive data that our competitors would love to have. And so I'm going to punt on answering that question. I would just say that, when you zoom out and look at iPhone, as a total we could not be happier with the iPhone 13 family of products and the strength we've seen for this cycle. And really, it's those products that have powered the line and given us the overall results that we've had on iPhone, which for the first half the revenues were $120 billion and we feel very, very good about those results.
Samik Chatterjee:
And my follow-up for Luca. Luca we are seeing sort of a settling in terms of growth rate for the Services business on the tough comps that you have. We're also seeing the gross margins there settling around this sort of 72% range. And I understand there are a lot of moving pieces beneath that. But is this sort of a good range for Services longer term, or are there sort of moving pieces there that as they scale they can take – there is an opportunity for more upside?
Luca Maestri :
Well we feel really great about the momentum for our Services business. I was looking at the absolute numbers here. This run rate of almost $20 billion is essentially double what we had just four years ago. So we've done really, really well with Services. We have a lot of momentum for a variety of reasons. The first one is the fact that our installed base of active devices continues to grow very nicely. And so that is obviously a big engine for our Services business. The second thing is that the level of engagement that we see on our platform continues to grow. We have more transacting accounts, more paying accounts, more accounts with subscriptions. The absolute amount of paid subscriptions on our platform is pretty impressive 825 million. It's an increase of 165 million in the last 12 months alone. So you can tell that this is great growth. And of course, as you've seen over the last few years, we've added a lot of new services and we plan to add new services and new features that we believe that our customers would love. And so we think that's a great -- absolute great momentum. The growth rates can change a bit, especially during COVID because we've gone through some cycles of lockdowns and then reopenings and so on. And so sometimes the comps can be a bit deceiving. We are looking at it from the lens of continuing to satisfy our customers, adding to the portfolio, improving the quality of the services and that has served us very well, because in the last 12 months, we've generated $75 billion of Services revenue. And you've seen the margins are obviously accretive to company margin. So we feel good, we feel good about the Services business. I mentioned in my prepared remarks that the growth rate for the June quarter, we expect it to be less than the 17% that we've reported in March for some of the reasons that I described. Of course, foreign exchange is an issue with the dollar being strong at this point. And of course we paused, our sales in Russia. So we need to take that into account. But in general, when we look across the board, we set all-time records and quarterly records for each one of our categories.
Samik Chatterjee:
Thank you.
Tejas Gala:
Thanks, Samik. Can we have the next question please.
Operator:
We'll take our next question from Krish Sankar with Cowen and Company.
Krish Sankar:
Yeah. Hi. Thanks for taking my question and congrats on the really strong results. I have two questions too and I do apologize. The first one is on supply constraints. Luca, if I tried to read the deal based on June quarter guidance revenue is being impacted kind of implies year-over-year down revenue. And you also spoke about a $4 billion to $8 billion supply constraint which is a large amount compared to the revenue. And I understand you have the supply constraints and the China shutdowns. I'm just kind of curious, do you think the last three quarters Apple supply chain had a better buffer inventory of semis that kind of got used up and now you're kind of more tied to whatever the true supply contains of legacy semis, or is there something else going on? And then I had a follow-up.
Luca Maestri:
What has happened obviously during COVID has change over the quarters. Recently, for example during the March quarter, the constraints that we had were limited to silicon shortages. When we are giving out this range of $4 billion to $8 billion, it's not only silicon but it's the restrictions in China that we're seeing right now. So they are different. There's additional constraints at this point that we are seeing because of the COVID situation. So it's -- that is the fundamental difference there.
Krish Sankar:
Got it. Got it. Very helpful. And then as a quick follow-up with the shutdowns, especially in places like China, have you seen actually the App Stores or your Services business actually inflect positively, or is it too short a time frame to make a judgment call on that?
Luca Maestri:
Yes, I think, it's early to tell. The restrictions in China started at the very end of March. So, it's very, very early to tell.
Krish Sankar:
Got it. Got it. Thank you Luca. Thank you very much.
Tejas Gala:
Thanks, Krish. Can we have the next question, please?
Operator:
We'll take our next question from Wamsi Mohan with Bank of America.
Wamsi Mohan :
Yes. Thank you. Luca, thanks for the color around the impacts to the revenue guidance. But I was wondering if you could share a if you expect to grow overall revenue in the June quarter on a year-on-year basis. And just to be clear on these impacts that you gave those are on a year-on-year basis. Can you also tell us how much FX is a headwind if any on a quarter-on-quarter basis and incremental Russia impact quarter-on-quarter basis and incremental supply chain impact also on a quarter-on-quarter basis? And I have a follow-up.
Luca Maestri:
Well, as we said, we're not guiding to a specific revenue number. And -- but just to repeat what I said during the prepared remarks, we're having supply constraints that are caused by the COVID-related disruptions and by the silicon shortages. And that is what is creating the constraints. We expect them to be in the range of $4 billion to $8 billion. This is substantially larger than what we've had during the March quarter. Again, let me repeat the COVID-related disruptions did not affect the March quarter. So you need to keep that in mind. With respect to foreign exchange, we expect it to be nearly 300 basis points headwind. It was about 200 basis points headwind during the March quarter. For Russia, we said that the impact on a year-over-year basis is approximately 150 basis points, that reflects the three months of the quarter. We paused sales in Russia at the beginning of March. So it was a partial impact on the March quarter. So, obviously, on a sequential basis, it's an incremental factor to keep in mind. I would say on the positive side here is that the demand for both our products and services is solid. Tim has mentioned a number of times the iPhone 13 family is having a really strong year. We -- when we look at top-selling smartphones around the world, we've had pretty incredible results during the March quarter. The top six models in the United States are iPhones, the top four in Japan, the top five in Australia, five of the top six in urban China and so on and so forth. So the iPhone 13 has been truly a global success. And as you know and as you can tell even from our website, most of the iPad and Mac models are constrained today. They've been constrained for several quarters, because the demand is very good for those products. And the Services business as you know is growing double digits. So that's what gives us confidence for the June quarter and going forward.
Wamsi Mohan :
Okay. Thank you, Luca. And if I could follow-up, Tim you're in a really enviable place of being pretty far from your net cash neutral objective. At the same time, you're generating a significant amount of cash flow every year. So your capital return strategy has been an extremely successful program in the past, but $90 billion is 3% of your market cap. And on the other hand there are just a lot of assets that arguably have a lot of synergies with Apple in the health care space, the fitness area like Teladoc or [indiscernible] or Netflix in the content area. Why is this not the right time for Apple to perhaps look at such assets instead of buying back stock or maybe do both?
Tim Cook:
We're always looking and we continue to look. But we would only acquire something that were strategic. We acquire a lot of smaller companies today and we'll continue to do that for IP and for great talent. And -- but we don't discount doing something larger either if the opportunity presents itself. And so -- but I don't want to go through my list with you on the phone, but we're always looking.
Wamsi Mohan:
Thanks.
Tejas Gala:
Great. Thanks Wamsi. Can we have the next question please?
Operator:
We'll take our next question from Kyle McNealy with Jefferies.
Kyle McNealy:
Hi, thanks very much for the question. This one is regarding Mac. Great quarter with the results by the way, some exciting products coming out for sure. We're noticing that there's the lead times are longer for Mac's now ordered today with some available now but many not shipping until June. Just wanted to get your insight on how much of that you think is driven by the strong March results with the product launch and likely sellout conditions versus just real tightness in the supply chain? And the obvious follow-on to that is when do you expect you might catch up and get Mac lead times back within a week?
Tim Cook:
Well, we're working hard. We've got lots of customers that we want to get the new Macs too. And so we're working hard on them. They are a result of the combination of the COVID disruptions and the silicon shortage that we've talked about before. And when we might remedy that, I don't -- we're not really forecasting when we can be out of the silicon shortage, so that would be a difficult answer. I think the COVID piece of it I hope is a transitory kind of issue. And so I would hope that it would get better over time.
Kyle McNealy:
Great. Thanks a lot.
Tim Cook:
Yeah.
Tejas Gala:
Great. Thanks Kyle. Can we have the next question please?
Operator:
Thank you. We’ll take our next question from Ben Bollin with Cleveland Research.
Ben Bollin:
Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for taking the question. The first one is on services. Luca, I was hoping you could share a little bit of perspective on maybe how much of the services contribution is purely consumer versus enterprise? And how you think about the longer term opportunity to monetize the enterprise community? And then Tim for you as a follow-up, I think Jim Suva had asked a question earlier about some of your strategy. I was curious how strategy might have evolved since everything has been going on, what changes you might have seen as of late with respect to freight and some of the geographic production footprint? And any evolution that has happened as of late? Thank you.
Luca Maestri:
So Ben on the services side, of course, the vast majority of what we do in services is to final consumers. We do understand and appreciate the fact that the enterprise is a great opportunity for us. Very recently, for example, we launched this new subscription service here in the United States which we call Apple Business Essentials where essentially we provide support to small and medium-sized businesses in terms of 24/7 support device management for small business owners which we think small companies will value and appreciate. Obviously, we sell Apple Care to enterprises already today. But we know enterprise in general as a market is a very interesting market for us and we're putting a lot of effort and focus on it and we believe we have really good opportunities to grow.
Tim Cook:
Ben, you brought up freight. Freight is a huge challenge in today both from an inflationary point of view and from an availability point of view. And so right now the focus is on moving the freight to customers any way that we can do that. Over time, we'll do that much more efficiently. And I would hope that the fundamental rates reset some both -- and I'm talking about both ocean and air. And so both of them have come under some significant inflationary pressure partly due to COVID and some other reasons as well I would guess. And in terms of geo production we are constantly making tweaks here and there. And I don't want to go into the details of those because we view it as to be sensitive kind of information, but we're constantly making moves to optimize in the current environment.
Ben Bollin:
Thank you both.
Tim Cook:
Thank you.
Tejas Gala:
Thank you, Ben. A replay of today's call will be available for two weeks on Apple Podcast as a webcast on apple.com/investor and via telephone. The numbers for the telephone replay are in 888-203-1112 or 719-457-0820. Please enter confirmation code 1807633. These replays will be available by approximately 5 P.M. Pacific Time today. Members of the press with additional questions can contact Josh Rosenstock at 408-862-1142. Financial analysts can contact me with additional questions at 669-227-2402. Thank you again for joining us.
Operator:
This concludes today's conference. We appreciate your participation.
Operator:
Good day, and welcome to the Apple Q1 FY 2022 Earnings Conference Call. Today's call is being recorded. At this time, for opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn the call over to Tejas Gala, Director of Investor Relations and Corporate Finance. Please go ahead.
Tejas Gala:
Thank you. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us. Speaking today first is Apple's CEO, Tim Cook; and he'll be followed by CFO, Luca Maestri. After that, we'll open the call to questions from analysts. Please note that, some of the information you'll hear during our discussion today will consist of forward-looking statements, including, without limitation, those regarding revenue, gross margin, operating expenses, other income and expense, taxes, capital allocation and future business outlook, including the potential impact of COVID-19 on the company's business and results of operations. These statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results or trends to differ materially from our forecast. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in Apple's most recently filed annual report on Form 10-K and the Form 8-K filed with the SEC today, along with the associated press release. Apple assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements or information, which speak as of their respective dates. I'd like to now turn the call over to Tim for introductory remarks.
Tim Cook:
Thank you, Tejas, and good afternoon. Today, we are proud to announce Apple's biggest quarter ever. Through the busy holiday season, we set an all-time revenue record of nearly $124 billion, up 11% from last year and better than we had expected at the beginning of the quarter. And we are pleased to see that our active installed base of devices is now at a new record with more than 1.8 billion devices. We set all-time records for both developed and emerging markets and saw revenue growth across all of our product categories, except for iPad, which we said would be supply constrained. As expected, in the aggregate, we experienced supply constraints that were higher than the September quarter. Before I discuss our results in greater detail, I want to first acknowledge the toll that COVID continues to have on communities around the world. In many places, case counts are higher and health systems more strained than at any point throughout the pandemic. On behalf of all of us at Apple, I want to extend our deep gratitude to the scientists, doctors, nurses and so many others on the front lines of combating COVID-19. This is our eighth quarter reporting results in the shadow of the pandemic. And while I can't say it gets any easier, I can say I'm incredibly proud of the way our teams have come together and continue to innovate on behalf of our customers. A few weeks ago, we marked the 15th anniversary of the day Steve revealed iPhone to the world. We knew that we had the beginnings of something fundamentally transformative, though none of us could have predicted the incredible and meaningful impact it would have on all of our lives. The creative spirit that made the first iPhone possible has thrived at Apple every day since. We never stop creating. We never stop innovating. You can see that spirit reflected throughout our products from the incredible performance and capability of our M1 chips to our powerful yet easy to use operating systems to our unrivaled iPhone camera systems to the beauty and magic of AirPods. That's why each of our major products leads the industry in customer satisfaction for their respective category. People expect Apple to solve hard problems with easy to use products. And iPhone has never been more popular. During the December quarter, we set an all-time revenue record for iPhone, thanks to the strength of our incredible iPhone 13 lineup. This is the best iPhone lineup we've ever had and the reaction from the press and our users have been off the charts. This past quarter, we also set another all-time revenue record for Mac with customers eager to get their hands on an M1-powered MacBook Air, iMac or MacBook Pro. We've been thrilled with the response from Pro users to the M1 Pro and M1 Max chips and to see how Apple silicon is blowing them away with its power, performance and efficiency. Despite the constraints I mentioned earlier, our iPad lineup continues to be indispensable to tens of millions of people, from teachers and students to artists and creators. Customers are eager to get their hands on our ninth generation iPad, which features a beautiful display and double the storage capacity, as well as the new iPad Mini with its ultra portable design. Wearable, Home and Accessories, meanwhile, set an all-time revenue record. Customers are loving the Apple Watch Series 7, with its cutting edge health and fitness tracking features. Nearly every day, I get notes from customers who share how a heart alert led to a life saving appointment with a cardiologist. And more recently, I've been hearing from people who tell me that their Apple Watch saved their lives by calling 911, when they couldn't. As I've said, we're still in the early innings with our health work that every day I'm encouraged by our positive impact. We are also making great advancements in audio and are seeing strong demand from customers as a result. The HomePod Mini continues to earn praise for combining the intelligence of Siri with an immersive room filling audio experience. And our customers have responded with a lot of excitement to the magic of spatial audio on AirPods which packs the acoustics of a concert hall. As always, the deep integration of hardware, software and services is a hallmark of everything Apple makes. It's a principle you can see at work in the introduction of SharePlay, a feature that offers a whole new way to create shared experiences by letting users watch and listen to their favorite content together on FaceTime. And we continue to invest in innovation across our services business, which set another all-time revenue record last quarter and performed even better than we had anticipated. The App Store continues to be an economic miracle for developers around the world and a safe and trusted place for consumers to discover their favorite apps. Since its launch, we have paid developers selling digital goods and services more than $260 billion, with 2021 setting a new record for their earnings. I'm also happy to report that in its first 2 years, Apple TV+ shows and movies have earned 200 award wins and more than 890 nominations. Among the powerful lineup are feature films like The Tragedy of Macbeth, CODA and Swan Song, along with many gripping new series coming up, including Severance and The Afterparty. Each one is a tremendous credit to all the storytellers in front of the cameras and behind them who touched audiences all over the world. Fitness+, meanwhile, continues to inspire customers to reach their health and fitness goals. We recently introduced Time to Run, an extension of our popular series Time to Walk, as well as new collections of workouts and meditations to help users make more intentional training choices. Despite the pandemic, our retail businesses saw its highest revenue in Apple's history, and we also earned our highest ever customer satisfaction scores. That is a testament to the incredible adaptability our teams have shown as we've reimagined [digital] experience. I also want to take a moment to thank our retail employees and AppleCare teams for the deep care you've given to our customers as they look to get the most out of our products, learn new skills or track down the perfect gift. We have always led with our values and with compassion and care and never has that been more needed than during the pandemic. Last quarter, we celebrated 10 years of our Employee Giving program, which we started to help our employees identify and support the causes they care most deeply about. We pledged to match their contributions to organizations doing important work at every level from their local food pantry to global humanitarian non-profits. In the last decade, this program has contributed nearly $725 million to charitable organizations. We also celebrated 15 years of Apple's partnership with a global fund on Project RED supporting their life-saving work to expand healthcare services in Sub-Saharan Africa for people living with HIV/AIDS. With the support of our customers, we've now raised nearly $270 million to fund prevention, testing and counseling services for people impacted by HIV/AIDS. And in keeping with our abiding belief in and commitment to education, we also launched a new partnership with the Boys & Girls Club of America. This initiative will help young people across the U.S. learn to code on iPad using our Everyone Can Code curriculum. And we are continuing to drive innovations to help combat climate change. We are already carbon neutral across our own operations, and we are working intensely to meet our 2030 goal of carbon neutrality across our supply chain and the life cycle of our products. To celebrate Black History Month, we will be releasing a special edition Apple Watch Black Unity Braided Solo Loop and a matching Unity Lights Watch Face. And through our racial equity and justice initiative, we are continuing to support organizations blazing trails to a more equitable world in our economies, our classrooms and our criminal justice system. We recognize, as ever, that it takes all of us to confront our most profound challenges. And at Apple, we are determined to do our part. That includes our own work and inclusion and diversity, which we are advancing every day. Let me close by saying that despite the uncertainty of the world, there is one thing of which I am certain
Luca Maestri:
Thank you, Tim, and good afternoon, everyone. We are very pleased to report record financial results for the December quarter. We set an all-time revenue record of $123.9 billion, an 11% increase from a year ago. We reached new all-time records in the Americas, Europe, Greater China and the rest of Asia Pacific. And it was also an all-time record quarter for both products and services. On the product side, revenue was $104.4 billion, up 9% over a year ago, despite significant supply constraints. We grew in each of our product categories, except iPad, where supply constraints were particularly pronounced, and set all-time records for iPhone, Mac and Wearables, Home and Accessories. The strong level of sales performance, the unmatched loyalty of our customers and the strength of our ecosystem have driven our current installed base of active devices to a new all-time record of 1.8 billion devices. The growth in the installed base were broad-based as we set all-time records in each major product category and in each geographic segment. Our Services set an all-time revenue record of $19.5 billion, up 24% over a year ago, with December quarter records in every geographic segment. Company gross margin was 43.8%, up 160 basis points from last quarter due to volume leverage and favorable mix, partially offset by higher cost structures. Products gross margin was 38.4%, up 410 basis points sequentially, driven by leverage and mix. Services gross margin was 72.4%, up 190 basis points sequentially, mainly due to a different mix. Net income of $34.6 billion and diluted earnings per share of $2.10 both grew more than 20% year-over-year and were all-time records. Operating cash flow of $47 billion was also an all-time record. Let me get into more detail for each of our revenue categories. iPhone revenue grew 9% year-over-year to an all-time record of $71.6 billion despite supply constraints, thanks to a remarkable customer response to our new iPhone 13 family. We set all-time records in both developed and emerging markets, reached all-time high in the iPhone active installed base and the latest survey of U.S. consumers from 451 Research indicates iPhone customer satisfaction of 98%. For Mac, revenue of $10.9 billion was an all-time record with growth of 25% year-over-year driven by strong demand for our newly redesigned MacBook Pro powered by M1 despite supply constraints. We are 1 year into our transition to Apple silicon and already, the vast majority of our Mac sales are from M1-powered devices, which helped drive a record number of upgraders during the December quarter. Our momentum in this category is very impressive as the last 6 quarters have been the best 6 quarters ever for Mac. iPad generated $7.2 billion in revenue, down 14% year-over-year due to very significant supply constraints, but customer demand was very strong across all models. Despite the supply shortages, our installed base of iPads reached a new all-time high during the quarter, thanks to a high number of customers that are new to iPad. In fact, around half of the customers purchasing an iPad during the quarter were new to the product. Wearables, Home and Accessories set a new all-time record of $14.7 billion, up 13% year-over-year. And we set all-time revenue records in each geographic segment. We also continue to improve and expand our product offerings in this category to create unique experiences showcasing our deep integration of hardware, software and services. In addition to an outstanding level of sales performance globally, Apple Watch continues to extend its reach, with over 2/3 of customers purchasing an Apple Watch during the quarter being new to the product. Turning to services. As I mentioned, we reached an all-time revenue record of $19.5 billion, up 24%, with all-time records for cloud services, for music, video, advertising and payment services and a December quarter record for the App Store. These impressive results reflect the positive momentum we are seeing on many fronts. First, as I mentioned before, our installed base has continued to grow and has reached an all-time high across each geographic segment and major product category. Next, we continue to see increased customer engagement with our services. The number of paid accounts on our digital content stores grew double digits and reached a new all-time high during the December quarter in every geographic segment. Also, paid subscriptions continue to show very strong growth. We now have more than 785 million paid subscriptions across the services on our platform, which is up 165 million during the last 12 months alone. And finally, we're adding new services that we think our customers will love, and we continue to improve the breadth and quality of our current service offerings. Just in this last quarter, we have added incredible new content on Apple TV+, on Fitness+ and Apple Arcade and a brand-new way to listen to music with Apple Music Voice. We also announced in November the beta program for Apple Business Essentials, a new service offering that brings together device management 24/7 support and iCloud storage to our small businesses, manage the end-to-end life cycle of their employees' Apple devices. We are very excited that many thousands of small business customers are already actively participating in the beta program. This announcement is just one of many ways we are expanding our support for enterprise and business customers. With the latest MacBook Pros that we've introduced last October, the new M1-powered Mac lineup has quickly become the preferred choice of Macs among enterprise customers. Shopify, for example, is upgrading its entire global workforce to M1-powered MacBook Pro and MacBook Air. By standardizing on M1 Max, Shopify continues its commitment to providing the best tools to help its employees work productively and securely from anywhere. And Deloitte Consulting is expanding the deployment of the Mac Employee Choice program, including offering the new M1 MacBook Pro to empower their professionals to choose devices that work best for them in delivering consulting services. Let me now turn to our cash position. Due to our strong operating performance and holiday quarter seasonality, we ended the quarter with $203 billion in cash, plus marketable securities. We decreased commercial paper by $1 billion, leaving us with total debt of $123 billion. As a result, net cash was $80 billion at the end of the quarter. Our business continues to generate very strong cash flow, and we were able to return nearly $27 billion to shareholders during the December quarter. This included $3.7 billion in dividends and equivalents and $14.4 billion through open market repurchases of 93 million Apple shares. Our business continues to generate very strong cash flow, and we're also able to return nearly $27 billion to shareholders during the December quarter. This included $3.7 billion in dividends and equivalents and $14.4 billion through open market repurchases of 93 million Apple shares. We also began $6 billion accelerated share repurchase program in November, resulting in the initial delivery and retirement of 30 million shares. As we move ahead into the March quarter, I'd like to review our outlook, which includes the types of forward-looking information that Tejas referred to at the beginning of the call. Given the continued uncertainty around the world in the near term, we are not providing revenue guidance, but we are sharing some directional insights based on the assumption that the COVID-related impacts to our business do not worsen from what we are projecting today for the current quarter. We expect to achieve solid year-over-year revenue growth and set a March quarter revenue record despite significant supply constraints, which we estimate to be less than what we experienced during the December quarter. We expect our revenue growth rate to decelerate from the December quarter, primarily due to 2 factors. First, during the March quarter a year ago, we grew revenue by 54%. Remember that last year, we launched our new iPhones during the December quarter. While this year, we launched them during the September quarter. Due to the later launch a year ago, some of the associated channel inventory fill occurred during the March quarter last year. As a result of the different launch timing, we will face a more challenging year-over-year compare. Second, we expect foreign exchange to be a 3-point headwind when compared to the December quarter growth rate. We currently expect FX to have a negative impact on growth of 2 points in the March quarter, while it represented a 1 point benefit during the December quarter. Specifically related to Services, we expect to grow strong double digits but decelerate from the December quarter performance. This is due to a more challenging compare because a higher level of lockdowns around the world last year led to increased usage of digital content and services. We expect gross margin to be between 42.5% and 43.5%. We expect OpEx to be between $12.5 billion and $12.7 billion. We expect OI&E to be around negative $150 million, excluding any potential impact from the mark-to-market of minority investments, and our tax rate to be around 16%. Finally, today, our Board of Directors has declared a cash dividend of $0.22 per share of common stock payable on February 10, 2022, to shareholders of record as of February 7, 2022. And with that, let's open the call to questions.
Tejas Gala:
Thank you, Luca. We ask that you limit yourself to two questions. Operator, may we have the first question, please?
Operator:
Absolutely. We'll take our first question from Katie Huberty with Morgan Stanley. Hearing no response, we'll take our next question from Wamsi Mohan with Bank of America.
Wamsi Mohan:
Yes. Thank you. Your margins have clearly been very impressive. So I have one question each on product and one on services gross margins. On product gross margins, that's clearly benefiting from a very strong mix. So Tim, I'm curious how sustainable do you think these mix trends are from the data that you see? And can you share any thoughts across how the Pro and Pro Max mix compared to prior cycles? And on the services side, if I could just ask that, too. When you look at the gross margins there, that's been really impressive. Can you give us some sense of where within services, you're seeing particularly favorable mix trends? And how should investors think about the trajectory of these margins given some of the sizable investments you're making to drive very successful areas like content for TV+ as an example?
Tim Cook:
Wamsi, it's Tim. In terms of the mix, we don't comment directly on mix. But what I would tell you is that we saw strong demand across the iPhone 13 family. And in fact, we had several of the top-selling models in various markets, including the top 5 in the U.S. and Australia, the top 4 in Urban China, 2 of the top 3 in the UK, 3 of the top 4 in France and Germany and 4 of the top 6 in Japan. And certainly, based on some external data that I've seen, it does seem to say that we are gaining share as well. So we feel quite good about the momentum of iPhone. And I should add that we were constrained during the quarter.
Luca Maestri:
Wamsi, on the services side, you were asking about gross margin there. As you know, our services business in aggregate is accretive to overall company margin. And as you know, our services portfolio is very broad, and it contains businesses with very different margin profiles. The difference in margin profile is due in part to the nature of those businesses and in part to the way that we account for them, in some cases, we account on a net basis as opposed to a gross basis. And so as a result, the services gross margin percentage over time will be influenced by the relative growth of the different businesses within the portfolio. We do not guide at the product and services level, but I think you've seen the guidance that we provided for the March quarter at the total company level, 42.5% to 43.5%, obviously very strong compared to our recent history. And so we're very pleased with that.
Operator:
We'll take our next question from Kyle McNealy with Jefferies.
Kyle McNealy:
Congrats on the solid iPhone result. That's very good. I assume that you may have prioritized iPhone to the extent there may be similar components that are used for iPhone and iPad. Can you just level set me on that if that's not the case? And if it is, should we see a recovery in iPad as you move past your prime iPhone selling season and you may have better access to components or better supply as we move through the next few months of the year?
Tim Cook:
Yes. Kyle, it's Tim. From a supply constraint point of view, as you recall, we said that in Q1, the December quarter, that would have constraints more than 6, and we clearly did have constraints more than 6. On March, we're saying that where we will have -- we will do better or have less constraints than we had in the December quarter. If you look at the commonality between different products, there is some. But generally, the challenge is on legacy nodes. And these legacy nodes are by supplier. And so it's much more focused on the supplier than anything else and versus us behind the curtain finding a place to take it. There's not -- none of that, but there is some of that. But largely, we have to take it where the shortages are.
Kyle McNealy:
Okay. Great. Can you give us any other color on kind of the trajectory of iPad and what's impacting this quarter and where it might go in the March and the June quarter?
Tim Cook:
Yes. The issue with iPad, and it was a very significant constraint in the December quarter, was very much on these legacy nodes that I had talked about. Virtually all of the problem was in that area. And so overall, we're not guiding by product constraint -- by product level. But at the -- but overall, we do see an improvement in the March quarter in terms of the constraints going down versus what they were in the December quarter.
Operator:
We'll take our next question from Shannon Cross with Cross Research.
Shannon Cross:
Tim, could you talk a bit about the Mac business? Looking back, it's up about 50% from the calendar 2019 revenue. You did almost $11 billion this quarter, and you're still working through the M1 transition. So can you talk about where you see the opportunity to gain share? What are really sort of the target markets that you think you can go after in order to grow this beyond think it was about $37 billion in the last 12 months? And then I have a follow-up.
Tim Cook:
Yes. Shannon, thank you for the question. Mac set an all-time revenue record at $10.9 billion for the quarter. That was up 25%. And as you point out, the last 6 quarters for the Mac have been the top 6 revenue quarters of all time. And what's further very good about this is we set all-time revenue records in Americas, in Europe and the rest of Asia Pacific. And we set a December quarter record in Greater China. And so it's not narrowed to a particular geographic area that we're doing well in. It's almost -- about almost across the board. The response is very much because of M1. And we got even more response with the MacBook Pro that we launched in the -- during the Q1 time frame. The -- both the upgraders, which we had a record number of upgraders for the December quarter, but also in markets like China, 6 out of 10 sales are people new to the Mac. And so it's powered by both upgraders and switchers. Customer satisfaction is off the charts. And so what I see this as is a -- that will -- a product that will be very successful in a number of different markets from education, to business, to the creative industry and in all geographic markets. We're not limiting ourselves.
Shannon Cross :
Great. And then, Luca, can you talk a bit more on services? Just obviously outperformed your guidance or your expectations as well as certainly where we were at. Where were the -- what were the things that really outperformed? And maybe what trends are you seeing that is driving the extra revenue?
Luca Maestri :
Yes, Shannon. It was -- I mean it was really great on all fronts. We said December quarter records in every geographic segment. And then as I mentioned earlier, an all-time record for cloud, for music, for video, for advertising, for payment services. December quarter record in the App Store. So we've done, as you said, better than we were expecting at the beginning of the quarter. This overperformance has been spread around the world and spread around our services categories. And the reality is this combination of factors, the fact that the installed base is growing, the fact that we continue to have more and more engagement of our customers on all the services -- paid subscriptions is a phenomenal story, right? We now have 785 million paid subs. We just -- we've increased 165 million in the last 12 months alone, right? And so all these things combined are really powering the business. Very, very pleased with the performance.
Operator:
We'll hear next from Katy Huberty with Morgan Stanley.
Kathryn Huberty :
So first question just as it relates to some of the disruption you've seen on the component side, manufacturing and logistics over the past couple of years, are you starting to rethink your broader supply chain strategy or the manufacturing footprint on the back of the significant disruption? Are you happy with the overall geographic exposure that you see in the supply chain today?
Tim Cook:
Katy, if you sort of step back and look at how we've done, our largest issue by far has been the chip shortage. That is industry-wide and on these legacy nodes, as I had mentioned earlier. And I think our supply chain actually does very good considering the shortages because it's a fast-moving supply chain. The cycle times are very short. There's very little distance between a chip being fabricated and packaged and a product being -- going out of factory. And so, no, I don't see that it makes a fundamental change in the supply chain.
Kathryn Huberty :
Okay. And how are you thinking about the metaverse opportunity and Apple's role in that market?
Tim Cook:
Well, that's a big question. But we're a company in the business of innovation. So we're always exploring new and emerging technologies. And I -- you've spoken at length about how this area is very interesting to us. Right now, we have over 14,000 AR kit apps in the App Store, which provide incredible AR experiences for millions of people today. And so we see a lot of potential in this space and are investing accordingly.
Operator:
We'll take our next question from Amit Daryani with Evercore.
Amit Daryanani :
I have 2 as well. I guess both up on the supply chain side, I think these continue to be fairly volatile. I'd love to get your perspective, if you feel, if things or supply chain issues are starting to alleviate or they still remain challenging? And then maybe I missed this, but could you perhaps tell us how much revenue was left on the table in December because of the supply chain issues? And how does that number shake up in March?
Tim Cook:
Yes. Amit, what we've said in terms of December and March was that it's very difficult to estimate with great precision the constraints. But we said that they would be more than the Q4 or more than the September quarter, and we're saying that March will be less than the December quarter. And so that's the kind of verbiage that we’ve placed around it. In terms of is it still challenging? Yes, it is challenging. And for us, we pride ourselves on getting products to customers who really want them and try to do that in a fast basis. And so it's frustrating that we can't always do that at the speed that we would like. However, March is better than December. And so there's some encouraging sign there. We're not predicting, [which we do not know] overall, obviously because of the number of variables that go into such a prediction.
Amit Daryanani:
Fair enough. Tim, I think one of the topics investors can struggle a fair a bit with Apple is really just sort of understand visibility around your product road map, and I think some of your tech peers tend to be more vocal about their initiative. Some of them go change their name when they find an initiative that’s attractive I feel. You folks are spending, I think, $23 billion on R&D in '21. So you're really spending a fair amount. And maybe without telling us the road map, could you just talk about how do you think about where to focus your R&D resources on? And to some extent, is the way to think about this R&D spend, how much of it is really done on things that are more evolutionary in products that are out in the marketplace versus things that we haven't seen yet are on potential new offerings?
Tim Cook:
We have a little different model. We try to announce things when they're ready or close to ready and try to maintain an element of surprise in there. And so that explains hopefully what we do with our road map. And I think that's proven successful for us, and other people can do it differently, of course, but it's pretty been good for us over time to do that. So we're going to continue to do that. In terms of deciding where we invest in, we look at areas that are sort of at the intersection of hardware, software and services. And because we think that, that's where the magic really happens and it brings out the best in Apple. And so there are areas that have more than peaked our interest, and we are investing in those. And you can tell through time that we've ramped our R&D spend even more than we were before. And so there's quite a bit of investment going into things that are not on the market at this point as there always are.
Operator:
We'll hear next from David Vogt with UBS.
David Vogt:
I just wanted to dive in perspective on China and sort of the macro climate there and how that sort of pertains to your business as we think about it going forward. And the reason why I'm asking is we've heard some concerns that current policies might have caused a pause in this market and smartphone inventory. Maybe more specifically the local vendors could be a little bit elevated going into Chinese New Year. So we just want to get your thoughts on what you're seeing in this market around, the sort of potential development and then maybe touch on sell-in versus sell-through in that market. And then I have a follow-up.
Tim Cook:
Well, I can only comment on, for us. Our sales grew 21% there in the last quarter, and we're very proud of that. I'll stay away and let other people be the economist and make the macro determinations. But what we're seeing there was super impressive with all-time revenue records and a record number of upgraders and strong double-digit growth in switchers on iPhone, which is very important to us. And as I've mentioned before, we had the top 4 selling phones in urban China. And so there's a lot of good there. And I would remind you that iPhone was constrained in the quarter. And so I'm not sure where the statements are coming around about inventory, and I can't comment on whether other people have more or not, I don't know the answer to that. Thanks for the question.
David Vogt:
That's helpful, Tim. And then maybe just on the supply chain. Obviously, you've been managing it incredibly well over the last 12 to 18 months. And gross margins have actually performed relatively well, mix driven both between products and services. Can you help us think about sort of the quantifiable impact or maybe the costs that you're carrying due to the supply chain that may be sort of -- I don't want to use the word transitory, but we'd expect over the longer term, that might be sort of abate a little bit and you'll get a little bit of a benefit as we get past some of these supply chain issues over the next 12 months or so?
Tim Cook:
We're seeing inflation, and it's factored into our gross margin and OpEx that Luca reviewed with you earlier. Logistics, as I've mentioned on a previous call, is very elevated in terms of the cost of moving things around. I would hope that at least a portion of that is transitory, but the world is -- the world has changed, and so we'll see.
Operator:
We'll take the question from Samik Chatterjee with JPMorgan.
Samik Chatterjee:
I had a couple. The first question that I had was really on Apple TV+, and I know some of the other players in this market have talked about slowing subscriber growth as we exit the pandemic. So curious if you can share what trends you're seeing in Apple TV and Apple TV+ and how similar or dissimilar they are and how your content is maybe helping you on that aspect? And I have a follow-up.
Tim Cook:
We don't give out subscriber numbers for Apple TV+. What we do, do is give out a subscriber number for our subscription number for the total number of subscriptions that we had. And I think Luca mentioned earlier we ended the quarter at 785 million. And so we were incredibly pleased with that. That's a huge growth on a year-over-year basis of 165 million. And it counts, as you recall, both Apple branded and third party. In terms of how we're doing with TV+, we've been honored with 200 wins and 890 nominations. We're doing exactly like we had wanted to. We’re giving storytellers a place to tell original stories and feel really good about where we are competitively and strategic position of the product.
Samik Chatterjee:
And if I can just follow up, and similarly on Apple Pay, can you just help us think about when you think about the next few years, where are the biggest opportunities, either be it in terms of like geographies or either segments -- customer segments that you may not be tapping into currently and have an opportunity in.
Tim Cook:
Well, putting aside any kind of thing that sits on our road map for a second in that area, which we obviously wouldn't talk about in the call, I would say that I think Apple Card has a great runway ahead of us. It was rated to the #1 midsized credit carding customer set by J.D. Power and is getting -- has fast become people's main credit card for many, many people. And the growth of Apple Pay has just been stunning. It's been absolutely stunning. And there's still obviously a lot more there to go and because there's still a lot of cash in the environment. And so I think that both of these and whatever else we might do have a great future ahead.
Operator:
We'll take our next question from Chris Caso with Raymond James.
Christopher Caso:
Yes. So the first question is just a little bit of help in interpreting the guidance. And if you could speak to the March quarter, perhaps in terms of seasonality and seasonal performance. And Luca, as you mentioned last year, because of the later launch of the phone that some of that came into the March quarter, and that was better than seasonal performance in March. Should we interpret because the supply constraints are easing somewhat as you go into the March quarter that we should see something similar that March quarter would get some better than seasonal performance? Is that the correct way to interpret your guidance?
Luca Maestri :
Well, and we talked about it on a year-over-year basis because that's probably how most people look at it. And so just to recap what we said. First of all, we expect a record for the March quarter. We expect solid growth on a year-over-year basis. And -- but as Tim was saying, we still expect significant supply constraints but less than what we've seen in December. So I think on that basis, you can do the math around sequential. But given where we are in the environment, given the difficult compare both on iPhone, and as I mentioned on -- during my prepared remarks, on services, we're very, very happy with the way we're guiding and the way the business is going right now.
Christopher Caso :
Okay. As a follow-up, a follow-up question is on perhaps the sustainability and repeatability of the growth in iPhone after 2 very good years, well-received product and the 5G upgrade cycle. And I think there was a point in time when perhaps there's a view from some that iPhone was ex growth, and that's been proven wrong. Off of these very strong results, maybe you can speak to your level of confidence that iPhone continues to grow in the future? And kind of what are the avenues for that growth?
Tim Cook:
Yes. Chris, it's Tim. What I would say is that iPhone has become an integral part of so many people's lives now more than ever. And the active installed base of iPhone continues to grow and is now at an all-time high. And during December, as we had mentioned, we had a record number of upgraders and grew switchers strong double-digit, which I think speaks to the strength of the product. And that's all baked into some -- an enormous customer satisfaction rating of 98% and doing well throughout the geographies. And I've mentioned some of the geos that we track and how many units that we have on the top-selling model charts. And so -- and even though this is the second product announcement that has 5G in it, we're still really in the early innings of 5G, meaning if you look at the installed base and look at how many people are on 5G versus not, and we don't release those exact numbers, but you can do some math and estimate those, we maintain a very optimistic view on iPhone long term.
Operator:
We'll take our next question from Ben Bollin with Cleveland Research.
Benjamin Bollin :
Tim, I'm interested in how you think about the relationship between the total iOS installed base and then the subsequent performance you see within the services or the paid subscriptions. And a second part to that is, how do you look at the existing services business in terms of the growth you get from customers who are already subscribers versus completely net new or greenfield subscribers?
Tim Cook:
I think I'll let Luca comment on the second part of that. But if you back up and sort of look at how we're doing, even though we have 785 million subs, relative to the total number of products offered and the customers that's offered in, there's still a lot of room to grow there. And so I -- the way that I look at it is that we -- there's a lot more greenfield in front of us.
Luca Maestri :
And Ben, on the services engagement and how we think about customers, right, obviously, it's important for us that customers are engaged on our services platforms. And the ones that we have, we know that the more engaged they are, they're more likely to stay with Apple for the long term. So we just obviously track all those metrics, and they're very important for us. And that's why we continue to improve the quality of our offerings and the quantity over time. As you've seen, we launched a lot of new services. We obviously care a lot about new customers as well, and that's why we keep track of the installed base and a lot of other metrics on that front. It's very similar to what we do with products. I mean, also for products, we care a lot about upgraders. We care a lot about switchers. It's obviously the combination of the 2 that when you put it together provides the level of growth that you've actually seen in our Services business. I mean the last 12 months, we've done over $72 billion of revenue on Services. It's the size of a Fortune 50 company. It couldn't happen with our contribution from both existing and new customers.
Operator:
We'll take our next question from Harsh Kumar with Piper Sandler.
Harsh Kumar :
First of all, congratulations on stellar quarter in December and all the records that the Apple community has set. Tim, I had a question on the content on Apple TV. When we look at the Apple content that you guys put all on TV original content, it's typically very socially responsible and healthy, for example, Ted Lasso. Has this, in effect, created a constraint or a hesitancy of some sort for Apple to go and purchase studios when they come up? Or have those decisions be primarily financial or otherwise?
Tim Cook:
We don't make purely financial decisions about the content. We try to find great content that has a reason for being. And we love shows like Ted Lasso and several of the other shows as well that have reason for existing and may have a good message and may make people feel better at the end of it. But we're -- but I don't view that we've narrowed our universe, the things we're selecting from. There's plenty to pick from out there. And I think that we're doing a pretty good job of it as we speak.
Harsh Kumar :
Fair enough. And then my follow-up was the Apple vision of healthcare in the future. So you guys have sort of cautiously approached healthcare with iWatch and iPhone. It's mostly a preventative sort of approach. It provides you updates. But do you see a situation down the line where Apple perhaps plays a more active role, either through the Watch or some of the device where perhaps a doctor or a hospital mandates that the watch we want for effectively for critical and vital monitoring? And I was curious if you could just give us some color on how you guys think about health care and iWatch and that confluence?
Tim Cook:
Well, the -- with the Apple Watch, there's literally not days that go by without me getting notes about someone that's received a health alert. Maybe it's to do with their cardiovascular health. Or more recently, a lot of people have told me that they fell and was knocked unconscious and couldn't respond and the watch responded for them to emergency contacts and emergency personnel. And so there's a lot that we're doing today. My sense has always been that there's more here. I don't want to get into a road map discussion in the call. But we continue to kind of pull the string and see where it takes us. But we're really satisfied with how we're doing in this area because we are fundamentally changing people's lives and, in some cases, saving people's lives. So it's an area of great interest.
Tejas Gala:
Thank you. A replay of today's call will be available for 2 weeks on Apple Podcast as a webcast on apple.com/investor and via telephone. The numbers for the telephone replay are (888) 203-1112 or (719) 457-0820. Please enter confirmation code 3599903. These replays will be available by approximately 5 p.m. Pacific Time today. Members of the press with additional questions can contact Josh Rosenstock at (408) 862-1142. Financial analysts can contact me with additional questions at (669) 227-2402. Thank you again for joining us.
Operator:
This concludes today's conference. We do appreciate your participation.
Operator:
Good day, and welcome to the Apple Q4 Fiscal Year 2021 Earnings Conference Call. Today’s call is being recorded. At this time, for opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn the call over to Tejas Gala, Director of Investor Relations and Corporate Finance. Please go ahead.
Tejas Gala:
Thank you. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us. Speaking today first is Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook; and he’ll be followed by CFO, Luca Maestri. After that, we’ll open the call to questions from analysts. Please note that some of the information you’ll hear during our discussion today will consist of forward-looking statements, including, without limitation, those regarding revenue, gross margin, operating expenses, other income and expense, taxes, capital allocation and future business outlook, including the potential impact of COVID-19 on the Company’s business and results of operations. These statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results or trends to differ materially from our forecast. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in Apple’s most recently filed annual report on Form 10-K and the Form 8-K filed with the SEC today, along with the associated press release. Apple assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements or information which speak as of their respective dates. I’d like to now turn the call over to Tim for introductory remarks.
Tim Cook:
Thanks, Tejas, and good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining the call today. A year ago, I spoke to you about the atmosphere of uncertainty in which we were living and the way it had come to define our daily experience, both as people and as a company. Today, much has changed, profoundly so. And while we are still living through unprecedented times, we are encouraged by progress around the world. I’m grateful to our teams who have stayed resolutely focused on our customers and the pursuit of innovation on their behalf. We’ve aimed to help our customers navigate the world as it is while empowering them to create the world as it can be. Whether it’s public health workers managing vaccination campaigns on iPhone or students returning to classrooms full of iPads or family staying connected over FaceTime, it is an honor to know that what we make matters and to see that reflected in the world and in our performance. This fiscal year, we reported $366 billion of revenue, which represents 33% annual growth. We also achieved more than 20% growth across all of our product categories and in every geographic segment. And today, Apple is reporting another very strong quarter. Demand was very robust, and we set a new September quarter record of $83.4 billion, up 29% from last year and in line with what we discussed on our last call, despite larger-than-expected supply constraints. We estimate these constraints had around a $6 billion revenue dollar impact, driven primarily by industry-wide silicon shortages and COVID-related manufacturing disruptions. Even so, we set an all-time record for Mac and quarterly records for iPhone, iPad, Wearables, Home and Accessories, representing 30% year-over-year growth in products. Our services business performed better than we expected, where we hit an all-time record of $18.3 billion and grew 26% year-over-year. And we set quarterly records in every geographic segment with strong double-digit growth across the board. During fiscal 2021, we earned nearly one-third of our revenue from emerging markets and doubled our business in India and Vietnam. We are optimistic about the future, especially as we see strong demand for our new products. At the end of the September quarter, we introduced our iPhone 13 lineup as well as the Apple Watch Series 7, iPad and iPad mini, all of which represents significant advances. The iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 mini, alongside the iPhone 13 Pro and Pro Max, are setting a new standard with their superfast performance, advanced camera systems, longer battery life and brilliant Super Retina displays. Customers are loving the ninth generation iPad, which features a beautifully sharp display and twice the storage of the previous generation, as well as the new iPad mini, with its ultra portable design and impressive speed and performance. And we’ve been thrilled with the reviews that Apple Watch Series 7 has earned for its larger display, faster charging and refined design. And just last week, we introduced the completely reimagined MacBook Pro powered by the extraordinary M1 PRO and M1 Max chips. These are our most powerful notebooks ever with game-changing performance and battery life, and the world’s best notebook display. We think customers are going to love MacBook Pro, whether they’re editing video in Final Cut Pro or making music in Logic Pro and so much more. They’ll be able to do things never before possible on a notebook. We also announced our all-new AirPods that feature spatial audio and industry-leading sound, longer battery life and an all-new design. For the home, we added three new colors to our HomePod mini lineup, which offers seamless integration across Apple’s products and services. We also announced a new subscription tier to Apple Music called Apple Music Voice, which offers subscribers access to the services catalog of 90 million songs all through the power of Siri. Across the board, teams at Apple continue to drive unmatched innovation through the seamlessly integrated hardware, software experience we’ve long prided ourselves on. iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 have created more ways than ever to stay productive, whether choosing Focus to avoid distractions or Quick Note to capture a thought. macOS Monterey offers new ways to connect with friends and family, get more done and work fluidly across Apple devices. And watchOS 8 has made Apple Watch even more powerful and more ways than ever to stay active and to track your health on the go. We’ve never had a more diverse range of services for our customers to choose from, and we’ve been very encouraged by our performance, which reflects growing customer enthusiasm and satisfaction. In just its first two years, Apple TV+ has already proved itself to fans around the world. And I want to congratulate the incredible actors, writers, storytellers, producers and everyone else whose behind-the-scenes work has made that success possible. This quarter, Apple TV+ won 11 Emmys, including the Award for Outstanding Comedy Series for Ted Lasso. That show has continued to bring light and laughter to fans all over the world with its boundless optimism and beloved cast of characters. We couldn’t be more proud of our entire lineup of content from the gripping second seasons of The Morning Show and Truth Be Told to our newest programs, Swagger, which is out tomorrow. The response has been incredible. This quarter also saw major updates to Fitness+, including the addition of new activities like meditation and pilates, and the announcement of group workouts, a feature that brings fitness and friends together. We also shared that Fitness+ will soon be available in 15 new countries, bringing workouts for every age and skill level to millions more people around the world. And those are just two of the services our customers are loving. This quarter, Apple Card won a J.D. Power award for customer satisfaction in its very first year of eligibility. The App Store continues to help people find the apps they depend on to stay productive, creative and entertained. And on Apple News, we launched a News Partner Program that expands Apple’s support for journalism while creating an even better business opportunity for publishers. As we continue to support our customers around the world, we’re glad to report we’ve opened several new Apple Stores. This quarter, we opened a beautiful store in Changsha, which is our first store in the Hunan province of China. We also just opened our third store in Istanbul. And we recently added a store in the Bronx, which means we are now in all 5 boroughs of New York City. All of our stores are now open worldwide and have been for 7 weeks. As we enter our busiest time of year, I particularly want to share my gratitude for our retail teams. Customers have never relied on our products more, and our retail teams have truly answered the call. We meet our customers where they are with many ways to shop through our online and retail stores and can help them choose the best product for them and get it up and running. We are also excited about our education initiatives. This month, we introduced the Everyone Can Code Early Learners program, offering free resources, which helps students and elementary school learn coding. We see education not only as a fundamental good in its own right but is a great equalizing force. A world where all people can access a quality education isn’t just a smarter world. It’s a more equitable one. That desire to create a more just an equitable world is the guiding principle behind our Racial Equity and Justice Initiative. This quarter, Apple shared plans to expand our $100 million investment by an additional $30 million. Those funds will be used in a number of ways, including the creation of a new global Hispanic-serving institution equity and innovation hub. The hub will dramatically expand the technology and resources for students in the STEM fields. Those programs join our ever-expanding work with historically black colleges and universities, including the now 45 community coding centers and regional hubs, serving underrepresented communities across the United States. This month, we were also happy to welcome the inaugural class of developers and entrepreneurs to the Apple Developer Academy in Detroit. The academy is Apple’s first in the United States and is designed to help prepare students for jobs in the thriving iOS app economy, which supports more than 2.1 million jobs across all 50 states. In August, we shared our impact accelerators first cohort of black, Latinx and indigenous-owned businesses whose pioneering work in green technology and clean energy serves many of the communities most impacted by climate change. More broadly, we are already carbon-neutral as a company. And this quarter, we made new strides towards reaching our goal of carbon neutrality across our entire supply chain and the life cycle of our devices by 2030. We’ve made significant product advances in this area. iPad and iPad mini now come with 100% recycled aluminum enclosure. The antenna on iPhone 13 is made up of upcycled plastic water bottles, which marks an industry-first. And as our customers are seeing when they purchase iPhone 13, we’ve redesigned the packaging to eliminate that outer plastic wrap, which will allow us to avoid using 600 metric tons of plastic. This brings us closer to removing all plastic in our packaging by 2025. We’ve also made good progress toward our goal to one day make our products without taking anything from the earth. With Apple Watch Series 7, for example, 99% of the rare earth elements we use are recycled. Ahead of COP26, I’m also pleased to report that we have more than doubled the number of our suppliers who have committed to becoming carbon neutral by 2030. We’re very encouraged to see the growth in this area, and we will continue to drive those changes in the supply chain in the months and years to come. We’ve never viewed our environmental work as a side project. Teams across Apple are pushing this work forward in the same spirit of innovation we bring to our products and services. We are determined to be a ripple in the pond that drives a far greater change. From the pandemic to climate change to an equity and injustice, global challenges won’t abide solitary solutions, and we feel a deep sense of responsibility to help. We are incredibly proud of the product lineup we have going into the holiday season, and we are encouraged by the customer response we’ve seen. And while we cannot know exactly which path the pandemic will take the world down in the months to come, we feel quite confident that this new year will be driven by the values that guide us and by the innovation that defines us. With that, I’ll hand it over to Luca for a deeper dive on our performance this quarter. Luca?
Luca Maestri:
Thank you, Tim. Good afternoon, everyone. We are pleased to report very strong financial results for the September quarter, capping a record-setting fiscal year 2021. We set a September quarter revenue record of $83.4 billion, an increase of nearly $19 billion or 29% from a year ago, despite larger-than-expected supply constraints. We also reached new Q4 records in every geographic segment with strong double-digit growth in each one of them. And it was a record September quarter for both, products and services. On the product side, revenue was $65.1 billion, up 30% over a year ago as we experienced better-than-expected demand for our products, despite supply constraints that we estimated at around $6 billion. We grew in each of our product categories with an all-time record for Mac and September quarter records for iPhone, for iPad and for Wearables, Home and Accessories. This level of sales performance, combined with the unmatched loyalty of our customers and the strength of our ecosystem, drove our installed base of active devices to a new all-time record. Our services set an all-time revenue record of $18.3 billion, up 26% over a year ago, with September quarter records in every geographic segment and in every services category. Company gross margin was 42.2%, down 110 basis points from last quarter, due to higher costs and a different mix of products, partially offset by leverage. Products gross margin was 34.3%, down 170 basis points sequentially as higher cost structures were partially offset by leverage and mix. Services gross margin was 70.5%, up 70 basis points sequentially, mainly due to a different mix. Net income of $20.6 billion and diluted earnings per share of $1.24, both grew over 60% year-over-year and were September quarter records. Let me get into more detail for each of our revenue categories. iPhone revenue grew 47% year-over-year and set a September quarter record of $38.9 billion, despite supply constraints as customer demand was very strong. The iPhone 12 family continued to perform very well, and we are seeing enthusiastic customer response to the launch of our iPhone 13 family. We also grew double digits in each geographic segment, setting September quarter records in both, developed and emerging markets. The latest survey of U.S. consumers from 451 Research indicates iPhone customer satisfaction of 98% for iPhone, and our active installed base of iPhones reached a new all-time high. For Mac, we set an all-time revenue record of $9.2 billion, despite supply constraints, driven by strong demand for our M1-powered MacBook Air. In fact, our last five quarters for Mac have been the best five quarters ever for the category. iPad performance was also strong with a September quarter revenue record of $8.3 billion, up 21%, in spite of significant supply constraints as customer demand for the iPad Pro also powered by M1 was very strong. For both, Mac and iPad, we continue to see a combination of high levels of customer satisfaction and first-time buyers. Around half of the customers purchasing Mac and iPad during the quarter were new to that product. And in the most recent surveys of U.S. consumers from 451 Research, customer satisfaction was 97% for both, Mac and iPad. Our continued investment in iPad and Mac is taking computing to the next level. We have redesigned and reengineered both products to provide customers an unmatched experience, which resulted in record fiscal years for both categories. We are carrying this momentum also in the enterprise market. For example, SAP has already deployed Macs to tens of thousands of their employees to date. Following the launch of our new M1 MacBook Pro last week, SAP is planning to add it to the growing list of M1 Mac offerings available to their global workforce. Another example is France’s national railway company, SNCF, which equips all train drivers with iPads to manage their entire daily workflow and train operations, helping to lower energy and maintenance costs. In fact, the iPads have been so well received that 90% of the drivers choose to purchase them for personal use at the end of the corporate device refresh cycle. Next, Wearables, Home and Accessories set a new September quarter record of $8.8 billion. We continue to improve and expand our product offerings in this category, which we believe improve the overall customer experience and showcase the integration between our products and services. Apple Watch, AirPods and HomePod mini are powerful devices in their own right, but paired with our other products, software and services, they create unique experiences, like switching audio seamlessly between devices on your AirPods. Turning to services. As I mentioned, we reached an all-time revenue record of $18.3 billion with all-time records for cloud services, music, video, advertising, AppleCare and payment services and a September quarter record for the App Store. Our continued investment and strong execution in services has helped us deliver a record $68 billion in revenue during fiscal 2021, nearly tripling this category in six years. These impressive results reflect the positive momentum we are seeing on many fronts. First, our installed base continues to grow and reached an all-time high across each geographic segment. Next, we continue to see increased customer engagement with our services. The number of paid accounts on our digital content stores grew double digits and reached a new all-time high during the September quarter in each geographic segment. Also, paid subscriptions continued to show very strong growth. We now have more than 745 million paid subscriptions across the services on our platform, which is up more than 160 million from last year and nearly 5 times the number of paid subscriptions we had less than five years ago. And finally, as Tim mentioned earlier, we’re adding new services that we think our customers will love. And we continue to improve the breadth and quality of our current services offerings. Fiscal ‘21 was not only a big year for services but for our entire company. During the past 12 months, we grew our business by 33% or $91 billion, reaching nearly $366 billion of revenue with record level performance across the board. Every product category and every geographic segment set a new annual revenue record and was up at least 20% over fiscal 2020. Let me now turn to our cash position. We ended the quarter with $191 billion in cash plus marketable securities. We issued $6.5 billion of new term debt, retired $1.3 billion of term debt and decreased commercial paper by $2 billion, leaving us with total debt of $125 billion. As a result, net cash was $66 billion at the end of the quarter as we continue to make progress towards our goal of net cash neutral over time. As our business continues to generate very strong cash flow, we were also able to return $24 billion to shareholders during the September quarter. This included $3.6 billion in dividends and equivalents and $20 billion through open market repurchases of 137 million Apple shares. We also retired an additional 5 million shares in the final settlement of our 17th ASR. As we move ahead into the December quarter, I’d like to review our outlook, which includes the types of forward-looking information that Tejas referred to at the beginning of the call. Given the continued uncertainty around the world in the near term, we are not providing revenue guidance but we are sharing some directional insights based on the assumption that the COVID-related impacts to our business do not worsen from what we are projecting today for the current quarter. As we mentioned earlier, during the September quarter, supply constraints impacted our revenue by around $6 billion. We estimate the impact from supply constraints will be larger during the December quarter. Despite this challenge, we are seeing high demands for our products and expect to achieve very solid year-over-year revenue growth and to set a new revenue record during the December quarter. We expect revenue for each product category to grow on a year-over-year basis, except for iPad, which we expect to decline year-over-year due to supply constraints. For services, we expect our growth rate to decelerate from the September quarter but to remain strong. We expect gross margin to be between 41.5% and 42.5%. We expect OpEx to be between $12.4 billion and $12.6 billion. We expect OI&E to be around negative $50 million, excluding any potential impact from the mark-to-market of minority investments and our tax rate to be around 16%. Finally, today, our Board of Directors has declared a cash dividend of $0.22 per share of common stock payable on November 11, 2021, to shareholders of record as of November 8, 2021. With that, let’s open the call to questions.
Tejas Gala:
Thank you, Luca. We ask that you limit yourself to two questions. Operator, may we have the first question, please?
Operator:
Thank you. Our first question comes from Shannon Cross from Cross Research.
Shannon Cross:
Thank you very much. Tim, I’m wondering, can you talk a bit more about specific supply chain issues you saw and how you’ve seen improvements I think during the current quarter, and how we should think about what products do you expect to see most impacted going forward? Just any more color you can give us on what’s going on out there because clearly, this is hitting everyone.
Tim Cook:
Sure. If you look at Q4 for a moment, we had about $6 billion in supply constraints, and it affected the iPhone, the iPad and the Mac. We had -- there were two causes of them for Q4. One was the chip shortages that you’ve heard a lot about from many different companies through the industry. And the second was COVID-related manufacturing disruptions in Southeast Asia. The second of those, the COVID disruptions, have improved materially across October to where we currently are. And so, for this quarter, we think that the primary cause of supply-chain-related shortages will be the chip shortage. It will affect -- it is affecting, I should say, pretty much most of our products currently and -- but from a demand point of view, demand is very robust. And so, part of this is the demand also is very strong. But we believe that by the time we finish the quarter that the constraints will be larger than the $6 billion that we experienced in Q4.
Shannon Cross:
Okay, great. So, you’ll sort of push forward in the next quarter as well. Can you -- just a different question because I’m curious, you’re starting to sell more and more things on a ratable basis. And how are you thinking about that? I mean, you have the new Macs and that we keep seeing. You can buy for a monthly charge in that. How do you think that’s driving sales? And how should we think about percent maybe of the portfolio that’s now available? And I don’t know if you want to tell us how much revenue is now under a recurring nature, but it definitely seems as you’re shifting more and more to maybe sort of a bundled sale or offering from a consumer standpoint where you just pay one price every month and you get all of your Apple devices and Apple services. Thank you.
Tim Cook:
Yes. The first product, Shannon, that really sold on a monthly basis was iPhone. And that began to happen in the U.S., as an example, shortly after the subsidy kind of world changed markedly. And so, I would say that predominantly, the mode of buying an iPhone in the United States is on a monthly kind of plan today. For the balance of the products, still the most popular would be buying them outright. But, we are seeing more and more demand for monthly payments. And so, we want to give the customer what they want. And so, you will see us do more and more things like that that will meet the customer where -- and provide the price that they want -- in a way that they want to pay for it. I don’t know the percentage of products that are sold that way today, but it is increasing.
Operator:
We will hear next from Amit Daryanani with Evercore.
Amit Daryanani:
Perfect. Thanks a lot, and good afternoon, everyone. I have two as well. I guess, when I think about the supply chain headwinds, and you’re talking about $6 billion in September, getting bigger in December. Tim, I would love to understand how do you guys comfort that this is really a demand that’s getting deferred versus potentially getting destroyed at least somewhere else. And if you think about the supply chain bottlenecks -- you were the COO. You managed a lot of the stuff. Do you feel comfortable that sort of peaks in December and alleviates it from there, or what does the trajectory look like for improvement?
Tim Cook:
Yes. What I feel comfortable on is I feel like we’ve made great progress on the COVID-related disruptions, and that happened across the month of October, and we’re in a materially better position today. It is difficult to predict COVID. And so, I’m not going to predict where it goes. But I can just tell you that as of today, we’re in a materially better position than we were in September and in the first several weeks of October. In terms of the chip shortage, the chip shortage is happening on legacy nodes. Primarily, we buy leading edge nodes, and we’re not having issues on leading edge nodes. But on legacy nodes, we compete with many different companies for supply. And it’s difficult to forecast when those things will balance because you’d have to know how kind of -- how the economy is going to be in ‘22 and the accuracy of everyone else’s demand projections. And so, I don’t feel comfortable in making a prediction. I think, it would be subject to too much inaccuracy. But, I do feel very comfortable with our operational team. I think, we’ve got a world-class one. And I’m sure they’re doing everything they can do to collapse cycle times and improve yields and do all the things that you can do in addition to fundamental capacity investment to remedy the situation.
Amit Daryanani:
Got it. And then, Luca, if I may ask you a question on gross margins for December, you’re essentially guiding gross margins to be flat to maybe down a little bit versus sort of September. Maybe just touch about it. So, I think historically, I would have expected gross margins to be up in December, given how much revenue leverage you end up with. So maybe, what are the puts and takes on gross margins that are resulting in a more flattish guide versus historical seasonality?
Luca Maestri:
Well, as you know, typically, obviously with December being the holiday season, we do get leverage, as you say. But, it’s also the period of the year where we launch a lot of new products. And as you know, we launch essentially in every product category. We launch new products. Demand is very strong. But as you know, when we launch these new products, we tend to have higher cost structures at the beginning of the cycle. And so, that’s what balances this out. Obviously, from a year-over-year standpoint, it’s actually a significant expansion, right? Because when you look at what we did a year ago in the December quarter, 39.8%, this clearly indicates a significant expansion.
Operator:
We’ll hear next from Katy Huberty with Morgan Stanley.
Katy Huberty:
Thank you. Given the supply chain is blurring the demand picture for iPhone 13, what data points can you share that help investors understand whether demand is tracking to a product cycle that is flat, growing or down from the very strong iPhone 12? And maybe on that front, Luca, you can also comment on where you exited the quarter from a channel inventory standpoint for iPhone relative to a normal product cycle? And then, I’ve got a follow-up.
Tim Cook:
Yes. Look, maybe I can take both of those. Channel inventory, as you would expect in a constrained environment, the iPhone channel inventory ended below the targeted range and is currently below it. And so, that’s that. In terms of the blurring of demand, we look at -- Katy, we look at a number of different data points. We look at demand across our online store, demand in retail. We look through to back orders on the carrier channels, the ones that do take back orders there. We look at channel orders as well. And so, we have a number of different data points that we use to conclude how strong demand is. And we feel very, very good about where demand is right now. And we’re working feverishly on the supply side of that.
Katy Huberty:
And Tim, as a follow-up. We recently surveyed 4,000 consumers in the U.S. and China, and the feedback is most of them don’t want to pay for apps or services direct with the developer. They value the security, privacy, ease of transactions with the App Store. So, how do you think about balancing the regulators push for more choice with a customer base that’s happy with the existing experience? And just as a follow-on to that, how are you and Luca thinking about the potential impact of services revenue growth rate as some of the changes to the App Store go into effect?
Tim Cook:
Katy, the main thing that we’re focused on, on the App Store is to keep our focus on privacy and security. And so, these are the two major tenets that have produced over the years a very trusted environment where consumers and developers come together and consumers can trust the developers on the developers and the apps or what they say they are and the developers get a huge audience to sell their software to. And so, that’s sort of number one on our list. Everything else is a distant second. And so, what we’re doing is working to explain the decisions that we’ve made that are key to keeping the privacy and security there, which is to not have sideloading and not have alternate ways on the iPhone, where it opens up the iPhone to unreviewed apps and also get by the privacy restrictions that we put on the App Store. And so, we’re very, very focused in discussing the privacy and security elements of the App Store with the regulators and legislators.
Operator:
We’ll take our next question from David Vogt with UBS.
David Vogt:
Great. Thank you, guys. And I just have two quick questions, one big picture, theoretical. So, you covered the supply chain in pretty extensive detail on the call. But maybe just a bigger picture on how you’re thinking about it philosophically given what you just sort of went through over the last 12 to 8 months. So, what I mean by that, is there sort of a recalibration needed or an adjustment around your supply chain philosophy either from a partner perspective or maybe a regional perspective? And how do you think about the current infrastructure and its ability to sort of rebound and sort of handle sort of these disruptions that seem to crop up from time to time? And then, I have a follow-up.
Tim Cook:
Yes. I don’t see a fundamental error that we’ve made, if that’s what you’re picking out, in terms of creating the environment that we’re in. It was created for a number of reasons. The pandemic came along. Some people in the industry and some people outside the industry thought that the pandemic would reduce demand. They pulled their orders down. Things reset. And what really happened was demand went up and went up even more than a straight trend would predict. And so, the industry is working through that now. I’m making it little overly simplistic. There’s some other things like yields and things like that that are happening as well. But, those things are mainly manageable in the course of time. And so, what we’re doing is working with our partners on making sure that they have supply that we need and making sure that our demand statements are accurate as we see them and so forth. And at the same time, we are reducing our lead times and cycle times, so that when you get a chip off a fab that as quickly as possible, it’s in a product and shipping and also helping the fab partners increase their yields. And so, those things are things that we’re doing. We also support the CHIPS Act and investment there to put more investment in the ground. And so, we’re spending some time advocating for the CHIPS Act as well.
David Vogt:
Great. And that’s helpful. And I didn’t mean to implicate that you guys had messed up, just maybe came off that way. And maybe just as a quick follow-up. When you think about purchasing devices ratably, you touched on that earlier. But maybe can you just touch on the partnerships that you have with carriers and the support that they have given you over the last couple of years. Now, it’s been a key component of your success, the tight relationships that you have globally. Do you think sort of this business model, as it’s currently sort of put together globally, is sort of a permanent structure, meaning carriers are going to be integral part of driving demand for iPhones, or is there a sense that maybe it’s a little bit more transitory depending on the part of the cycle that we’re in?
Tim Cook:
I think that 5G has provided a once in a decade kind of upgrade potential, and it’s a multiyear kind of thing. It’s not a one year and done. And I think that we’re motivated there. The carrier is motivated there. We have mutual interest and the customer benefits hugely from getting a new 5G phone that has 5G and a number of other features in it, too. And so, I think everybody is aligned on purpose. The model that you paint is -- I wouldn’t call it a global model because there are different variations around the world depending upon the country. But, in general, I think that the marriage, if you will, or partnership between Apple and the carrier channel has never been stronger and that it’s on very solid footing.
Operator:
So, we’ll take our next question from Krish Sankar with Cowen and Company.
Krish Sankar:
I had two of them, too. And Tim, I will give you a reprieve from the supply chain questions. I had two on services. The first one is on your new ATT, the ad tracking transparency feature, and all the headlines that have gone recently, I’m kind of curious. The feedback you’ve seen or received from your advertisers and users and how it has also impacted search ads your own ad business. Can you let us know the feedback? And then, I have a follow-up.
Tim Cook:
The feedback from customers is overwhelmingly positive. Customers appreciate having the option of whether they want to be tracked or not. And so, there’s an outpouring of customer satisfaction there on the customer side. And the reason that we did this is that -- as you know, if you followed us for a while, we believe strongly that privacy is a basic human right and we believe that for decades, not just in the last year or so. And we’ve historically rolled out more and more features over time for -- to place the decision of whether to share data and what data to share in the hands of the user where we believe that it belongs. We don’t think that’s Apple’s role to decide, and we don’t think that’s another company’s role to decide but rather the individual who owns the data itself. And so, that’s our motivation there. There’s no other motivation.
Krish Sankar:
Got it. Got it, Tim. And that’s a very fair characterization. Thank you for that. And then, as a quick follow-up, I’m just kind of curious, on the mobile gaming in your App Store, there have been some recent actions by certain governments to limit game time. Kind of curious how that affects your App Store business in those geographies. And is there a way you can quantify that, or is it too immaterial at this point?
Tim Cook:
You mean limiting the time on games. Is that what you’re getting at?
Krish Sankar:
Yes, exactly. Like you’re trying to decide to limit game time and things like that.
Tim Cook:
It’s very difficult to measure. Yes, with the policy that you’re talking about for those people that don’t know is there’s a policy to restrict kids below a certain age to -- I think it’s one hour on Friday, Saturday, Sunday each. And it’s very difficult to see the impact of it on the App Store at this point.
Operator:
We’ll take our next question from Samik Chatterjee with JP Morgan.
Samik Chatterjee:
I guess, Tim, I wanted to first start off on your comment about strong demand across products. And just specific to iPhone 13, if you can give us a bit more insight about what are you seeing in terms of intent, in terms of either upgrades from the installed base or even switchers rate too, if you can compare to iPhone 12 because some of the feedback we are getting is, for example, like strong switching activity in China. So just wondering if you can get a bit more granular there in terms of the -- what’s driving the demand and who is it coming from. And then, I have a follow-up, please.
Tim Cook:
It’s so early to talk about iPhone 13 because it’s only been on the market for less than 30 days now. What I can tell you is going into the cycle, if you look at our results from last quarter, we grew on upgraders and switchers in the double digits. And so, both were very meaningful for the iPhone results last quarter. And so, there’s significant momentum in iPhone. And I would clearly characterize the demand that we’re seeing currently as robust, as you can tell from the -- some of the quotes that we’re quoting on the online store.
Samik Chatterjee:
Okay. And as a follow-up, I guess, back to the supply chain but I wanted to just ask more relative to cost implications there. And what we’re hearing is not only delays but also component cost going up. So, as we look through -- as I think about this upcoming cycle, how are you looking to manage component cost related headwinds? And is that something you’re seeing coming through the supply chain? Thank you.
Tim Cook:
We’ve put our current thoughts in the gross margin guidance that we gave you, the 41.5% to 42.5%. I would tell you that we are seeing a significant increase in freight costs. And I would assume that that is pretty consistent across different companies. And so, we’re clearly seeing some inflation there.
Operator:
We’ll take our next question from Jim Suva with Citigroup.
Jim Suva:
Thank you. And I’ll ask both my questions at the same time. Probably the first one is for Tim. On the services revenue, much better than expected. Can you give us some details about what drove that? Was it Apple Stores more open, so more AppleCare or more Apple One or Arcade or TV or Fitness? And then, probably for Luca on supply chain, when you mentioned supply chain headwind is going to get worse and you mentioned $6 billion this quarter, there’s two ways to think about your terminology of worse. Is it the delta from $2 billion that you identified three months ago that went to $6 billion, so therefore, the delta of $4 billion gets worse, or are you just saying -- and therefore, it’s above $10 billion for December quarter. Are you just saying it just gets higher than the $6 billion that you just identified earlier in the call?
Tim Cook:
Jim, I’m going to take the second question that you asked, and Luca could take the first one on services, just in the reverse of the way you coined it. On the supply constraints, what we’re saying is that the amount of -- the nominal amount of supply constraints for Q1, we estimate to be larger than $6 billion. And so, it’s important to know that we’re getting a lot more supply in Q1 than we had in Q4, obviously, because our sequential growth is significant. And we have very solid growth year-over-year. And so, the amount of supply is growing dramatically. It’s just that the demand is so robust that we envision having supply constraints for the quarter.
Luca Maestri:
And Jim, on services, the 26% growth rate that we had was better than what we were expecting at the beginning of the quarter. And it was really across the board. It’s difficult to single out a specific area because we set all-time records on cloud. We set all-time records across the board, AppleCare, Music, video, advertising, payment services, the App Store was a September quarter, right? So, it was strong across the board. When we look at the services business, we always think about some fundamental factors that allow us to have good visibility over the sustainability of the business, right? The fact that the installed base continues to grow, that’s obviously a positive. The fact that the number of people that are actually paying on the platform continues to grow double digits. And so, that obviously increases our opportunity. The number of subscriptions that we have on the platform, we mentioned during the call, 745 million paid subs right now. It’s an increase of 160 million versus just 12 months ago, right? And obviously, the fact that we continue to launch new services, new offerings within the services that we already have, new features, that obviously gives us a lot of momentum going forward. We’re very fortunate we have a very -- now it’s a very large business, $68 billion in the last 12 months and very diversified. We sell a lot of different services and our customers seem to really enjoy the experience that they have on the platform.
Operator:
We’ll take our next question from Chris Caso with Raymond James.
Chris Caso:
For my first question, it’s a question about your ability to recapture sales that you weren’t able to fill in Q4, Q1 and Q2. And you have some experience in that from last year when the iPhone, not all the models launched at the same time and some are late, and you did recapture some of that as you went past the holidays. Do you think that we should expect similar behavior this year? And then, with that also is, will all product categories behave similarly? Meaning that are the some product categories where if you missed the holidays, you just missed the sale.
Tim Cook:
I think there are some products that people buy as gifts that if it’s not there that it’s perishable. But I think that we have a lot of products as well that people will wait for and would expect those to be captured in a different time period. So, it’s a combination for this certain quarter, the holiday quarter, I believe.
Chris Caso:
Okay. As a follow-up, could you speak to iPhone mix? And one of the things we noted is that the delivery time for all iPhones are a bit long because of the constraints. They’re a bit longer on the Pro and the Max. Is that a function of supply or demand or perhaps both? And again, I would imagine you have a little better handle on that this year, given that all the phones were launched at the same time.
Tim Cook:
Yes. It’s really too early to make comments on mix at this point because it has been -- we have been in a constrained environment. So, the mix becomes more obvious, once supply and demand are balanced.
Operator:
We’ll take our next question from Harsh Kumar with Piper Sandler.
Harsh Kumar:
Yes. Hey, guys, first of all, a great job managing to the supply constraints. It’s obviously affecting everybody. So congratulations. And then Tim, one for you, a strategic question. When Apple thinks about strategic areas that as a company that we own, for example, software is a high priority, but you’re also one of the largest semiconductor companies if the company would stand alone. So, curious about the kind of input that -- thinking that goes into owning some piece of technology. For example, when we survey people, they say batteries and screens are very important. So, why doesn’t Apple -- for example, what causes Apple from looking at areas like that?
Tim Cook:
We look at ones where we believe we can make a substantial difference and have a level of differentiation. And so, we’ve put a lot of energy in the silicon space because we have felt that we could design and develop products that we could not if we were in the -- just buying what’s available on the commercial market. And as you can see, more recently, we made that call on the Mac as well and have shifted to our own chips there. And so, it really depends on whether we see a way to do something that’s differentiated or not. And I wouldn’t want to rule anything out. It’s more of whether or not we see our way clear to doing something that is materially better. We feel like we’ve done that in the chip area.
Harsh Kumar:
And then, I’ve got one for Luca. I want to go back to a question that Amit asked earlier in the call about the gross margin. So, when I look at the September quarter, services obviously grew much faster than the product business, margin was down and same thing for December. But I think you’re effectively saying that there’s a lot of new product launches. Would that not go into OpEx, for example, marketing, et cetera, as opposed to COGS, or is there something that maybe needs to be clarified here?
Luca Maestri:
There is -- certainly, obviously, that we have launch expenses in marketing and advertising, of course, when we launch new products. But, the reality, what happens, we always make our products better and which means adding new technology and new features to the product. So, typically, when you move from one generation of products to the next one, the cost structures tend to be higher, particularly at the beginning of the cycle. And so, when you make that transition, there is always some level of margin compression from the transition to a new product. The other aspect that you need to think about is the fact that the December quarter is the holiday season, and so the percentage of products business that we have in the holiday quarter is higher than what we have in the September quarter, for example. And therefore, as you know, because the services margins are higher than the products margin. There’s also a mix between the products and services business that plays into the gross margins for the Company, right? And that’s what you see as you move sequentially from September to December.
Operator:
We’ll hear next from Wamsi Mohan with Bank of America.
Wamsi Mohan:
I had a question about -- broadly about pricing of new products. This year, Apple launched the iPhone 13 at a slightly lower price than where the 12 was launched last year in China. Can you maybe help us think through what are some of the things that you look at in deciding that? And is that an action that you could take more broadly in other regions? And I have a follow-up.
Tim Cook:
We look at a variety of things, including our costs, including competition, including local conditions and exchange rates and a number of different things. And so, there’s not a -- there’s no formula for determining it. It’s done by a level of judgment looking at a number of different points -- data points. And we do that region by region.
Wamsi Mohan:
But, we shouldn’t, as investors, think of that as something structural that you intend to use to flex demand curves more globally?
Tim Cook:
It’s something we’ve always done. And so, it’s not something that is new to this year and this cycle.
Wamsi Mohan:
Okay. And as a follow-up, you’ve introduced a lot of new services over the past few years, and these have become a much more important part of the Apple story. Can you maybe share either some metrics on some of the new Services like TV+ in terms of paid subs? And how are you measuring the success of these investments?
Tim Cook:
Well, we look at a number of things internally that we don’t share externally. And so, you can bet that we’re looking at subs and ARPUs and conversions and churn and all of the normal things you would look at with a subscription business. But, we’re not going to get into sharing those on an individual service basis. What we’re trying to do is give you visibility to the aggregate number of subscriptions that we’ve had, which Luca covered earlier with the 745 million across both Apple branded and third party. And so, we’re giving you an aggregated view of it instead of the -- at the individual service level. But, you can bet that we’re managing it at the individual service level.
Tejas Gala:
Thank you, Wamsi. A replay of today’s call will be available for two weeks on Apple Podcast as a webcast on apple.com/investor and via telephone. The numbers for the telephone replay are 888-203-1112 or 719-457-0820. Please enter confirmation code 7141415. These replays will be available by approximately 5:00 p.m. Pacific Time today. Members of the press with additional questions can contact Josh Rosenstock at 408-862-1142. Financial analysts can contact me with additional questions at 669-227-2402. Thank you again for joining us.
Operator:
This concludes today’s conference. We appreciate your participation.
Operator:
Good day, and welcome to the Apple Q3 FY 2021 Earnings Conference Call. Today's call is being recorded. At this time, for opening remarks and introductions, I'd like to turn the call over to Tejas Gala, Director, Investor Relations and Corporate Finance. Please go ahead.
Tejas Gala:
Thank you. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us. Speaking first today is Apple's CEO, Tim Cook, and he'll be followed by CFO, Luca Maestri. After that, we'll open the call to questions from analysts. Please note that some of the information you'll hear during our discussion today will consist of forward-looking statements, including, without limitation, those regarding revenue, gross margin, operating expenses, other income and expense, taxes, capital allocation and future business outlook, including the potential impact of COVID-19 on the Company's business and results of operations. These statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results or trends to differ materially from our forecast. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in Apple's most recently filed Annual Report on Form 10-K and the Form 8-K filed with the SEC today, along with the associated press release. Apple assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements or information which speak as of their respective dates. I'd like now to turn the call over to Tim for introductory remarks.
Tim Cook:
Thanks, Tejas. Good afternoon, everyone. Today, Apple is reporting a very strong quarter with double digit revenue growth across our product and services categories, and in every geographic segment. We set a new June quarter revenue record of $81.4 billion, up 36% from last year, and the vast majority of markets we tracked grew double digits, with especially strong growth in emerging markets including India, Latin America, and Vietnam. Total retail sales also set a June quarter record, and almost all of our retail stores have now opened their doors. This quarter saw a growing sense of optimism from consumers in the United States and around the world, driving renewed hope for a better future and for all that innovation can make possible. But as the last 18-months had demonstrated many times before, progress made is not progress guaranteed. An uneven recovery to the pandemic and a Delta variant surging in many countries around the world have shown us once again, that the road to recovery will be a winding one. In the midst of that enduring adversity, we are especially humbled that our technology has continued to play a key role in keeping our customers connected. Just last month, it was great to be back with our teams and customers for the opening of our newest retail store in Los Angeles, our Apple Tower Theater. It was a hopeful reminder of the energy and sense of community, shared spaces bring and how appreciative we all are now of the simple privilege of talking to one another face to face. As we look forward to more in-person interactions in the future, we're doubling down on innovation, and doing all we can to help chart a course to a healthier and more equitable world. I'll have more to say about our work in those areas a bit later on. But first, let's turn to our product and services categories. For iPhone, this quarter saw very strong double digit growth in each geographic segment, and we continue to be heartened by our customer's response to the iPhone 12 lineup. We're only in the early innings of 5G, but already its incredible performance and speed have made a significant impact on how people can get the most out of our technology. Customers love iPhone 12 for its superfast 5G speeds, A14 Bionic chip and Adobe vision camera never seen before in a phone. Users continue to rely on iPad and Mac to work, learn, create and connect. iPad had its highest June quarter in nearly a decade, while Mac set an all-time June quarter record. We've seen a great response to the new iMac and iPad Pro, both powered by the M1 chips exceptional speed and power efficient performance. The iMac’s remarkable thin design and vibrant colors have made it a favorite for users everywhere. And the iPad continues to be an incredibly versatile tool in our user's toolbox, inspiring creativity and connection and keeping us entertained and productive in equal measure. It was another very strong quarter for wearables, home and accessories, which set a new June quarter record, while helping people find more ways to stay entertained, healthy and connected at home and on the go. Apple Watch remains a go to choice for users to stay on top of their health and reach their fitness goals. And our newest accessory AirTag began shipping to an enthusiastic response from customers, making the find my network more useful than ever, while protecting user privacy. Turning to services, which set a new all-time revenue record as we continue to roll out innovative new features and programming. We're proud to be the recipients of 35 Emmy Nominations this year, which speaks to the quality of our programming, and an enthusiastic reception from customers and critics alike. Apple TV+ users are loving series like Mythic Quest, and anticipating groundbreaking films like Coda, which premieres next month. And of course, Ted Lasso kicked off season two just last week, and continues to win over viewers with its heartwarming message about the power of community, compassion and hope. We also introduced Apple Podcast subscriptions, a global marketplace for users to discover exclusive content and support their favorite creators. And we launched spatial audio for Apple Music, a cinematic listening experience that promises to change how music fans listen, and musicians create even more immersive, layered, and beautiful songs. Last month, we shared many exciting new features at WWDC. But more powerful than any of them was the incredible showing of developers from all walks of life and around the world. The new tools we announced will help developers harness cutting edge technologies, like augmented reality, reach new users and customize their experience on the App Store, or learn to update or invent an app with Swift, Apple's powerful and intuitive programming language. Today's investments in education and coding translate to tomorrow's small businesses and groundbreaking new apps. The next act of an app economy, already creating jobs and opportunity around the world. In June, a new study by the analysis group found that it was another record year for App Store developers, whose combined billings and sales increased by 24% to $643 billion in 2020. The app economy continues to be an incredible engine of prosperity and opportunity, fueled by the ceaseless striving for developers to make apps that enrich people's lives. Much like the developer community, we are diehard optimist, about technology's potential to help people live happier, healthier and more fulfilled lives, goals that shine through with powerful new updates coming to iOS, iPad OS, Mac OS, and Watch OS this fall. That begins with innovative new features that help users stay connected with one another, like share play and spatial audio for FaceTime, or disconnect when they need a break like focus, which limits distracting notifications when you're winding down for bed or concentrating at work. And new productivity features make iPad an even more useful tool for multitasking, helping users navigate across apps, split their screen or use quick note to capture a thought the moment inspiration strikes. In the health space, our new health sharing feature will make it easier than ever to securely share your health data to share your health data with loved ones. That includes new capabilities like walking steadiness, which uses sensors to assess user stability doing everyday tasks, and recommends exercises to improve stability and avoid a fall. In the belief that privacy is a fundamental human right, we share new features in iOS 15 that continue to drive our progress forward, from mail privacy protection, which stops invisible pixels and an email from tracking your mail activity to App Privacy Report, which helps users check on the apps they've granted permission to use their personal data. We also introduced some incredible next generation technologies coming to the accessibility space. From assistive touch, which helps people with limb differences navigate Apple Watch to new voiceover capabilities to help blind and low vision users, accessibility remains a bedrock principle for us, in the simple belief that the best technology for the world should be the best technology for everyone. But the responsibility to be a force for good in the lives of others extends beyond the technology we made, so the teachers and students shaping our future. This quarter as part of our racial equity and justice initiative, we awarded innovation grants to engineering schools at four historically black colleges and universities to expand their coursework, scholarships and internship opportunities in hardware engineering and silicon chip design. We see education as a great equalizing force, and we're more dedicated than ever to supporting the educators, advocates and students lining the path and leading the way. That includes the 350 swift student challenge winners, we recognized at this year's WWDC. If you ever need a dose of hope or inspiration, I can't say enough about our students' scholarship winners, whose apps bring so much good into the world, from teaching other young people to code to helping volunteers deliver groceries to people at high risk of COVID-19. Young people's innovations remind us that our collective future is bound up in the next generations' passion for solving global challenges, and of the responsibility we have to join them in building a better world. Turning to our own backyard, we're continuing to press forward in our efforts to help bring more affordable housing to the Bay Area and across California. This month, we shared that we've contributed more than $1 billion to help first time homeowners and construct 1000s of new affordable housing units across the state. And we're continuing to stay focused on supporting the global response to the pandemic and delivering the best products and services for people. Our greatest source of inspiration is a technology itself, but how people use it in their own lives, in ways great and small, to write a novel or to read one, to care for an ailing patient or see a doctor virtually, to track their heart rate on a jog or to train for the Olympics. Every day, I'm grateful for the dedication of our teams to the simple mission of creating technology that improves people's lives. And I want to thank everyone at Apple for the purpose and passion they bring to that mission. With that, I'll hand it over to Luca for a deeper dive on our performance this quarter.
Luca Maestri:
Thank you, Tim. Good afternoon, everyone. We're very pleased to report record June quarter financial results, which reflect the importance of our products and services in our customers lives and our strong underlying operating performance. Our revenue reached a June quarter record of $81.4 billion, an increase of nearly $22 billion or 36% from a year ago. We grew double digits in each of our product categories, with an all-time record for services, and June quarter records for iPhone, Mac, and Wearables, Home and Accessories. We also set new June quarter records in every geographic segment with very strong double digit growth in each one of them. Products revenue was a June quarter record of $63.9 billion, up 37% over a year ago. This level of sales performance, combined with the unmatched loyalty of our customers drove our installed base of active devices to a new all-time record. Our services set an all-time revenue record of $17.5 billion up 33% over a year ago, with June quarter records in each geographic segment. Company gross margin was 43.3%, up 80 basis points from last quarter driven by cost savings and a higher mix of services, partially offset by seasonal loss of leverage. Products gross margin was 36% down 10 basis points sequentially, a seasonal loss of leverage was almost entirely offset by cost savings. Services gross margin was 69.8% down 30 basis points sequentially, mainly due to a different mix. Net income of $21.7 billion, diluted earnings per share of $1.30, and operating cash flow of $21.1 billion were all June quarter records by a wide margin. Let me get into more detail for each of our revenue categories. iPhone revenue set a June quarter record of $39.6 billion growing 50% year-over-year and exceeding our own expectations, as the iPhone 12 family continued to be in very high demand. Performance was consistently strong across the world, and we grew very strong double digits in each geographic segment, setting June quarter records in most markets we track. Our active installed base of iPhones reached a new all-time high, thanks to the exceptional loyalty of our customer base and the strength of our ecosystem. In the U.S., the latest survey of consumers from 451 research indicates iPhone customer satisfaction of 97% for the iPhone 12 family. Turning to services, as I mentioned, we reach an all-time revenue record of $17.5 billion with all-time records for cloud services, music, video, advertising and payment services, and June quarter records for the App Store and Apple Care. Our newest service offerings Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, Apple News+, Apple card, Apple Fitness+ as well as the Apple One bundle, continue to scale across users, content and features and are contributing to overall services growth. The key drivers for our services business all continue to move in the right direction. First, our installed base of devices reached an all-time high across each geographic segment. Second, the number of both transacting and paid accounts on our digital content stores reached a new all-time high during the June quarter in each geographic segment, and paid accounts increased double digits. Third, paid subscriptions continue to show strong growth. We now have more than 700 million paid subscriptions across the services on our platform, which is up more than 150 million from last year, and nearly four times the number of paid subscriptions we had only four years ago. And finally, we're adding new services that we think our customers will love, while also continuing to improve the breadth and quality of our current services offerings. For example, during WWDC in June, we previewed our new iCloud+, and Apple Wallet features, which we believe will create a more secure and differentiated customer experience. Wearables, home and accessories grew 36% year-over-year to $8.8 billion, setting new June quarter revenue records in every geographic segment. We continue to improve and expand our product offerings in this category. This quarter, we began shipping our new Apple TV 4K with a redesign Siri remote and our brand new air tags, and the customer response to both products has been very strong. In addition to its outstanding sales performance globally, Apple Watch continues to extend its reach, with nearly 75% of the customers purchasing Apple Watch during the quarter being new to the product. For Mac, despite supply constraints, we set a June quarter record of $8.2 billion up 16% over last year, with June quarter revenue records in most markets we track around the world. It is remarkable that the last four quarters for Mac have been its best four quarters ever. This exceptional level of sales success has been driven by the very enthusiastic customer response to our new Macs, powered by the M1 chip, which we most recently brought to our newly redesigned iMac. iPad performance was also strong with revenue of $7.4 billion up 12% in spite of significant supply constraints. During the quarter we also started shipping our new iPad Pro powered by the M1 chip and customer response has been outstanding. Both iPad and Mac have taken computing to the next level, and when you combine their performance over the last 12-months, they're now the size of a Fortune-50 business, thanks to the best product lineups we've ever had, very high levels of customer satisfaction and a loyal growing installed base. In fact, around half of the customers purchasing Mac and iPad during the quarter were new to that product. And in most recent surveys of U.S. consumers from 451 research customer satisfaction was 92% for Mac and 95% for iPad. In enterprise, our customers are excited about the superior performance, battery life and security that the new M1 Macs bring. MassMutual for example, is offering M1 MacBook Pro to all of its employees and equipping all conference rooms with M1 Mac minis in preparation for return to work. And with its incredible performance and affordable entry price, the MacBook Air with M1 is gaining rapid adoption among many leading enterprise organizations. Italgas, Italy's largest natural gas company, which will soon be using its extensive network to distribute renewable gases is replacing every employee's Windows laptop with the new MacBook Air powered by Apple's M1 chip to bring the latest technology to its workforce. And Grab, Southeast Asia's leading super app that provides transportation, food delivery and digital payment services is adding M1 MacBook Air to its company-wide M1 Mac deployment. Let me now turn to our cash position, we ended the quarter with $194 billion in cash plus marketable securities. We retired $3 billion of term debt and increased commercial paper by $3 billion, leaving us with total debt of $122 billion. As a result, net cash was $72 billion at the end of the quarter. As our business continued to perform at a very high level, we were also able to return $29 billion to shareholders during the June quarter. This included $3.8 billion in dividends and equivalence, and $17.5 billion through open market repurchases of 136 million Apple shares. We also began a $5 billion accelerated share repurchase program in May, resulting in the initial delivery and retirement of 32 million shares. As we move ahead into the September quarter, I'd like to review our outlook, which includes the types of forward-looking information that Tejas referred to at the beginning of the call. Given the continued uncertainty around the world in the near-term, we're not providing revenue guidance. But we are sharing some directional insights, assuming that the COVID-related impacts to our business do not worsen from what we're projecting today for the current quarter. We expect very strong double digit year-over-year revenue growth during the September quarter. We expect revenue growth to be lower than our June quarter year-over-year growth of 36% for three reasons. First, we expect the foreign exchange impact on our year-over-year growth rate to be three points less favorable than it was during the June quarter. Second, we expect our services growth rate to return to a more typical level. The growth rate during the June quarter benefited from a favorable compare, as certain services were significantly impacted by the COVID lockdowns a year ago. And third, we expect supply constraints during the September quarter to be greater than what we experienced during the June quarter. The constraints will primarily impact iPhone and iPad. We expect gross margin to be between 41.5% and 42.5%. We expect our OpEx to be between $11.3 billion and $11.5 billion. We expect OI&E to be around zero, excluding any potential impact from the mark to market of minority investments and our tax rate to be around 16%. Finally, today, our Board of Directors has declared a cash dividends with $0.22 per share of common stock payable on August 12, 2021, to shareholders of record as of August 9, 2021. With that, let's open the call to questions.
Tim Cook:
Thank you, Luca. We ask that you limit yourself to two questions. Operator, may we have the first question, please.
Operator:
Thank you. Our first question comes from Katy Huberty from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead. Katy, your line is open. Please check your mute function. We'll take our next question from Chris Caso with Raymond James.
Chris Caso:
Thank you. Good morning. Just dig into the commentary on guidance a little bit. Just starting with the fact that last year, obviously there was a later launch of iPhone than what was typically seen in other years. Could you talk us through that, and perhaps some of the other products, what may be different as compared to last year?
Luca Maestri:
Well, as I explained that, first of all, we are expecting to grow very strong double digits, that's I think Chris the starting point here. We expect this very strong level of growth that we've experienced during the course of the year, to continue into the September quarter. We said that the growth rate is going to be below 36%. And I've listed three factors. The first factor is that the dollar continues to be favorable on a year-over-year basis in the sense that it's weakened against most currencies on a year-over-year basis. But that benefit is going to be about three points less in the September quarter than what we've experienced during the June quarter, because the dollar strengthened against most currencies in recent weeks. Second, I mentioned that the services growth rate that we've experienced in the June quarter 33%, that's significantly higher than what we've had in recent history. And that was due to the fact that there were a couple of services categories, namely, our advertising business and Apple Care, that were significantly impacted a year ago, because of the COVID lock downs. And therefore, they're relatively easy compare in the June quarter. So we don't expect that to continue into the September quarter. And so we expect to see significant growth in services, but not to the level that we've seen in June. And then I mentioned that the supply constraints that we've seen in the June quarter will be higher during the September quarter. Back in when we talked here three months ago, we said that we were expecting supply constraints for the June quarter between $3 billion and $4 billion, to affect primarily iPad and Mac. We were able to mitigate some of those constraints during the June quarter, and so we came in at a number that was slightly below the low-end of that range that we accorded at the beginning of the quarter. But we expect that number to be higher for the September quarter. And so when you put all that together, again, very strong double digit growth for September, with this caveat, that I just mentioned.
Chris Caso:
Thank you. If I could follow-up with regard to the supply constraints, and do you expect those supply constraints to persist through the December quarter as well? What effect will that have on the holiday selling season? And then, in conjunction with that, what additional costs are you absorbing because of the supply constraints? Is that having an effect on gross margins or just product costs in general, as you perhaps pay a little more to get more supply?
Tim Cook:
Chris, it's Tim. In terms of the cost, we're paying more for freight than I would like to pay. But component costs continue in the aggregate to decline. In terms of supply constraints, and how long they will last, I don't want to predict that today. We're going to take it sort of one quarter at a time. And as you would guess we'll do everything we can to mitigate whatever set of circumstances were dealt.
Luca Maestri:
And Chris, on the cost side, as I mentioned during my comments, our results for gross margins for the June quarter 43.3%, we really saw some really nice cost savings during the quarter. And I think you've seen that we provided guidance for 41.5% to 42.5% for September, which is obviously a level that we are very pleased with.
Chris Caso:
Right. Thank you.
Tejas Gala:
Thank you, Chris. Can we have the next question please?
Operator:
Thank you. We'll take our next question from Jim Suva with Citigroup Investment Research. Please go ahead.
Jim Suva:
Thank you very much, and congratulations to you and your global team for great operations during a challenging time. Tim and Luca, I just have one question and either of you or both of you could figure out who's best to answer it. But we look at a world of pretty unprecedented whether it be COVID, the Delta variant, China floods, supply chain, components. Just wondering for your, like R&D and innovation, is it being materially impacted by that such where a normal cadence is unfair? Or, is it kind of happening during a slow time of year where you're able to empower people to work remotely, and still have the typical innovations and product launches that you've had historically in the past?
Tim Cook:
Jim, the company has been incredibly resilient. The employees are really doing double duty. And I could not be more pleased with the cadence that we're coming out with new things. As you can see from the software announcements that we made at WWDC, and the corresponding launches of the software that we plan on in the fall, and then all of the products that we've been able to bring out over the last 12 to 18-months, it's amazing. So I'm very pleased with it.
Tejas Gala:
Thanks, Jim. Can we please the next question please?
Jim Suva:
Thank you. Congratulations again.
Tim Cook:
Thank you.
Operator:
Thank you. We'll take our next question from Shannon Cross with Cross Research.
Shannon Cross:
Thank you very much, Tim, I'm curious, what have you learned from this iPhone cycle regarding customer preferences and pricing and maybe subscriptions and that? And if there's a difference, if you could talk about on a geographic basis. Thanks.
Tim Cook:
If you look at our results in Q3, Shannon, we had strong double digit growth for switchers and for upgraders. And, in fact, it was our largest upgrade quarter for Q3 ever. And so we feel really, really great about both categories. And as Luca kind of said, during the preamble or opening comments, our results are really strong for iPhone around the world. And so it's been a very, very strong cycle. And yet we're -- the penetration on 5G is obviously still very, very low. And so we feel really good about the future of the iPhone.
Shannon Cross:
Okay. And maybe if you can talk a bit about China, up 58%, where are you seeing the growth? What are you hearing from customers there? Obviously 58% is not sustainable, but how sustainable is the strength? Thank you.
Tim Cook:
It was an incredibly strong quarter, it set a June quarter revenue record for Greater China for us. And so we're very proud of that. And, doing the best job we can to serve customers there. We had a particularly strong response to the 12 Pro and the 12 Pro Max. Those results were particularly strong. But if you look at the balance of our products, we also set June quarter records for Wearables, Home and Accessories, for Mac and for services. So it was sort of an across the board strength. And we're seeing plenty of new customers come to the market. For example, Mac and iPad, about two-thirds of the customers who bought in the last quarter were new to that product. For the Apple Watch that number was 85%. And so, we could not be happier with the results.
Shannon Cross:
Was 85% China or overall?
Tim Cook:
85% was China. I was talking about specifically the numbers of reference were specifically for China.
Luca Maestri:
And Shannon, for the world with the Watch is 75%.
Shannon Cross:
Right. Great. Thank you so much.
Tejas Gala:
Thanks, Shannon. Can we have the next question, please?
Operator:
Thank you. We'll take our next question from Amit Daryanani with Evercore. Please go ahead.
Amit Daryanani:
Perfect. Thanks a lot for taking my question, I have two, as well. I guess first off Luca, I was hoping you could maybe talk a little bit more about the gross margins and maybe the expectations you laid out for September, I think sequentially implies down 100 basis points or so. So can you just touch on what are the puts and takes that would be helpful, because I think historically, September tends to be a flattish maybe even up a little bit gross margin number for you folks?
Luca Maestri:
Yeah, I think it's important to go back to the Q3 results, it's 43.3%. And one of the things that I mentioned is that in addition to getting really good cost savings on a sequential basis, we also had a very high mix of services as part of the total. And particularly with advertising doing really, really well, because of the rebound that we saw from COVID lockdowns a year ago. So as we move forward sequentially, we do expect a different mix and so that that drives the guidance that we provided which again, as you know, is significantly higher than just a year ago, for example. A year ago, we were at 38.2%, so almost 400 basis points of expansion on a year-over-year basis. And so, I think it's important to take that into account, just a different mix.
Amit Daryanani:
Got it. No, absolutely. I don't think anyone expected gross margins to be north of 40 this quickly for you folks. So that is impressive. As a follow-up on services, and I know you've called out the 33% growth this quarter, as a bit of an aberration that compares easier. But if you look at your services growth rate over the last four quarters, let's just say, what do you think is enabling this growth? Is it you're able to have a higher ARPU more monetization of the installed base? Or, is the installed base growing and choose which one's bigger? And then over time, how do you think those two components stack up for you?
Luca Maestri:
It's a combination of multiple factors. Obviously, the fact that our installed base continues to grow, and it sets new all-time highs all the time, obviously, it gives us a larger opportunity all the time. And second, we have more and more people that are engaged in our ecosystem, both transacting for free, which is a very large number, and people that are willing to pay for some of the services. And that percentage of people that are paying for our services continues to grow nicely. I mentioned, we grew double digits again this quarter. So that obviously helps on the revenue side. And of course, we continue to increase both the quality and the quantity of the services. As you know, during the last few years, we've launched a lot of new services from Apple TV+, Fitness+, Apple Arcade, News+, of course, the Apple Card. And so these are businesses that we are scaling right now, and so all that additional revenue helps. And I think it flows through our growth rates, as you said, during the last four quarters we are well into the mid-20s. So I think it's obviously very nice for us to see.
Amit Daryanani:
Perfect. Thank you.
Tejas Gala:
Thanks, Amit. Can we have the next question, please?
Operator:
Thank you. We’ll hear next from Katy Huberty with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Katy Huberty:
Thank you. Good afternoon. Can you hear me okay?
Luca Maestri:
Yes, we can.
Katy Huberty:
Okay, good. So first question, there's a debate in the market around how much Apple benefited from the pandemic, given increased spend in areas like Mac and App Store. But of course, you've mentioned over the past several quarters that there are other areas that were limited by the pandemic, and store closures and less foot traffic. When you net out all the puts and takes was your business helped? Or, was it hindered by the pandemic?
Luca Maestri:
Well, of course, Katy, we don't have the crystal ball that tells us exactly what these different variables, how they impacted our business. We do know that I would say on the positive side of the ledger, obviously, especially during the periods of extreme lockdowns, digital services did very well because entertainment options were limited. And so obviously, our digital services did really, really well. Obviously with more people working from home, more people studying from home, we know that iPad and Mac demand was very, very strong. On the other side we add certain services like advertising because of the reduced economic activity, Apple Care because our stores were closed, they were affected negatively. And certain products like the iPhone or the Watch that are may be more complex types of sales because of the complexity of the transaction. They were also affected because so many points of sale were closed all around the world, not only our stores but also our partner stores. It’s difficult for us to gauge because we've been constrained for quite a long period of time. And the reality is that maybe the new normal after we exit COVID may be different from the past. For example, maybe there's going to be hybrid models around work, for example. And so, it's difficult to tell you on a net basis what that is. Clearly, and this is very fluid because it tends to change over time. I can certainly tell you that we're all looking forward to a COVID free world, I think that would be very good for us and for our customers as well.
Katy Huberty:
And just to follow-up on iPhones, specifically, if you look historically, after a really strong product cycle, which you've experienced this year with iPhone 12. iPhone revenues come under pressure, because the upgrade rate slows, the mix often shifts to the lower end of the portfolio. Is it fair to assume a similar trend will play out over the next year? Or if not, time… [ph]
Tim Cook:
Katy, it's Tim. We're not predicting the next cycle. But I would point out a few things. One is we have a very large and growing installed base. As you know with the iPhones passed a billion active devices earlier this year. Two, we have loyal and satisfied customers. The customer set we're seeing on the new iPhones are just amazing. It's just jaw dropping. And the geographic response is pervasive across the world. In the U.S., we have the top three selling models. In the UK, we have four out of the top five. In Australia, we have the top two. In Japan, we have the top three. In urban China, we have the top two. And so the response from customers all around had been great. Obviously, the product itself is amazing. The 12 lineup was a huge leap that introduced 5G and have A14 Bionic and a number of other fantastic features that customers love. The next thing I think to consider is that we're in the very early innings of 5G. If you look at our 5G penetration around the world there's only a couple of countries that are in the double digits yet. And so that's an amazing thing, nine months or so into this. And the last thing is we're going to continue to deliver great products. We're going to continue to do what we do best is integrate hardware, software and services together into an amazing experience. And so those are the things that I would consider if I were coming up with forecast.
Katy Huberty:
That's great color. Thank you.
Tejas Gala:
Thanks, Katy. Can we have the next question, please?
Operator:
Thank you. We'll take our next question from Harsh Kumar with Piper Sandler.
Harsh Kumar:
Yeah. Hey, guys, first of all, congratulations, fantastic execution that resulted in consistency for your results. Tim, this is actually perfect timing for this question. You talked about your installed base of a billion odd units. I was curious if you could help us understand how all of that installed base is? And the reason that I'm asking this question is we're clearly seeing people upgrade to 5G phones. That's the case and that continues, that could be a larger force than most other forces for your revenues to continue to grow as people migrate to the 5G family of phones. So I was curious, if you can shed light on how the upgrades are happening and then also, how old that base is?
Tim Cook:
Yeah, what I would tell you is first of all, it's difficult to answer your question precisely. But what I would tell you is on both switchers and upgraders, we did extremely well in Q3. Both were up strong double digit, and the geographic representation of iPhone year-over-year comps looks extremely well. And so we're really pleased with it. I would remind you that the billion number that I quoted also was iPhone, where we quoted a number earlier in the year in the January call, I believe, of 1.65 billion devices is the total active devices just for clarification. And so the net is very strong switchers, very strong upgraders, best upgrade quarter for the June quarter that we've seen. And we feel really great about the momentum. But at the same time, we recognize that the 5G penetration is quite low around the world. And, they're very, very low. We're at the front end of this.
Harsh Kumar:
Fair enough. For my follow-up, Apple's probably one of the largest semiconductor companies in the world. How does Apple determine what's strategic, and something that Apple wants to make itself versus non-strategic? And also was curious, there's a lot of -- well, it's public news now the Arm is getting acquired by Nvidia. And I was just curious how Apple views that? Is that something that's beneficial to Apple or not meaningful or negative?
Tim Cook:
I think that acquisition has lots of questions that people are asking, and I'll sort of leave that up to everyone else. And in terms of us and how we decide to make silicon, we ask ourselves, if we can do something better, if we can deliver a better product, if we can buy something in the market. And it's great, and it's as good as what we could do, we're going to buy it. We will only enter where we believe we have a ability to do something better, and therefore make a better product for the user. And so the M1 is a great example of that. We have the ability within our silicon team to deliver product that we feel is appreciably better than we could buy. And so, we've taken our great hardware and software expertise, and combine those and have brought the M1 out. And the response to the M1 has been unbelievable. It's powering Mac sales that are constrained, it's powering now iPad, which also has constraints on it. And so, that's how we look at whether we should enter into a market or not.
Harsh Kumar:
Thank you.
Tim Cook:
Thanks for the question.
Tejas Gala:
Thank you. Can we have the next question, please?
Operator:
Certainly, we will take our next question from Krish Sankar with Cowen & Company. Please go ahead.
Krish Sankar:
Hi, thanks for taking my question, and congrats on the strong results. First one for Luca, you mentioned services growth should normalize in the September quarter. And I understand the last few quarters' services business was strong, driven by work from home, et cetera. So what is the normalized growth rate for the services business as folks return back to the office in this post-COVID world? And then I have a follow-up.
Luca Maestri:
Well, I think, you can go back several quarters and try to do a bit of an average and that's what we were talking about. Of course, there's always a bit of variability around results, right. But certainly, we haven't done 33% in years and so that was a bit of an anomaly. And again, I explained it's around a couple of the businesses that had a relatively easy compare during the June quarter. So our services growth has been for many, many quarters in strong double digits and we feel confident around that level.
Krish Sankar:
Got it. And then just a follow-up for Tim or Luca. I think, Tim, you mentioned in your prepared comments that in September quarter, there's going to be greater impact on supply constraints on the iPhone and iPad. So I'm kind of curious, this is the first time I heard you talk about component shortages impacting the iPhone. Can you be more specific? Is it display drivers? Or, what exactly is the choke point on the supply?
Tim Cook:
The majority of constraints we're seeing are of the variety that I think others are saying that are I would classify as industry shortage. We do have some shortages, in addition to that, that are where the demand has been so great and so beyond our own expectation that it's difficult to get the entire set of parts within the lead times that we try to get those. So it's a little bit of that as well. As I said before, I think probably maybe with the basis of your question, sort of the latest nodes, which we use in several of our products have not been as much of an issue. The legacy nodes are where the supply constraints have been on the silicon.
Krish Sankar:
Thanks, Tim.
Tim Cook:
Yeah.
Tejas Gala:
Thanks, Krish. Can we have the next question, please?
Operator:
Thank you. We’ll hear the next question from David Vogt with UBS.
David Vogt:
Great. Thank you guys for the question. So maybe just a point of clarification. So based on the data and the comments about upgraders and switchers being strong, as well as emerging markets were relatively strong in the quarter. What does that specific set of data points strength mean for the iPhone portfolio? And I guess my question around that is, when you think about switchers and price points, I think last year, you launched the SE2 to really address maybe some of the lower price point markets like the emerging markets. So does that mean thinking about the portfolio going forward, there's less of a need for a lower priced product going forward, and the current portfolio and the new cycle going forward would be more high-end in nature, as we currently have today? And then I have a follow-up.
Tim Cook:
David, we had an incredible quarter for the emerging markets in Q3. We set June quarter records in Mexico, and Brazil, and Chile, in Turkey, and UAE, and Poland and Czech Republic, India. Obviously, in China, as I've talked about before, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, I could go on in the name a few more, it's a very long list. And so those results are for the entire line of products that we have. And keep in mind, we still do have SE in the line, we launched it a year ago, but it's still in the line today. And it’s sort of our entry price point. And so, I'm pleased with how all of them are doing. And I think we need to sort of that range of price points to accommodate the types of people that we want to accommodate. So we've put something for the entry buyer who really wants to get into an iPhone, and then something for the pro buyer who wants the very best iPhone that they can buy. And I think that's true in the emerging markets as good as it's true in the United States or other developed markets.
David Vogt:
No, that's helpful. I appreciate that, Tim. So does that mean sort of the emerging market buyer that wants to get into the iPhone is looking for a device that has 5G capability as well? Obviously, we're early innings in a lot of markets, or how do we think about that over the intermediate to longer-term in terms of consumer preference for 5G in those markets, if available from an infrastructure perspective?
Tim Cook:
In most of the markets I read, it is really, really, really early on 5G, really early. But I think the top end buyer is buying for the future as well, because they may hold their phone for two years or longer in some cases. So, 5G becomes an important part of their buying decision.
David Vogt:
Great. Thank you very much.
Tejas Gala:
Thank you. Can we have the next question, please?
Operator:
Thank you. We'll take our next question from Ben Bollin with Cleveland Research Company.
Ben Bollin:
Good evening, everyone. Thanks for taking the question. I wanted to start Luca or Tim, could you walk us through a little bit about how you think Apple One bundles are influencing the trajectory of services and the economics? And then a second part on services, I'm curious how you think IDFA is developing and influencing the trajectory of the advertising business within services?
Tim Cook:
In terms of Apple One as you know, we're offering Apple One because it makes enjoying our subscription services easier than ever before, including Apple Music and Apple TV+ and Apple Arcade and iCloud and more. And so we really put the customer at the center of that and have recently began to remind people about Apple One in a way that we probably waited a few months before doing that. And so, I'm very pleased with what we're seeing on Apple One right now. I think it's a great ramp for the future services. And more importantly, it's a great customer benefit because many of our customers like to try out more than one of these services, and it allows them to do that with one easy bundle and subscription service. In terms of IDFA or the advertising in general, I take it your question is around ATT. With ATT we've been getting quite a bit of customer positive reaction to being able to make the decision on a transparent basis about whether to be tracked or not. And it seems to be going very well from a user point of view.
Tejas Gala:
Thank you. Can we have a question, please?
Operator:
Thank you. We'll take our next question from Wamsi Mohan with Bank of America.
Wamsi Mohan:
Yes, thank you, I have two as well. To begin with Luca, you noted significant product revenue deleverage but yet your product gross margins were roughly flat, you know that cost savings. Can you maybe talk about whether these are tactical in nature, or more structural like vertical integration that will continue to drive benefits to product gross margins? And on services side, you noted several times about the strength in ad growth, which is obviously very high margin contributor, but the sequential trajectory on services margins was flat. So what were some of the offsets there? And I’ve a follow-up for Tim.
Luca Maestri:
Yeah. On the product side, I talked about cost savings. Tim mentioned that, maybe on the freight side, we're seeing some level of cost pressure that is a bit out of the norm, at this point in the cycle. For everything else, for all the major commodities and components, we continue to see a very typical cycle where we are getting good cost savings on a sequential basis. And so far, it's been very good as you can tell from the absolute level of gross margins, because on the product side, we're up more than 600 basis points on a year-over-year basis. So it feels something that we've been able to accomplish, and we were able to maintain, at least in the near-term, nothing that was abnormal during the quarter or a one-off in nature. It was pretty structural. On the services side, again, up a lot on a year-over-year basis. So, the baseline has gone up a lot. The sequential decline, as you said, it was very, very small. And as I mentioned several times in the past, we have a very large services portfolio with very different margin profiles in our services. And so even a slight change in mix can drive some sequential differences, and this was the case this quarter, just a different mix. I mentioned for example, that Apple Care has rebounded. And so the relative success of our services in the marketplace can drive some slight changes in gross margins. Again, step back for a second, 69.8% gross margin we're very, very happy with where we are with the services margin trajectory.
Wamsi Mohan:
Okay. Thanks, Luca. And Tim, there is increasing regulatory focus in China in particular on some of the Chinese companies. It's not a direct impact of Apple, but how should investors handicap the indirect impact, given some of these companies are pretty large contributors to Apple's App Store revenues? And also, is there -- are you seeing any impact at all from these? And is the limiting of the usage of some of these apps influencing how people are either interacting with your devices, or is there any other ancillary impact that you're seeing? Thank you.
Tim Cook:
For the quarter, as you can see we grew 58% so it was a strong quarter. And embedded in that was a quarterly record for services, which includes the App Store world. So, we're seeing strength in China. The economy has really bounced back there fairly quickly from COVID. In terms of the regulatory focus, what we are focusing on from our angle is to serve users there and make sure that they're very satisfied with the products and services that we’re showing. And we work with a lot of different companies to ensure that. So that's our focus.
Tejas Gala:
Thank you, Wamsi. A replay of today's call will be available for two weeks on Apple Podcasts as a webcast on apple.com/investor and via telephone. The numbers for the telephone replay are 888-203-1112 or 719-457-0820. Please enter a confirmation code 9766068. These replays will be available by approximately 5 PM Pacific Time today. Members of the press with additional questions can contact Josh Rosenstock at 408-862-1142. Financial Analysts can contact me with additional questions at 669-227-2402. Thank you again for joining us.
Operator:
Thank you. That does conclude today's conference. Thank you for your participation.
Operator:
Good day, and welcome to the Apple Q2 FY 2021 Earnings Conference Call. Today's call is being recorded. At this time, for opening remarks and introductions, I'd like to turn the call over to Tejas Gala, Director, Investor Relations and Corporate Finance. Please go ahead.
Tejas Gala:
Thank you. Good afternoon and thank you for joining us. Speaking first today is Apple's CEO, Tim Cook, and he'll be followed by CFO, Luca Maestri. After that, we'll open the call to questions from analysts. Please note that some of the information you'll hear during our discussion today will consist of forward-looking statements, including, without limitation, those regarding revenue, gross margin, operating expenses, other income and expense, taxes, capital allocation and future business outlook, including the potential impact of COVID-19 on the Company's business results of operation. These statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results or trends to differ materially from our forecast. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in Apple's most recently filed annual report on Form 10-K and the Form 8-K filed with the SEC today, along with the associated press release. Apple assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements or information which speak as of their respective dates. I'd now like to turn over the call to Tim for introductory remarks.
Tim Cook:
Thanks, Tejas. Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining the call today. Apple is proud to report another strong quarter, one where we set new March quarter records for both revenue and earnings, besting our year ago revenue performance by 54%. Reflecting both the enduring ways our products have helped our users meet this moment in their own lives as well as the optimism consumers seem to feel about better days ahead, we set new March quarter records in every geographic segment, and success was broadly distributed across our product categories. Mac and Services delivered all-time record results, and we set new March quarter records for iPhone and Wearables, Home and Accessories. To provide some color on our results, let's turn to our product categories. We saw a very strong performance for iPhone, which grew 66% year-over-year driven by the strong popularity of the iPhone 12 family. With unmatched 5G capability, the best camera system ever in an iPhone and advanced durability from ceramic shield, this family of devices is popular with both upgraders and new customers alike. And just last week, we unveiled an all-new purple finish for iPhone 12 and 12 Mini. As has been the case throughout the pandemic, iPad and Mac continue to be critically important tools for our customers. Over the past year, tens of millions of iPads and Macs have been deployed to help students learn, creators create, and to enhance remote work in all of its forms. This has helped iPad grow very strong double digits to its highest March quarter revenue in nearly a decade. On Mac, fueled by the M1, we set an all-time revenue record continuing the momentum for the product category. In fact, the last three quarters for Mac have been its three best quarters ever. Last week, both iPad and Mac took a big step forward. We debuted a radically redesigned brand-new iMac designed around M1's unmatched capabilities, and we've brought M1 to iPad for the first time in the new iPad Pro with 5G capability and a Liquid Retina XDR display. It was a quarter of sustained strength for Wearables, Home and Accessories, which grew by 25% year-over-year. Apple Watch is a global success story, and the category set March quarter records in each geographic segment, thanks to strong performance from both Apple Watch Series 6 and Apple Watch SE. It's an exciting and busy period ahead for Wearables, Home and Accessories with the launch of the next-generation Apple TV 4K and our newest accessory, AirTag. AirTag builds on the powerful and incredibly useful Find My experience, helping users privately and securely keep track of the items that matter most to them. Third-party accessories and products can also make use of the Find My network guaranteeing a great experience no matter what products you choose to use. Turning to Services. We achieved growth of 27% year-over-year and set new records for services in each of our geographic segments. We continue to enhance and improve our current service offerings from Apple Music to Apple News while continuing to launch new services that enhance our customers' lives. Just last week, we introduced Apple Card family which reinvents how you can share credit cards and build credit together. We also announced Apple Podcast subscriptions, a global marketplace for listeners to discover premium content from their favorite creators and storytellers. While we're on the topic of services, in many ways, this quarter showed the unique value to customers created by Apple's belief in the deep integration of hardware, software, and services. Across our products and throughout our software ecosystem, we continue to deploy industry-leading new tools to protect users' fundamental right to privacy. In addition to the App Store privacy nutrition labels that we discussed on last quarter's call, we're proud to have launched the full implementation of App Tracking Transparency. This powerful, yet simple idea gives users a choice over how their data is used and shared across the apps that they love and use every day. No matter what device you enjoy it from, it is a milestone period for Apple TV+, racking up many new award nominations and wins, including its first Oscar nominations. Ted Lasso, in particular, has been recognized with a multitude of awards and nominations including most recently, an AFI Program of the Year Recognition, Writers Guild of America Awards, and a clean sweep at the Critics Choice Awards. Apple TV+ also continues to be a place where we can tell stories that matter and lift up important voices and experiences like our new upcoming content partnership with Malala, our latest original documentary special The Year the Earth Changed narrated by the legendary David Attenborough and released to commemorate Earth Day. This is, of course, just one example of how Apple lives its values and operationalizes the idea that to whom much is given, much is expected. To begin with our environmental efforts, just last week, we marked a milestone Earth Day on multiple fronts. In addition to the progress we've made in our own efforts to achieve our pledge of a net zero carbon footprint by 2030 across our entire supply chain and use of our products, we're proud to play a role in the growing ripple change taking place across the private sector. As of this month, 110 of our suppliers have joined us in our renewable energy commitment, and we will bring online nearly 8 gigawatts of new clean energy, the equivalent of taking 3.4 million gas-powered vehicles off the road each year. Through Apple's $4.7 billion in green bonds and related efforts, we've supported transformative environmental projects around the world from clean energy initiatives in China to two of the world's largest onshore wind turbines in Denmark to 180-acre solar project outside Reno, Nevada and many more. We're also keenly focused on how this wave of green innovation can lead to equitably shared prosperity. Through our new $200 million Restore Fund, we're helping local and rural communities around the world build sustainable industries around working for us creating opportunities and removing up to 1 million metric tons of carbon from the atmosphere every year. And here in the United States, we started a green impact accelerator, investing and supporting minority-owned businesses at the forefront of environmental fields. As we look forward to WWDC, we're taking new steps to support and foster the unmatched community of developers we work with here in the United States and around the world. I'm particularly excited about our inaugural Entrepreneur Camp for black founders and developers. Building on the success of our Entrepreneur Camp program, which we began in 2019, this program gives this profoundly innovative community of developers the chance to develop next-level technical skills through hands-on technology labs, and with our partners at Harlem Capital, it also shares insights and mentorship on building and scaling an app business. We were proud to announce that we have expanded and accelerated our commitment to the U.S. economy. Over the next five years, we will invest $430 billion, creating 20,000 jobs in the process. The investments will support American innovation and drive economic benefits in every state, including a new North Carolina campus and job creating investments in innovative fields like silicon engineering and 5G technology. Looking forward, whether you're running a business or just hoping to see family again after more than a year, it's tempting at this moment to let hope about the end of the COVID-19 pandemic outstripped clear-eyed realism about the challenges we still face. In many places around the world, new waves of infections driven by even more infectious variants of the virus are driving new lockdowns. Instead of simply assuming that the end is in sight, we at Apple are doing our part to make it a reality. Beginning with an enduring and uncompromising commitment to the health and safety of our teams, and extending well beyond our walls into the communities where we work. We also want to do everything we can to connect users to life-saving vaccinations that are in ever greater supply. Through Apple Maps, for example, we now showcase vaccine site locations here in the United States, building on our maps of testing locations in many countries around the world. It's worth remembering for much more than financial reasons or year-ago compares, just how we felt at this time last year when everything we knew had to change. Plains set grounded, entire business districts were empty and silent. People left groceries or care packages sitting in the garage or in the hall overnight in recognition of all that we didn't know and therefore, had to imagine. Thanks to researchers and scientists, doctors and nurses, everyone who can put a shot in an arm and even just check a name off a list. We have reached new days of hopeful resolve. Our work is not done, but as I said a year ago, while we can't say for sure how many chapters are in this book, we can have confidence that the ending will be a good one. With that, I'll hand things over to Luca.
Luca Maestri:
Thank you, Tim. Good afternoon, everyone. We are extremely pleased to report record results for our March quarter despite continued uncertainty in the macro environment. We've been operating in new ways for over a year, and we could not be more proud of the way our team continues to execute and innovate at unprecedented levels. Our revenue reached a March quarter record of $89.6 billion, an increase of over $31 billion or 54% from a year ago. We grew very strong double digits in each of our product categories, with all-time records for Mac and for Services and March quarter records for iPhone and for Wearables, Home and Accessories. We also set new March quarter records in every geographic segment with growth of at least 35% in each one of them. Products revenue was a March quarter record of $72.7 billion, up 62% over a year ago. As a result of this level of sales performance and the unmatched loyalty of our customers, our installed base of active devices reached a new all-time record in each of our major product categories. Our services set an all-time record of $16.9 billion, growing 27% over a year ago. We established new records in each geographic segment and in most service categories. I will provide more details about the performance of our services business later. Company gross margin was 42.5%, up 270 basis points from last quarter driven by cost savings, a strong mix and favorable foreign exchange. Products gross margin was 36.1%, growing 100 basis points sequentially also thanks to cost savings and FX, partially offset by seasonal loss of leverage. Services gross margin was 70.1%, up 170 basis points sequentially and mainly due to a different mix. Net income of $23.6 billion, diluted earnings per share of $1.40 and operating cash flow of $24 billion were all March quarter records by a wide margin. Let me get into more detail for each of our revenue categories. iPhone revenues had a March quarter record of $47.9 billion, growing 66% year-over-year as the iPhone 12 family continue to be in high demand. Performance was consistently strong across the world as we grew strong double digits in each geographic segment and set March quarter records in most markets we track. Thanks to the exceptional loyalty of our customer base and strength of our ecosystem, our active installed base of iPhones reached a new all-time high. In the U.S. the latest survey of consumers from 451 Research indicates customer satisfaction of over 99% for the iPhone 12 family. Turning to Services. We reached an all-time revenue record of $16.9 billion with all-time records for the App Store, cloud services, music, video, advertising and payment services. Our new service offerings, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, Apple News Fitness+ as well as the Apple One bundle, continue to scale across users, content and features and are contributing to overall services growth. The key drivers for our services business all continue to move in the right direction. First, our installed base growth has accelerated and reach an all-time high across each major product category. Second, the number of both transacting and paid accounts on our digital content stores reached a new all-time high during the March quarter, with paid accounts increasing double digits in each of our geographic segments. Third, paid subscriptions continued to show strong growth. During the March quarter, we added more than 40 million paid subs sequentially, and we have now reached more than 660 million paid subscriptions across the services on our platform. This is up $145 million from just a year ago and twice the number of paid subscriptions we are only 2.5 years ago. Finally, we're adding new services that we think our customers will love, while also continuing to improve the breadth and quality of our current service offerings. For example, Apple Arcade launched its biggest expansion yet adding incredibly fun games to the catalog, including new exclusive Arcade originals, along with two entirely new categories, App Store greats and timeless classics. Apple Pay continues to expand geographically, launching in Mexico and in South Africa, bringing our payment service to six continents. Wearables, Home and Accessories grew 25% year-over-year to $7.8 billion, setting new March quarter revenue records in every geographic segment. Apple Watch continues to extend its reach, with nearly 75% of the customers purchasing Apple Watch during the quarter being new to the product. We're very excited about the future of this category and believe that our integration of hardware, software and services uniquely positions us to provide great customer experiences in this category. Next, I'd like to talk about Mac. We set an all-time revenue record of $9.1 billion, up 70% over last year, and grew very strongly in each geographic segment with all-time revenue records in Europe and rest of Asia Pacific and March quarter records in the Americas, Greater China and Japan. This amazing performance was driven by the very enthusiastic customer response to our new Macs powered by the M1 chip. iPad performance was also outstanding with revenue of $7.8 billion up 79%. We grew very strongly in every geographic segment with an all-time record in Japan and a March quarter record in rest of Asia Pacific. Both Mac and iPad are incredibly relevant products for our customers in the current working and learning environments, and we are delighted that the most recent surveys of U.S. consumers from 451 Research measured customer satisfaction at 91% for Mac and 94% for iPad. With this level of customer satisfaction, and with around half of the customers purchasing Mac and iPad during the quarter being new to that product, the active installed base for both products continues to grow nicely and reached new all-time highs. In the enterprise market, customers across many industries are accelerating their adoption of iPhone 12 and 5G as a key platform for the future of their business. Delta Airlines, for example, is putting iPhone 12 and 5G connectivity into the hands of flight attendants so they can provide the best passenger service possible as air travel rebounds. Openreach in the U.K. has started equipping tens of thousands of field engineers with iPhone 12 to speed up their deployment of broadband services to homes around the country. And UCHealth, a large health care provider in Colorado, was able to reduce per patient vaccination time from 3 minutes to only 30 seconds largely by moving from PC stations to iPhones. This has allowed their staff to rapidly scan and register new patients and vastly increase their daily vaccination capacity. Let me now turn to our cash position. We ended the quarter with over $204 billion in cash plus marketable securities. We issued $14 billion of new term debt and retired $3.5 billion of term debt leaving us with total debt of almost $122 billion. As a result, net cash was $83 billion at the end of the quarter. This strong position allows us to continue to invest confidently in our future, while also returning value to our shareholders. We are innovating and investing at an unprecedented pace, including accelerating our investment in the United States with our new commitment to contribute more than $430 billion and 20,000 jobs to the country over the next five years. As we continue to execute at an extremely high level, we were also able to return nearly $23 billion to shareholders during the March quarter. This included $3.4 billion in dividends and equivalents and $19 billion through open market repurchases of 147 million Apple shares. We continue to believe there is great value in our stock and maintain our target of reaching a net cash neutral position over time. Given the confidence we have in our business today and into the future, our Board has authorized an additional $90 billion for share repurchases. We're also raising our dividend by 7% to $0.22 per share, and we continue to plan for annual increases in the dividend going forward. As we move ahead into the June quarter, I'd like to review our outlook, which includes the types of forward-looking information that Tejas referred to at the beginning of the call. Given the continued uncertainty around the world in the near term, we are not providing revenue guidance, but we are sharing some directional insights assuming that the COVID-related impacts to our business do not worsen from what we are seeing today for the current quarter. We expect our June quarter revenue to grow strong double digits year-over-year. However, we believe that the sequential revenue decline from the March quarter to the June quarter will be greater than in prior years for two reasons. First, keep in mind that due to the later launch timing and strong demand, iPhone only achieved supply-demand balance during the March quarter. This will cause a steeper sequential decline than usual. Second, we believe supply constraints will have a revenue impact of $3 billion to $4 billion in the June quarter. We expect gross margin to be between 41.5% and 42.5%. We expect OpEx to be between $11.1 billion and $11.3 billion. We expect OI&E to be around $50 million and our tax rate to be around 14.5%. Finally, reflecting the approved 7% dividend increase I just mentioned, today, our Board of Directors has declared a cash dividend of $0.22 per share of common stock payable on May 13, 2021, to shareholders of record as of May 10, 2021. With that, let's open the call to questions.
Tejas Gala:
Thank you, Luca. [Operator Instructions] Operator, may we have the first question, please?
Operator:
[Operator Instructions] We'll take our first question from Shannon Cross with Cross Research. Please go ahead.
Shannon Cross:
Tim, I had sort of a big picture question on iPhone. I'm just curious, there are so many different things happening in this cycle, 5G, pandemic. How are you thinking about the opportunity for refreshing the installed base and attracting new customers? And are you seeing lives shorten given some of the programs that are being put out there by the carriers and by yourself? Just kind of maybe big picture, if you can talk about what you're seeing in terms of iPhone out there in the market.
Tim Cook:
Sure, Shannon. We saw double-digit increases on a year-over-year basis on both the new to iPhone and upgraders. So -- and in fact, in the March quarter, there was actually a record number of upgraders for a March quarter. And so we like what we see. It's obviously the early days of 5G. Different countries are in different points. But penetration is still -- on a global level, is still low at this point. And so a lot of the 5G upgrades will be in front of us, not behind us. You see in China, things have moved quickly to 5G. They're moving quickly in the United States. But a lot of the other regions are slower to adopt and slower to gain coverage in 5G.
Shannon Cross:
Okay. And then, Luca, can you talk about gross margin? I mean 42% is higher than it's been that I can kind of remember actually at this point, so maybe if you talk about the drivers of gross margin, and maybe if there were any offsets from higher component costs or the logistics costs that obviously were overshadowed by currency and other things?
Luca Maestri:
Yes, Shannon. Yes, we did 42.5% during March, and we've guided to similar, slightly lower levels for June. So for March, we were up 270 basis points sequentially, really driven by three major factors. Cost savings, which has been good for us during the cycle. A really strong mix, a strong mix on iPhone, but in general, across all product categories, and that obviously was helpful. And foreign exchange sequentially, again, from December to March, was favorable 90 basis points. So that helped as well. So those are the three major factors there. As we transition into June, as you know, that we will expect some level of deleverage but that will be offset by cost savings. Foreign exchange doesn't have much of an impact as we go from March to June.
Operator:
We'll now take our next question from Amit Daryanani with Evercore. Please go ahead.
Amit Daryanani:
I have two as well. First one, just on services, I think 90 days ago, the expectation was that line item would decelerate a little bit into the March quarter. It turned out it actually accelerated for us. I'd like to just understand what do you think drove that acceleration specifically? And is mid-20% sort of the growth norm as we go forward for Services?
Luca Maestri:
So Amit, -- our Services business did better than what we were expecting when we had the last call in January. It was stronger across the board. One of the things that we've noticed is that throughout COVID was that obviously digital services have done very well. And then we've had a couple of categories like Apple Care because many of the points of sale and stores were closed and advertising because of the reduced economic activity that were negatively affected during COVID. During the March quarter, we've seen a return to growth on Apple Care and obviously, we've reopened a lot of the stores during the course of the quarter. And advertising, obviously, consumer sentiment has improved and advertising is coming back. And so the combination of these factors really delivered this very, very strong performance during the March quarter. As we look ahead, as you know, we don't provide specific guidance for our product categories. But in general, I talked during our prepared remarks, I mean, there are a number of things that we always look at around the Services business, how many new paid accounts do we have, what number of new subscriptions do we get that -- above all, is our installed base continuing to grow? Are we adding new services? Are we improving the quality of the existing services? And so, when we look at all these fundamental vectors of our Services business, obviously we feel very good. We feel very good about it.
Amit Daryanani:
Got it. That's helpful. And then, Tim, if I could follow up with you, it seems like engagement with iPhones and Apple devices generally has gone up materially over the last 12 months. And I don't think replacement cycles, at least in the data we see, has shrunk or changed that much at the end of the day. I'm wondering does that combination of increased usage, replacement cycles haven't changed, end up in iPhones potentially growing on a multiyear basis, because I would imagine if I'm using something more I have to replace it more often. So, I'd love your perspective on it.
Tim Cook:
Yes. We're clearly seeing strong performance in both the new to iPhone or the switcher component and upgraders as I'd mentioned before. And in fact, the upgrader was the best March quarter that we've ever had in -- and so that speaks to what you're seeing, I think, a lot. It's difficult with just this far into the cycle to make a statement about the cycle in general because keep in mind that we just launched midway through the Q1 period. And so, we've only been operating for 4.5 months or so. But clearly, we like what we see right now a lot. If you look at how the iPhone did around the world, we had the top five models of smartphone in the U.S., the top selling, the top two in urban China, four out of the top five in Japan, the top four in the U.K., and the top six in Australia. And so, it was sort of across the board in some really key countries, we did really, really well. I do think that the 5G cycle is important, and we're in the early days of it, frankly.
Operator:
We'll take our next question from Katy Huberty from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Katy Huberty:
This was a pretty unbelievable quarter, and investors are going to ask about the sustainability of current demand trends, especially as you lap some of the benefits from COVID in areas like services and Mac later this year. So I know you don't guide beyond or provide an outlook beyond the next quarter. But can you talk from a high level over the next year, which segments do you see the opportunity to maintain strong revenue growth versus where is it reasonable to assume there will be some digestion as consumers shift their spending priorities? And then I have a follow-up for Luca.
Tim Cook:
If you sort of look at the different products, iPhone, I've already mentioned some of the great momentum that we had there. Keep in mind that the compare that we're running to would be the quarter, the Q2 of last year is the quarter that China would have entered a shutdown first and then the rest of the world entered the shutdown in middle part of March. And so part of the growth is compared -- is the comparison point. But that said, the results were fabulous across the board. The shortages that Luca spoke about in the color that he provided on the future, affect primarily the iPad and the Mac. And so we'll have some challenges in there, and challenges in meeting the demand that we've got. The demand feels very strong right now. Both on the Mac side, you have the combination of M1 and work from home and remote learning. And then iPad, you've got remote learning and work from home as well. And the product that we just announced is really killer, the iPad Pro with the M1 in it. And so there's a lot of great things of the strength of the product cycle in addition to the trends that we're seeing in the marketplace. And where this pandemic will end, it seems like many companies will be operating in a hybrid kind of mode. And so it would seem that work from home and the productivity of working from home will remain very critical. If you look at Wearables then, the watch had a fabulous quarter. And I still think we're in the early innings on the watch. The number of new -- people that are new to the watch is almost three out of four. And so this is a long way from being a mature market. And so -- and then the Services by itself has really accelerated. And so all in all, we feel very, very good.
Katy Huberty:
And then, Luca, as I look at inventory plus vendor nontrade receivables, that grew only about 8% this quarter which is a big deceleration from last quarter. Should we read into that as a leading indicator for how we should think about the revenue growth deceleration in the business as the world normalizes? Or were there some supply disruptions during the quarter that caused you to drain inventory and create that tightness that you're talking about for June?
Luca Maestri:
No. On -- as you think about the June quarter, Katy, I would point you to what we said in our prepared remarks around the two factors that will influence our normal seasonality, right? One is the fact that iPhone, we launched iPhone later than usual during this cycle. And so we reached supply-demand balance only during the March quarter, which makes obviously the sequential decline steeper than usual. And then this $3 billion or $4 billion of supply constraints that Tim just said, primarily on iPad and Mac. So as you look at your model and you obviously can look at our numbers that we've done in the past, I think you can try to gauge that. From a channel inventory standpoint, we did what we normally do during a March quarter. So we reduced inventory as it's typical on iPhone. We exited within our target range. So I would say that on the inventory side, it was pretty straightforward Obviously, given that the supply constraints are on the iPad and on the Mac, we wish we had more inventory of iPad and Mac. But this is all a function of high demand for all our products.
Operator:
We'll take our next question from Wamsi Mohan with Bank of America.
Wamsi Mohan:
Tim, your content offerings are still at very compelling price points. And you've seen other content providers, whether it be Spotify, Hulu, Netflix, all announced price increases recently. I'm just wondering how you're thinking about pricing as it pertains to your offering here? And if you could share any stats around the uptake of TV+ paid subs that would be great. And I have a follow-up for Luca.
Tim Cook:
TV+ -- let me start with TV+. TV+ is going very well. As you know, the objective and the philosophy that we've had on TV+ is to create high-quality original content and to be one of the most desired platforms for storytellers. And I see that happening day by day as we sign more shows and more storytellers including Malala as I'd mentioned in my opening comments. To date, we've received -- the Apple originals have received 352 award nominations and had 98 wins. And this is from Oscar nominations to Indie awards to Critic Choice awards and all the rest. And we've got some shows that are -- have gotten significant buzz like Ted Lasso and The Morning Show and Defending Jacob and many others. And so we feel really good about where we are. We're not releasing subscriber numbers. But we feel good about where we are. In terms of other services and pricing, I don't have anything to announce today. We try to give the customer a great value. And we feel that we're doing that in the -- with the prices that we've got. And we'll see where we go from here.
Wamsi Mohan:
Okay. As my follow-up, Luca, on the June quarter guide, when you talk about the sequential decline being a little bit about perhaps the 13% or low-teens percent that we've seen historically. Are the supply constraints of the $3 billion, $4 billion impact included in that? Or is that in addition to sort of the more than average sequential decline that you're referring to? And any color on what specifically is driving the supply constraints of the subcomponent level?
Luca Maestri:
So when you look at our normal seasonality, and you've mentioned a percentage that is really an average of several years, what we're saying is that we believe that the sequential decline this year is going to be higher than that. And it's a combination of the two factors, right? One is the timing of the launch and then the very high demand for iPhone during the March quarter. And the $3 billion to $4 billion supply constraints that we mentioned. Yes, and the constraints come from the semiconductor shortages that are affecting many, many industries, and it's a combination of the shortages as well as the very, very high level of demand that we are seeing for both iPad and Mac. For Mac, for example, if you just -- just to keep it into context, the last three quarters of Mac have been the best three quarters ever in the history of the product, right? So we are experiencing an incredible level of demand, which certainly is favored by working from home and learning from home environment, but also by the incredible amount of new products and innovation that we put into the products that we launched during the last couple of quarters.
Operator:
We'll take our next question from Aaron Rakers with Wells Fargo.
Aaron Rakers:
Congratulations on the great quarter. I wanted to go back to iPhone. As we think about the iPhone 12 cycle, appreciating that you guys don't give actual shipment numbers, it would appear though that the mix has been quite healthy. So I'm wondering if you could give us any context of what in this cycle you're seeing in terms of the mix relative to past cycles? Is that mix sustainable? I'm just trying to understand kind of the mix of -- within the iPhones and how that's driving, I guess, particularly gross margin. And I have a follow-up.
Tim Cook:
Aaron, let me give you a little color on that. The iPhone 12 of the -- the iPhone 12 family are or more broadly affect all iPhones. The iPhone 12 is the most popular. But we did see very strong sales of the Pro portion of the family as well, the Pro plus the Pro Max. And so the revenue that you're seeing is a function of unit growth and revenue per unit growth. Does that help?
Aaron Rakers:
Yes. Can you give any context of how that might have changed this cycle relative to the prior cycles? Have we seen kind of a structural change to the higher band of the product category that you believe can be sustained going forward?
Tim Cook:
We don't predict going forward other than for our internal use. But we're really happy with the results.
Aaron Rakers:
Okay. And then as a quick follow-up back to the supply constraints. I guess it's hard to kind of see again, looking forward beyond this quarter. But what's your best assessment of when maybe the supply constraints could ease? Do you have any views of just the industry in general, overcoming some of the supply constraint dynamics?
Tim Cook:
Most of our issue is on legacy nodes. And so on legacy nodes, there are many different people, not only in the same industry, but across other industries that are using legacy nodes. And so in order to really answer that question on -- accurately, we would need to know the true demand from each of these players and how that's going to change over the next few months. And so it's very, very difficult to give you good answer. I think we have a good handle on our demand. But what everybody else is doing, I don't know. And so we will do our best. That's what I can tell you.
Operator:
We'll take our next question from Harsh Kumar with Piper Sandler.
Harsh Kumar:
Congratulations on a very nice quarter. Question on semis supply as well. You just beat by a substantial margin on the top line in the March quarter. I'm curious what went in your favor to be able to secure that kind of supply that you were able to beat by, I think it was $11 million or so? And then I had a follow-up.
Tim Cook:
We did not have a material supply shortage in Q2. And so how are we able to do that? You wind up collapsing all of your buffers and offsets. And that happens all the way through the supply chain. And so that enables you to go a bit higher than what we were expecting to sell when we went into the quarter 90 days ago.
Harsh Kumar:
That's very helpful. And then for my follow-up, I know there's a lot of moving parts, Tim, but with the economy sort of reopening here in the U.S., and you mentioned about supply constraints possibly on the Mac and the iPad. I was curious if I can get your thoughts, maybe just color-wise, on what you would expect for those two categories, Macs and the iPads in the second half of this year.
Tim Cook:
Well, we don't predict a rev guide to product-level detail. We're not even guiding to the top level at this point because of COVID. And so I'll sidestep that question. But I would point to Luca's point earlier about the shortages and those shortages primarily affect iPad and Mac. So, we expect to be supply gated, not demand gated.
Operator:
We'll take our next question from Krish Sankar with Cowen & Company. Please go ahead.
Krish Sankar:
Congrats on a fantastic quarter. First question for Tim or Luca. The Greater China sales were very strong in the March quarter. Can you give some color on what drove this strength. Which hardware products or services enabled the solid outperformance in China. And then I had a follow-up.
Tim Cook:
We were very pleased with our performance in China. We set a March quarter revenue record and grew strong double digits across each of the product categories. And so the revenue growth was broad. We've been especially pleased by the customer response in China to the iPhone 12 family. And as I had mentioned earlier, you have to remember that China entered the shutdown phase earlier in Q2 of last year than other countries. And so they were relatively more affected in that quarter, and that has to be taken into account as you look at the results. As I mentioned earlier, we had the top two selling smartphones in urban China, so we're very proud of that. And iPad, Mac both had enormously positive quarters with great strength across the board. And we're seeing a strong reception to the new iPad Pro as a well that we just announced. A lot of great comments and about 2/3 of the people buying Mac and iPad were buying them for the first time. And so we're attracting some new customers in China, which is really important to us.
Krish Sankar:
All right. That was very helpful, Tim. And then maybe as a follow-up, I kind of have like a big picture philosophical question, and to the extent you can answer this. One of the concerns many investors have is about the overhang of regulatory risk. I understand it's very hard to handicap that. But I'm kind of curious do you think giving more public disclosure on your Services business like App Store would help alleviate some of those concerns? Or do you think that's revealing a lot of competitive details. But kind of curious to know what you think on services disclosure.
Tim Cook:
I think with the regulatory questions and scrutiny, we have to make sure that we're telling our story and why we do what we do, and we're very focused on doing that. If we feel that more disclosure would help, we would obviously move in that direction. The App Store and other parts of Apple are not cast in concrete. And so we can move and are flexible with the times. For example, in the App Store, as you know, just a couple of quarters ago, we lowered the commission rate for small developers to 15%. So that was an example of moving with the times, and we've gotten a great, great reception to that. And so we continue to learn, and I think it's very important that we're very clear about why we do what we do. The idea behind curating the App Store in order to get the privacy and security that our customers want, I think is very important, and we have to convey that in a very straightforward manner.
Operator:
We'll take our next question from Kyle McNealy with Jefferies.
Kyle McNealy:
One of the things we've been positive about is how growing iPhone sales can pull along Watch and AirPods sales as well as customers shop the whole store. But you mentioned through COVID that accessories do much better in a physical store environment, and that's been hard due to the shutdowns, obviously. So my question is, have you seen any improvement in the attach rate for Watch and AirPods with iPhone? And can it get a lot better from here as the environment gets closer to normalization?
Tim Cook:
I think we get a lot of benefit from our stores when they're open and are fully operational. And we're in better shape for parts of Q2 than we were previously, but we're still operating with a limited operational model in many stores and there's still some stores today that are closed like stores in Michigan and stores in France and so forth. And so I think it will take some amount of time, but my view would be as the stores get back up to speed, fully up to speed, we should be able to increase some of the accessory sales. Although I think we're doing fairly well at the moment. So it's not something that we're not doing well. Online has been much more beneficial and much more productive than we would have guessed going into this.
Operator:
We'll take our next question from David Vogt from UBS.
David Vogt:
Congratulations on a great quarter. Maybe if I could just ask a question. I know it's early days, but any commentary color from maybe the developer community on App track -- on ATT and kind of what the initial feedback and data might look like that you could share with us?
Tim Cook:
Our ATT's focus is really on the user and giving the user the ability to make a decision about whether they want to be tracked or not. And so it's putting the user in the control. Not Apple, not another company, but the user of where it should be. And so that's really the focus of it. And the feedback that we've gotten from users, both before it went live when it was in the planning stages and so forth and after, has been tremendous. And so we're really standing up on behalf of the consumer here.
David Vogt:
Maybe just as a quick follow-up, Tim. Can you kind of discuss any sort of -- what the downloads have looked like. I know it just rolled out earlier this week and sort of the acceptance by the consumer at this point. Any sort of metrics that you can share with us, whether it's sort of an opt-in or opt-out sort of view from the consumer perspective?
Tim Cook:
I don't even know the answer to that. It's not something that we would have predicted beforehand. And frankly, even if it's very low of people that don't want to be tracked, it's worth doing because of the -- those people should have the -- should make their own mind up, whether they would like to be tracked or not.
Operator:
We'll take our next question from Samik Chatterjee from JPMorgan.
Samik Chatterjee:
I have a couple and just wanted to get into the performance by geography here a bit, and Europe really exceptional results, particularly for this time of the year. Tim, I know you mentioned some of the 5G iPhone upgrades are in front of you, and I would assume Europe is kind of in that category. But curious to hear or maybe if you can double-click on what's driving the exceptional growth here in Europe, and like are consumers moving to 5G phones even though some of the service provider plans are not rolled out? Or are we still expecting that to be much more in front of us?
Luca Maestri:
Samik, I'll take that one. You're right. I mean we had great performance in Europe. We grew 56% during the quarter. And it was probably one of the geos where we actually saw results that were better than even our own expectations. We grew very strong double digits across the board, every product category. Particularly, I would say, iPad and Mac, they really was very, very strong. Again, obviously, Europe has been affected by lockdowns. More than most parts of the world, the lockdowns have lasted longer than here in the United States, for example. Tim was mentioning there are places in Europe still today where our stores are closed. And fortunately, we have a very strong online business that has really helped us. But working from home, learning from home, limited entertainment options, that has all played in our favor. Keep in mind that our Europe segment is a very broad version of Europe because it includes Western Europe, which has done very, very well. And then Eastern Europe and it goes into the Middle East. Even India is part of Europe. And those emerging markets have done incredibly well, significantly better than company average. So very, very pleased with some of the results in India, for example, Russia, Middle East in general. So it's been very broad, both across product categories and across countries in Europe.
Samik Chatterjee:
Okay. Got it. And just a quick follow-up for you, Luca. I think overall, just wanted to understand the implication of the investment plans that you announced recently for the U.S., the $430 billion over a multiyear period, getting some questions from investors of how to think about the implication on the run rate of operating expenses for the Company.
Luca Maestri:
If you remember, we announced back in 2018 that we were making a very sizable commitment to the United States. We -- at the time we announced $350 billion of investment over the following five years. And during these three years, since then, we've overachieved on those commitments, and we felt it was the right time to update these type of investments. And they span from, obviously, the investment that we made directly at Apple. For example, we talked about the creation of 20,000 new jobs at Apple over the next five years in the United States. And of course, our business has grown. And so our commitment, for example, to U.S. suppliers grows over time, and that shows in the higher numbers. In the meantime, we've got into new businesses, for example, Apple TV+, a lot of the content that we developed for our TV service is produced here in the United States. And so that's additional investment here in the United States. From an OpEx standpoint, I think as you've seen this year, we're getting a lot of leverage. This is one of those years we said many times, sometimes our OpEx grows faster than revenue, and there are some other cycles where the opposite happens. We are growing revenue this year much faster than our OpEx increase. But we want to continue to make all the necessary investments into the business. We will never under invest in our business. And so you will continue to see the fact that we -- we will continue to grow our operating expenses, particularly on the R&D side, which continues to be the core of the Company.
Tejas Gala:
Thank you, Samik. A replay of today's call will be available for two weeks on Apple Podcast as a webcast on apple.com/investor and via telephone. The numbers for the telephone replay are (888) 203-1112 or (719) 457-0820. Please enter confirmation code 5799138. These replays will be available by approximately 5:00 p.m. Pacific Time today. Members of the press with additional questions can contact Kristin Huguet at (408) 974-2414. Financial analysts can contact me with additional questions at (669) 227-2402. Thank you again for joining us.
Operator:
Thank you. That does conclude today's Apple Q2 FY 2021 Earnings Conference Call. We thank you for your participation, and you may now disconnect.
Operator:
Good day, and welcome to the Apple Q1 Fiscal Year 2021 Earnings Conference Call. Today's call is being recorded. At this time, for opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn the call over to Tejas Gala, Director of Investor Relations and Corporate Finance. Please go ahead.
Tejas Gala:
Thank you. Good afternoon and thank you for joining us. Speaking first today is Apple's CEO, Tim Cook, and he'll be followed by CFO, Luca Maestri. After that, we'll open the call to questions from analysts. Please note that some of the information you'll hear during our discussion today will consist of forward-looking statements, including, without limitation, those regarding revenue, gross margin, operating expenses, other income and expense, taxes, capital allocation and future business outlook, including the potential impact of COVID-19 on the Company's business and results of operations. These statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results or trends to differ materially from our forecast. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in Apple's most recently filed annual report on Form 10-K and the Form 8-K filed with the SEC today, along with the associated press release. Apple assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements or information, which speak as of their respective dates. I'd now like to turn the call over to Tim for introductory remarks.
Tim Cook:
Thank you, Tejas. Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining the call today. It's with great gratitude for the tireless and innovative work of every Apple team member worldwide that I share the results of a very strong quarter for Apple. We achieved an all-time revenue record of $111.4 billion. We saw strong double-digit growth across every product category, and we achieved all-time revenue records in each of our geographic segments. It is not far from many of our minds that this result caps off the most challenging year any of us can remember. And it is an understatement to say that the challenges it posed to Apple as a business paled in comparison to the challenge it posed to Apple as a community of individuals, to employees, to their families and to the communities we live in and love to call home. While these results show the central role that our products played in helping our users respond to these challenges, we are doubly aware that the work ahead of all of us to navigate the end of this pandemic, to restore normal life and prosperity in our neighborhoods and local economies and, to build back with a sense of justice is profound and urgent. We will speak to these needs and Apple's efforts throughout today's call, but I want to first offer the context of a detailed look at our results this quarter, including why we outperformed our expectations. Let's get started with hardware. We hit a new high watermark for our installed base of active devices, with growth accelerating as we passed 1.65 billion devices worldwide during the December quarter. iPhone grew by 17% year-over-year, driven by strong demand for the iPhone 12 family, and our active installed base of iPhones is now over 1 billion. The customer response to the new iPhone 12 models' unprecedented innovation from world-class cameras to the great and growing potential of 5G has been enthusiastic, even in light of the ongoing COVID-19 impact at retail locations. iPad and Mac grew by 41% and 21%, respectively, reflecting the continuing role these devices have played in our users' lives during the COVID-19 pandemic. During this quarter, availability began for both our new iPad Air as well as the first generation of Macs to feature our groundbreaking M1 chip. The demand for all of these products has been very strong. We have also continued our efforts to bring the latest iPads, enriching content and professional support to educators, students and parents. Educational districts and governments worldwide are continuing major deployments, including the largest iPad deployments ever to schools in Germany and Japan. Wearables, Home and Accessories grew by 30% year-over-year, driven by significant holiday demand for the latest Apple Watch, our entire AirPods lineup, including the new AirPods Max as well as the new HomePod mini. This broad strength across the category led to new revenue records for each of its three subgroups, and we're very excited about the road ahead for these products. Look no further than the great potential of Fitness+, which pairs with Apple Watch to deliver real-time on-screen fitness data alongside world-class workouts by the world's best trainers. There are new sessions added each week, and customers are loving the flexibility, challenge and fun of these classes as well as how the pairing with Apple Watch pushes you to achieve your fitness goals. This deep integration of hardware, software and services, have always defined our approach here, and it has delivered an all-time quarterly Services record of $15.8 billion. This was the first quarter of the Apple One bundle, which brings together many of our great services into an easy subscription and with new content being added to these services every day, we feel very optimistic about where we are headed. The App Store ecosystem has been so important as individuals, families and businesses worldwide evolve and adapt to the COVID-19 pandemic, and we want to make sure that this unrivaled engine of innovation and opportunity continues. This quarter, we also took a significant new step to help smaller developers continue to experiment, innovate and scale the latest great app ideas. The App Store Small Business Program reduces the commission on the sale of digital goods and services to 15% for small businesses earning less than $1 million a year. The program launched on January 1st and we are already hearing from developers about how this change represents a transformation in their potential to create and grow on the App Store. Tomorrow is International Privacy Day, and we continue to set new standards to protect users' right to privacy, not just for our own products but to be the ripple in the pond that moves the whole industry forward. Most recently, we're in the process of deploying new requirements across the App Store ecosystem that give users more knowledge about and new tools to control the ways that apps gather and share their personal data. The winter holiday season is always a busy times for us and our products, but this year was unique. We had a record number of device activations during the last week of the quarter. And as COVID-19 kept us apart, we saw the highest volume of FaceTime calls ever this Christmas. As always, we could not have made so many holidays special without our talented and dedicated retail teams who helped us achieve a new all-time revenue record for retail, driven by very strong performance in our online store. Particularly, after the events of the last few weeks, we are focused on how we can help a moment of great national need. Because none of us should have any illusions about the challenges we face as we began a new chapter in the American story. Hope for healing, for unity and for progress begins with and depends on addressing the things that continue to wound us. In our communities, we see how every burden from COVID-19, to the resulting economic challenges, to the closure of in-person learning for students, falls heaviest on those who have always faced structural barriers to opportunity and equality. This month, Apple announced major new commitments through a $100 million Racial Equity & Justice Initiative. The Propel Center, launched with a $25 million commitment and with the support of historically black colleges and universities across the country, will help support the next-generation of leaders in fields ranging from machine learning to app development to entrepreneurship and design. And our new Apple Developer Academy in Downtown Detroit will be the first of its kind in the United States. Detroit has a vibrant culture of black entrepreneurship, including over 50,000 black-owned businesses. We want to accelerate the potential of the app economy here, knowing there is no shortage of good ideas in such a creative, resilient and dedicated community. Finally, we're committing $35 million across two investments in Harlem Capital and the Clear Vision Impact Fund that support, accelerate and grow minority-owned businesses in areas of great potential and need. In December, we concluded an unmatched year of giving. Since the inception of the Apple Giving Program in 2011, Apple employees have donated nearly $600 million and volunteered more than 1.6 million hours to over 34,000 organizations of every stride. Through our partnership with Product Red, we've adapted our 14-year $250 million effort to support HIV and AIDS work globally to ensure that care of COVID. That includes delivering millions of units of personal protective equipment to health care providers in Zambia. And here in the United States, even with COVID's effects, we are ahead of schedule on our multiyear commitment to invest $350 billion throughout the American economy. As proud as this makes us, we know there is much more to be done. Looking forward, we continue to contend with the COVID-19 pandemic but we must also now work to imagine what we will inherit on the other side. When a disease recedes, we cannot simply assume that healing follows. Even now, we see the deep scars that this period has left in our communities. Trust has been compromised, opportunities have been lost, entire portions of our lives that we took for granted, schools for children, meetings with our colleagues, small businesses that have endured for generations have simply disappeared. It will take a society-wide effort across the public and private sectors as individuals and communities, every one of us, to ensure that what's ahead of us is not simply the end of a disease, but the beginning of something durable and hopeful for those who gave, suffered and endured during this time. At Apple, we have every intention to be partners in this effort, and we look forward to working in communities around the world to make it possible. And as this chapter of uncertainty continues, so will our tireless work to help our customers stay safe, connected and well. With that, I'll hand things over to Luca.
Luca Maestri:
Thank you, Tim. Good afternoon, everyone. We started our fiscal 2021 with exceptional business and financial performance during the December quarter, as we set all-time records for revenue, operating income, net income, earnings per share and operating cash flow. We are thrilled with the way our teams continued to innovate and execute throughout this period of elevated uncertainty. Our revenue reached an all-time record of $111.4 billion, an increase of nearly $20 billion or 21% from a year ago. We grew strong double digits in each of our product categories, with all-time records for iPhone, Wearables, Home and Accessories and services as well as a December quarter record for Mac. We also achieved double-digit growth and new all-time records in each of our five geographic segments and in the vast majority of countries that we track. Products revenue was an all-time record of $95.7 billion, up 21% over a year ago. As a consequence of this level of sales performance and the unmatched loyalty of our customers, our installed base of active devices passed 1.65 billion during the December quarter and reached an all-time record in each of our major product categories. Our Services set an all-time record of $15.8 billion, growing 24% year-over-year. We established new all-time records in most service categories and December quarter records in each geographic segment. I'll cover our Services business in more detail later. Company gross margin was 39.8%, up 160 basis points sequentially, thanks to leverage from higher sales and a strong mix. Products gross margin was 35.1%, growing 530 basis points sequentially, driven by leverage and mix. Services gross margin was 68.4%, up 150 basis points sequentially, mainly due to a different mix. Net income, diluted earnings per share and operating cash flow were all-time records. Net income was $28.8 billion, up $6.5 billion or 29% over last year. Diluted earnings per share were $1.68, up 35% over last year and operating cash flow was $38.8 billion, an improvement of $8.2 billion. Let me get into more detail for each of our revenue categories. iPhone revenue was a record $65.6 billion, growing 17% year-over-year as demand for the iPhone 12 family was very strong despite COVID-19 and social distancing measures, which have impacted store operations in a significant manner. Our active installed base of iPhones reached a new all-time high and has now surpassed 1 billion devices, thanks to the exceptional loyalty of our customer base and strength of our ecosystem. In fact, in the U.S., the latest survey of consumers from 451 Research indicates iPhone customer satisfaction of 98% for the iPhone 12 family. Turning to Services. As I said, we reached an all-time revenue record of $15.8 billion and set all-time records in App Store, cloud services, Music, advertising, AppleCare and payment services. Our new service offerings, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, Apple News+, Apple Card, Apple Fitness+ as well as the Apple One bundle are also contributing to overall Services growth and continue to add users, content and features. The key drivers for our Services growth all continue to move in the right direction
A - Tejas Gala:
Thank you, Luca. We ask that you limit yourself to two questions. Operator, may we have the first question, please?
Operator:
We'll go question from Katy Huberty with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Katy Huberty:
Congratulations on a really strong quarter. First question for Luca. The gross margin was particularly strong versus your outlook. Can you talk about whether you recognize the full impact of the weaker dollar in the December quarter, given your typical currency hedges? And then how are you thinking about the headwinds and tailwinds on gross margins as you go into the March quarter? And then I have a follow-up for Tim.
Luca Maestri:
Yes, Katy. So yes, the gross margin was strong, was better than we had anticipated at the beginning of the quarter. The reason for that was obviously, we had very strong leverage from higher sales. And the mix was strong, both the mix within products and the mix of services, and that was only partially offset by cost. As you know, we've launched many new products during the fall, and that always comes with new cost structures. So in total, it was very good. And from the FX standpoint, really, at the gross margin level, FX didn't play a role neither sequentially nor on a year-over-year basis for the December quarter, partially because of the hedges that you talked about but also because some currencies are still weaker against the dollar, they're still weaker than a year ago. Look specifically to emerging markets in Latin America, in Russia, in Turkey and so on. Clearly, if the dollar remains weak or continues to weaken, that can become a tailwind for us as we get into the March quarter. At current rates, we expect some level of benefit around 60 to 70 basis points for the March quarter.
Katy Huberty:
That's great. And Tim, one of the challenges with valuing Apple is just a limited visibility that investors have into the road map and any new categories that you might enter over time. Without, of course, commenting on any given opportunity, can you talk about the framework that you use internally to evaluate new markets that might be attractive and what you believe will determine your success as you look to enter new markets?
Tim Cook:
Thanks, Katy, for the question, and thanks for not asking me any specifics. The framework that we use is very much around we ask ourselves if this is a product that we would want to use ourselves or a service that we would want to use ourselves. And that's a pretty high bar. And we ask ourselves if it's a big enough market to be in unless it's an adjacency product, of which we're looking at it very much from a customer experience point of view. And so there's no set way that we're looking at it, no formula kind of thing. But we're taking into account all of those things, and the kind of things that we love to work on are those where there's a requirement for hardware, software and services to come together because we believe that the magic really occurs at that intersection. And so hopefully, that gives you a little bit of insight into how we look at it. And I think we have some good -- really good opportunities out there. And I think if you look at our current portfolio of products, we still have relatively a low share in a number of cases in very big markets. And so we feel like we have really good upside there, and we feel like we have really good upside in the Services area, too, that we've been working on for quite some time with four or five new services just coming online in the last year, year-plus, and so -- yes. Thank you.
Operator:
We'll hear next from Wamsi Mohan with Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Wamsi Mohan:
Luca, the iPhone growth exceeded your expectations despite a late launch. Can you maybe share on the unit side or the ASP side? You referred to very strong mix a couple of times on the call. And how does this change your view on the March quarter? And if you could share any color on if you're still supply constrained, and I have a follow-up for Tim.
Luca Maestri:
Yes. Yes, certainly, iPhone was one of the major factors why we exceeded our own internal expectations at the beginning of the quarter. We have a fantastic product lineup and we know that, and it's been fantastic to see the customer response for new models, particularly the Pro models, the Pro and the Pro Max. So, we've done very, very well both on units and on pricing because of the strong mix. And we've had some level of supply constraints as we went through the quarter, particularly on the Pro and the Pro Max. As you said correctly, we launched these products in the middle of the quarter, two models after four weeks, the other two models after seven weeks. And so obviously, we had a very steep ramp, which fortunately went very, very well. The products are doing very well all around the world. I think you've seen that our performance has been particularly strong in China, where we've seen phenomenal customer response that probably. There was also some level of pent-up demand for 5G iPhones, given that the market is moving very quickly to 5G. And so as we look ahead into the March quarter, we're very optimistic. We believe we're going to be able to be in supply-demand balance for all the models at some point during the quarter. And it's -- the product is doing very well all around the world.
Wamsi Mohan:
Great. And Tim, you mentioned about the strength of the installed base performance, which continues to grow very impressively at this scale. Can you maybe help us think through how the switcher versus upgrade activity has been tracking in recent quarters? I would love to get your thoughts on that.
Tim Cook:
Yes. Thanks for the question. If you look at this past quarter, which has -- we started selling two of the iPhones 4 weeks into the quarter and the other two, seven weeks into the quarter. And so I would caution that this is in the early going. But in looking at the iPhone 12 family, we saw both switchers and upgraders increase on a year-over-year basis. And in fact, we saw the largest number of upgraders that we've ever seen in a quarter. And so, we were very thrilled about that.
Operator:
We'll go ahead and take our next question from Shannon Cross with Cross Research.
Shannon Cross:
Tim, can you talk a bit about what you're seeing in China? Clearly, significant sequential growth, which I think has a lot to do with iPhone. But I'm curious, both from an iPhone as well as your other product categories, what you're seeing and how much back to normal you think the Chinese market is? And then I have a follow-up.
Tim Cook:
Yes. China was more than an iPhone story. iPhone did do very well there. And sort of like the world, if you look at both switchers and upgraders, we were up year-over-year, and China also had a record number of upgraders during the quarter, the most we've ever seen in a quarter. I think probably some portion of this was that people probably delayed purchasing in the previous quarter as rumors started appearing about an iPhone. Keep in mind that 5G in China is -- the network is well established. And the overwhelming majority of phones being sold are 5G phones. And so I think there was some level of anticipation for us delivering an iPhone with 5G. And so, iPhone did extremely well. However, the other products did as well. I mean, we could not have turned in a performance like we did with only iPhone. iPad did extremely well, far beyond the Company average. Mac was about the Company average. Wearables, Home and Accessories was above the Company average. And so if you really look at it, we did really well across the Board there. In terms of COVID, I think they're -- at least for last quarter, they were beat -- sort of beyond COVID, very much in the recovery stage. This quarter, there are different reports about some cases in some places and lockdowns occurring but we have not seen that in our business as yet. Of course, those cases are much smaller than the ones in other countries.
Shannon Cross:
Right. I guess the other thing I was curious about, with regard to the Services business, if we could dig a little bit more, I think this is one of the first times when Luca, you talked about Apple TV+, Arcade, Apple Pay, some of the smaller services actually kind of moving the needle. And then I was also curious, you had a number of stores closed at least later in the quarter, and that typically has impacted some of your AppleCare revenue and yet you outperformed. So, maybe if you could talk about a bit more about the drivers of the Services revenue?
Luca Maestri:
Yes. I mean, really, it's been strong across the Board. There are two businesses during COVID that have been impacted negatively, and then we talked about it in the past. One is AppleCare. Obviously, when the stores are closed, it's tougher, of course, for customers to have the interaction with us. And advertising, which is -- it's in line with the overall level of economic activity. What happened during the December quarter is that in-store traffic improved. And so AppleCare, we grew -- we didn't grow as much as company average but we grew in AppleCare, set an all-time record there in spite of the fact that, yes, we are running, particularly in December, we started closing a few stores, particularly here in the United States but also in Western Europe. But in total, we were able to support more customers than in past quarters. And we also saw a sequential acceleration in advertising and so that also helped the overall growth rate. Clearly, the strength was in digital services, in the App Store, in cloud services, in Music. Those were the services that really delivered very, very strong performance. It's something that we've seen happen during the COVID environment.
Operator:
We'll hear from Toni Sacconaghi with Bernstein.
Toni Sacconaghi:
I also have one for Luca and one for Tim. Luca, I was wondering if we could just probe a little bit more into iPhone. Maybe you can just -- you talked about a drawdown in channel inventory last quarter. Our iPhone channel inventory is sort of at normal levels now exiting Q1. And should we be thinking about above-seasonal iPhone growth, given that you're still not in supply-demand balance and you had fewer selling days in fiscal Q1? Should we be thinking about sort of above-seasonal iPhone growth looking into Q2?
Luca Maestri:
So on the December performance, as you know, Toni, this was a very different cycle because we launched at a different time than usual. And so, we had an initial part of the quarter where, obviously, we didn't have the new phones. And then as we launched the new phones, we also did the channel fill that typically happens, to a certain extent, in the September quarter. At the end of the quarter, the demand has been very strong. And so we've been constrained, as I said, on -- especially in the Pro models. At the end of December, we exited with a level of iPhone channel inventory, which was slightly below a year ago. So we -- and we still had some level of supply constraints, which we believe we're going to be able to solve during the March quarter. In terms of the sequential change, we talked about -- during the prepared remarks, we talked about total company average, and we said that we expect that sequential progression to be similar to the typical seasonality that you've seen in past years. Certainly, last year is not typical because of COVID. But if you go back, fiscal '17, '18, '19, that's our typical seasonal progression. And we mentioned a couple of product categories, Services and Wearables, where we're going to be having a slightly more difficult compare. And so I think you can draw your conclusions around the iPhone.
Toni Sacconaghi:
Okay. And then, Tim, I was wondering if you could just comment more broadly around growth for Apple and sources of growth. The Company this year is going to be well over $300 billion in revenue. Historically, you've issued acquisitions. And I'm wondering if you could comment whether you still feel confident that Apple has Apple organic growth opportunities and that you don't believe acquisitions are an important source of growth? And then I think perhaps most importantly, as you look out, let's say, over the next five years, what do you think is a realistic revenue growth rate for Apple going forward?
Tim Cook:
Yes. Toni, as you know, we give some color on the current quarter but not beyond that in terms of growth rates, so I'll punt that part of your question. But if you back up and look at the sort of the ingredients that we have at this point, we have the strongest hardware portfolio that we've ever had. And we have a great product pipeline for the future, both in products and in Services. We have an installed base that has hit new highs that we just talked about earlier in our opening comments. And we're still attracting a fair number of switchers and, of course, upgraders. We just set an all-time Services record, and we have that installed base to compound that, and particularly with the added services that we've had over the last year or so, that as they grow and mature, will contribute even more to the Services revenue stream. And on the Wearables side, we've brought this thing from zero to a Fortune 120 company, which was no small feat. But I still think that we're in the early stages of those products. If you look at our share in some of the other products, whether you look in iPhone or Mac or iPad, you find that the share numbers leave a fair amount of headroom for market share expansion. And this is particularly the case in some of the emerging markets, where we're proud of how we've done but there's a lot more headroom in those markets. Like if you take India as an example, we doubled our business last quarter compared to the year ago quarter. But our absolute level of business there is still quite low relative to the size of the opportunity. And you can kind of take that and go around the world and find other markets that are like that as well. And of course, the other thing from a market point of view is we're -- we've been on a multiyear effort in the enterprise and have gained quite a bit of traction there. You've heard some of the things in Luca's comments today and we comment some on it each quarter. We're very optimistic about what we can do in that space. And then, of course, we've got new things that we're not going to talk about that we think will contribute to the Company as well, just like other new things have contributed nicely to the Company in the past. So, we see lots of opportunity. Thank you for the question.
Operator:
We'll hear from Amit Daryanani with Evercore ISI. Please go ahead.
Amit Daryanani:
I have two questions as well. I guess, starting with you, Luca, I just wanted to go back to the gross margin discussion, and we really haven't seen gross margins at this level, high 39%, I think, since 2016. Could you maybe step back and talk, what has enabled the shift higher? What are the key drivers to get you there? And is commodity tailwind or in-sourcing of some components really a big part of this? So just love to understand the durability of the gross margin at these levels. And what are the big drivers that got us here?
Luca Maestri:
Well, I mean, of course, when you grow the way we've grown this quarter, 21%, it's -- obviously, we have a certain level of fixed cost in our product structures, right? And so a high level of sales helps margin expansion without a doubt, and so that has been probably the biggest factor, to be honest. And then as I was saying earlier, we've had, across the Board, in Services, in every product category, we've had a very strong mix of products, right? We were talking about the iPhone, the Pro and the Pro Max, and that's been pretty much the case in every product category. So the mix has also been very good. The commodity environment is fairly benign. And the one thing that has not affected us this time around is the FX that it's true, it has not been a tailwind yet for the reasons that I was explaining to Katy, but at the same time, it has not been a negative. And the reality is that FX for us has been a negative over the last five or six years, almost every quarter. And so that has changed. And that obviously makes a difference.
Amit Daryanani:
And then Tim and when I look at the growth rates on Mac and iPads, they've been in the 20% to 40% range for the last three quarters, and I suspect some of this is just folks contending with the pandemic. But love to understand, when you look at these growth rates, how much of this do you think is replacement cycle-driven folks upgrading with at home versus new customers and new folks that are coming into the Apple ecosystem? And do you see, I guess, what sort of growth rates do you think is more durable or predictable as we go forward over here?
Tim Cook:
If you look at the switcher or the switchers, if you look at the new to Mac and new to iPad, these numbers are still about, at a worldwide level, about half of the purchases that are coming from people that are new. And so the installed base is still expanding with new customers in it. And so that's true on both iPad and Mac. If you look at Mac, the M1, I think, gives us a new growth trajectory that we haven't had in the past. Certainly, if Q1 is a good proxy, there's lots of excitement about M1-based Macs. As you know, we're partly through the transition. We've got more -- a lot more to do there. We're early days of a two-year transition, but we're excited about what we see so far. The iPad, as we went out with the iPad Air, and we now have the best iPad lineup we've ever had, and it's clear that some people are using these as laptop replacements. Others are using them as complementary to their desktop. But the level of growth there has been phenomenal. You look at it at 41%. And yes, part of it is work from home and part of it is just learning. But I think I wouldn't underestimate how much of it is the product itself on -- in both the case of iPad and Mac. And of course, our share in the Mac is quite low. In the -- for the total personal computer market. And so there's lots of headroom there.
Operator:
We'll go ahead and take our next question from Samik Chatterjee with JP Morgan.
Samik Chatterjee:
Congrats on the record quarter from my side as well. I guess I wanted to start off with iPhone sales. I think in -- general impression we have is China and North America have more robust 5G infrastructure. I just wanted to see kind of what are you seeing in terms of customer engagement or velocity of sales for iPhone in Europe, where I think the general impression is that service providers haven't rolled out robust 5G services. Is that something that's impacting customer interest in the latest lineup in the region? And I have a follow-up.
Tim Cook:
If you look at the 5G rollout in Europe, it's true that Europe is not in the place of -- certainly nowhere close to where China is and nowhere close to the U.S. either. But there are other regions that 5G is -- that has very good coverage, like Korea is an example. And so the the world, I would describe it right now, is more of a patchwork more to do that we haven't had in quilt. There are places that there's really excellent coverage. There are places where -- within a country that is very good but not from a nationwide point of view. And then there are places that really haven't gotten started yet. Latin America is more closer to the last one. There's lots of opportunity ahead of us there. And I think Europe is where there are 5G implementations there. I think most of that growth is probably in front of us there as well.
Samik Chatterjee:
Got it. As a follow-up, if I can just ask you, I think you mentioned the momentum you're seeing for the Apple One bundle, which I think has been a couple of months now since you launched it. Any metrics to share in terms of what you're seeing for conversion rate of customers or even insights into which services are turning in that bundle, are turning out to be the anchor Services that's driving adoption of that bundle?
Tim Cook:
It's really too early to answer some of those questions. As you know, we just got started into the quarter in Q1 so we have less than a quarter on this right now. What we wanted to accomplish with it, we're clearly accomplishing, which is making our Services very easy to subscribe to. Our customers clearly told us that they wanted to subscribe to several services or, in some cases, all of our services. And so, we've made that very simple, and it's clear from the early going that it's working but we've just gotten started on it.
Operator:
We'll hear from Krish Sankar with Cowen.
Krish Sankar:
Congrats on the very strong results. My first question is for Tim. Tim, I want to talk a little bit about your search and advertising business. How do you think of the long-term growth opportunities in advertising? How do you think it -- how long can it grow at two times to three times the App Store growth rate? And also, are there any applications where your fundamental search technology, AI could be adapted for other parts of the Services business, that's the first question. And then I have a quick follow-up for Luca after that.
Tim Cook:
The search advertising business is going well. It's a -- there's lots of intent from search. And we do it in a very private kind of manner, observing great privacy policies and so forth. And I think people see so forth. And I think people see that and are willing to try it out. And we have been growing nicely in that area. It's a part of the advertising area that Luca spoke of earlier.
Krish Sankar:
Got it, got it. And then a follow-up for Luca. When you look at your Services segment in the March quarter, in China, you typically see a bump due to gaming downloads during Chinese New Year. So should see a similar trend this time around? But do you think with a pandemic, and people think for me at home, that kind of seasonal bump might not happen in China for gaming downloads?
Luca Maestri:
Yes. I mean, I think I was mentioning it during the prepared remarks. We -- clearly, in China, the March quarter is typically the strongest quarter for our Services business and for the App Store because of Chinese New Year, as you mentioned. And last year, what we saw was an increased level of activity because after Chinese New Year, the whole country went into lockdown for several weeks. And so that propensity for playing games continued for several weeks, more than a typical cycle. So, we expect to have a great quarter in China, but at the same time, you need to keep in mind that the compare is going to of what happened a year ago.
Operator:
We'll go ahead and take our next question from Chris Caso with Raymond James. Please go ahead.
Chris Caso:
The first question is on iPhone ASPs and I know you don't disclose the numbers there, but I wonder if you could speak about it qualitatively. You spoke about the richer mix, but there were also some price differences as compared to a year ago. iPhone 12 came higher price point. The Pro established a new price point. Can you speak to how that the level of benefit that you saw there? And going forward, are you confident that you can continue to improve the next in iPhone going forward?
Luca Maestri:
So, as I said earlier, we grew iPhone revenue 17%. That growth came from both unit sales and ASPs because of the strong mix that I mentioned before. So, I think that answers your question for the December quarter. What we've seen so far, it's very early because we launched the new products only a few weeks ago. What we've seen so far is a very high level of interest for the Pro models, the Pro and the Pro Max. We worked very hard to ramp up our supply. We've had some supply constraints during the December quarter. We think we're going to be able to solve them during the March quarter. But so far, the mix has been very strong on iPhone.
Chris Caso:
Okay. As a follow-up question, if you could talk a bit to the benefit that you may have seen from some of the carrier actions? We've seen very aggressive trade-ins during the quarter. Did that provide a benefit, in your view, on units or mix or perhaps both? And what would be the level of permanence that you would see in some of those actions such that if those subsidies were removed, could that potentially be a headwind going forward?
Tim Cook:
I think, Chris, it's Tim. I think subsidies always help, that anything that reduces the price to the customer is good for the customer and obviously good for the carrier that's doing it and good for us as well. And so, it's a win across the board. I believe that, at least based on what I see right now is that there would be probably continuing to have quite a bit of competition in the market, if you're talking about the U.S. market for customers as the carriers work to get more customers to move to 5G. Outside of the U.S., the subsidies are not used in all geographies, and so it really varies greatly by country. Some of them are separate completely, the handset and the service. And in those areas, we don't have subsidies.
Operator:
We'll go ahead and hear from Jim Suva with Citigroup.
James Suva:
It's amazing how your company has pivoted and progressed through this uncertain time in society. A lot of the pushback we get on our view on Apple is that everyone around them or that they know developed countries has an iPhone or Apple product and the market is kind of being saturated some. But when I look at other countries like India, I believe statistically, you are materially below that in market share. So are you doing active efforts there? It seems like there's been some news reports of moving supply chain there. Or you recently opened up an Apple Store. How should we think about that? Because it just seems like you're really not full market share equally around the world.
Tim Cook:
Yes. There are several markets, as I alluded to before. India is one of those, where our share is quite low. It did improve from the year-ago quarter. Our business roughly doubled over that period of time. And so we feel very good about the trajectory. We are doing a number of things in the area. We put the online store there, for example, and last quarter was the first full quarter of the online store. And that has gotten a great reaction to it and has helped us achieve the results that we got to last quarter. We're also going in there with retail stores in the future. And so we look for that to be another great initiative and we continue to develop the channel as well. And so there's lots of things, not only in India but in several of the other markets that you might name where our share is lower than we would like. And I -- again, I would also say, even in the developed markets, when you look at our share, definitely, everybody doesn't have an iPhone, not even close. And so, we really don't have a significant share in any market. So, there's headroom left even in those developed markets where you might hear that.
James Suva:
Congratulations to your team and employees.
Tim Cook:
Thank you, Jim. Appreciate that.
Tejas Gala:
Thank you. A replay of today's call will be available for two weeks on Apple Podcast, as a webcast on apple.com/investor and via telephone. The numbers for the telephone replay are (888) 203-1112 or (719) 457-0820. Please enter confirmation code 1828830. These replays will be available by approximately 5:00 PM Pacific Time today. Members of the press with additional questions can contact Kristin Huguet at (408) 974-2414. Financial analysts can contact me with additional questions at (669) 227-2402. Thank you again for joining us.
Operator:
Once again, that does conclude today's conference. We do appreciate your participation.
Operator:
Good day everyone and welcome to the Apple Inc. Fourth Quarter Fiscal Year 2020 Earnings Conference Call. Today’s call is being recorded. At this time for opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn things over to Tejas Gala, Senior Analyst, Corporate Finance and Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.
Tejas Gala:
Thank you. Good afternoon and thank you for joining us. Speaking first today is Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, and he will be followed by CFO, Luca Maestri. After that, we’ll open the call to questions from analysts. Please note that some of the information you’ll hear during the discussion today, will consist of our forward-looking statements including without limitation those regarding revenue, gross margin, operating expenses, other income and expense, taxes, capital allocation and future business outlook, including the potential impact of COVID-19 on the company’s business, and results of operations. These statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results or trends to differ materially from our forecast. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in Apple’s most recently filed Annual Report on Form 10-K and the Form 8-K filed with the SEC today, along with the associated press release. Apple assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements or information, which speak as of their respective dates. I’d now like to turn the call over to Tim for introductory remarks.
Tim Cook:
Thanks Tejas. Good afternoon and thanks for joining the call today. Back in April, I said we were in the most challenging environment in which Apple as a company has ever operated. That atmosphere of uncertainty, of resolve, of making difficult calls with limited information has not only come to define Apple’s year, but each of our lives as individuals across this country, and around the world. It has been a chapter that none of us will forget. In the face of these challenges, Apple stayed relentlessly focused on what we do best, seeing in every obstacle an opportunity to do something new, something creative, something better on behalf of our customers. Today we report a quarter and a fiscal year that reflects that effort. This quarter, Apple achieved revenue of $64.7 billion, a September quarter record, despite the anticipated absence of new iPhone availability during the quarter, and the ongoing impacts of COVID-19, including closures at many of our retail locations. We also set a new all-time record for Mac and Services. Outside of iPhone, each of our product categories saw strong double digit year-over-year growth, despite supply constraints in several product categories. Our results for this quarter were ahead of our expectations, driven by stronger-than-expected iPhone and Services performance. As we anticipated, we launched new iPhone models in October, a few weeks later than last year’s mid-September launch. Up to that mid-September point, customer demand for iPhone was very strong, and grew double-digits. On Services, we saw stronger-than-expected performance across the board. Geographically, we set September quarter records in the Americas, Europe and Rest of Asia Pacific. We also set a September quarter record in India, thanks in part to a very strong reception to this quarter’s launch of our online store in the country. Greater China is the region that was most heavily impacted by the absence of the new iPhones during the September quarter, still we beat our internal expectations in the region, growing non-iPhone revenue strong double digits and iPhone customer demand grew through mid-September. When you pull back the lens to the entire fiscal year, it’s a testament to the team’s work and to the resilience of the business in the era of COVID-19. This year, we set an all-time revenue record of $274.5 billion, growing 6% year-on-year. We grew every quarter, set all-time yearly records in Mac, Wearables Home and Accessories, and Services, and grew by double-digits in every product category outside of iPhone. When we first began to grapple with COVID-19, I said there are worse things for a company whose business is innovation, than having to periodically do just about everything in an entirely new way. This year, we not only launched our most powerful and compelling generation of hardware, software and Services ever, we did it in a way that pushes to reimagine every part of that innovation process, down to how we share these announcements with the world and how we get new products into our customers’ hands. Working from kitchen tables and bedrooms, in distanced office settings and rework labs and manufacturing facilities, the team rebuilt every part of the plane while it was mid-air, and the results speak for themselves. In a year that has been enormously challenging, our retail teams, contact centers, and all those who work with our customers most closely, have gone to creative and dedicated [lengths] [ph] to keep serving our customers. From adapting our stores for contactless pickup to new Apple Express storefronts, to new online customer support options. Amid store closings, reopenings and reimagining, these teams have been an unfailing source of energy, creativity and determination. Innovation isn’t just about what you make; it’s about how you approach problems, and these teams and every team across Apple having not faced a single question this year that they haven’t found an answer to with passion and resolve. Their actions didn’t just meet the moment; they will make us a better company moving forward. The pandemic has hit home for all of us, and at Apple we have seen it as a call to action. We have seen the pain in our communities. Many of us have seen our children work hard to adapt to remote learning, and we all know that the road ahead is uncertain. This quarter and throughout the year, our response to this crisis has been to ask, how can we help? In terms of COVID-19 response, that has meant sourcing and donating millions of face masks, designing and manufacturing millions of face shields, and scaling the production of millions of test kits. But we have tried to live our values more broadly. We’ve pledged $100 million to our new racial equity and justice initiative. We’ve committed to be fully carbon neutral by 2030 across our entire supply chain and device usage, as massive wildfires, hurricanes and floods, bring home the consequences of climate change for all of us. And we’ve deepened our enduring educational partnerships, from coding education beginning in elementary school, to new efforts with dozens of historically black colleges and universities. One of the many areas where COVID-19 continues to have a significant impact is in education. As teachers, students and parents alike work hard to keep education relevant, creative and effective, our products have helped them meet the moment. In a typical year, the back-to-school season is a bustling time for us. This year, that was true in the biggest way ever. We’ve helped school districts around the world meet this moment in an unprecedented way, including starting nine of our 10 largest school district deployments ever, that alone will support over 1 million students and teachers. We have also supported these deployments and educators and learners everywhere with free tools and training, reaching over 150,000 teachers and millions of parents and students around the world. Looking forward, we feel great optimism about the road in front of us. We’re in the midst of our most prolific product introduction period ever. In addition to the announcement of HomePod Mini, which achieves unmatched sound quality and Siri and smart-home capabilities in a small and affordable format, we just marked the beginning of a new era for iPhone, with the arrival of our first 5G enabled devices. The iPhone 12 and 12 Mini boasts powerful breakthroughs like an edge-to-edge Super Retina XDR display, unprecedented durability with a new ceramic shield, developed with our partners at Corning, new MagSafe charging and accessories, the fastest ever A14 Bionic chip, and a new dual camera system, driven by computational photography. The iPhone 12 Pro and 12 Pro Max take all of this to an even higher level, driven by the most powerful photo and video tools ever delivered by a smartphone, including an all new LiDAR scanner and the ability to shoot an Apple ProRAW and full Dolby video. And of course, all of these devices bring the 5G experience users have been waiting for, with lightning fast download and uploads, a new standard in video streaming, more responsive gaming and much more. The early product reviews have been tremendously positive, and our customers have been similarly excited to get their hands on this next era of devices. We’re very optimistic about what the next few weeks will bring. We’re also seeing a very positive response to our September announcement, the all new Apple Watch Series 6, boasts powerful new health and wellness features, including a blood oxygen sensor, a next generation altimeter, and a wide variety of new colors and bands. The potential for Apple Watch’s powerful health and wellness capabilities continues to grow. Just yesterday, the government of Singapore and Apple launched LumiHealth, a first of its kind program designed to encourage healthy activity and behaviors using Apple Watch. Created in collaboration with a team of physicians and public health experts, LumiHealth uses technology and behavioral insights to encourage Singaporeans to keep healthy and complete wellness challenges through their Apple Watch and iPhone. Singapore is a trailblazer here, and we’re proud to be their partner. Our iPad lineup continues to set the pace for the category, including the new iPad Air now shipping with the A14 Bionic, our most powerful chip ever. We announced Apple Fitness Plus, which delivers deep personalization and integration across the fitness tools our users love and depend on. And Apple One, launching tomorrow, is the easiest way for users to enjoy Apple’s services, like Music, TV+, Arcade, iCloud, News+ and Fitness+ on a single plan that is right for them and their family. Looking across services more broadly, we’re really excited about what we see. This was a record quarter for the App Store, AppleCare, Cloud Services, Music and Payment Services. The App Store in particular, continues to play an essential role in helping small businesses, educational institutions and workplaces adapt to COVID-19. Apple TV+ continues to impress, from fan favorites like Ted Lasso, which has won a worldwide audience with its hopeful tone during challenging times, to critical and award praise, including a Primetime Emmy for Billy Crudup in the morning show. Luca will speak in greater detail about our expectations for the December quarter. Without giving away too much, I can tell you that this year has a few more exciting things in store. Before I hand things off, I want to offer one more comment on resilience, because I think if I had to describe our performance this quarter in a single word, it’s resilient. Financial performance aside, I don’t think this year will be a time that any of us look back on with great fondness or nostalgia. Those of us, who wake up every day, hoping for a return to normal, can count ourselves fortunate. Others don’t have that luxury. There is the great pain of a lost loved one, the uncertainty and fear of a lost job, a deep well of concern for people we care about, who we are not able to see. A sense of opportunities missed, of plans delayed, of time lost. Even though we’re apart, it has been obvious this year that around the company, teams and colleagues have been leaning on and counting on each other more than in normal times. I think that instinct, that resilience has been an essential part of how we have navigated this year. Work can’t solve for all the things we’re missing right now, but a shared sense of purpose goes a long way. A belief that we can do more together than we can alone, that people of goodwill, driven by creativity and passion, and that certain itch of a big idea, can still do things that help other people in our own small way to teach, to learn, to create or just to relax at a time like this. Even as the things we make require us to operate at the very cutting edge of technology, in materials, products and ideas that didn’t exist just a few years ago, this year has forced us to face plainly the things that make us human; disease, resilience and hope. You never wished for a year like this one, but I couldn’t be prouder of the team, the work we have done and the small role we have played in helping our communities find hope and resilience in this time. With that, I’ll hand things over to Luca.
Luca Maestri:
Thank you, Tim. Good afternoon, everyone. We are very pleased to report today a new September quarter revenue record, which caps a remarkable level of performance for our fiscal year 2020, during which we set new all-time records for revenue, earnings per share and free cash flow, in spite of an extremely volatile and challenging macro environment. We could not be more proud of the way our team has innovated and executed, throughout this unprecedented period of uncertainty. We reported total revenue of $64.7 billion for the September quarter, up 1% from a year ago. This is a very impressive level of performance, when we consider that this year; we did not launch and ship any new iPhone models during the quarter. Outside of iPhone, we grew 25% in aggregate, and had strong double-digit year-over-year revenue growth in each of our product categories. We set all-time records for Mac and Services, and a September quarter record for Wearables, Home and Accessories. We also achieved new September quarter records in the vast majority of countries that we track, including among others, The U.S., Canada Brazil, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Turkey, Russia, India, Korea, Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam. Products revenue was $50.1 billion with very strong underlying performance across each product category. Our products outside of iPhone grew a combined 30%, despite supply constraints on iPad, Mac and Apple Watch throughout the quarter. For iPhone, through mid-September, customer demand grew double-digits. As a result of this level of sales performance and the unmatched loyalty of our customers, our installed base of active devices reached an all-time high in aggregate, and in each of our major product categories. Our Services set an all-time record of $14.5 billion, growing 16% year-over-year. We established new all-time records in many Services categories and September quarter records in each geographic segment. I’ll cover this in more detail later. Company gross margin was 38.2%. This was up 20 basis points sequentially, due to cost savings and a higher mix of services, partially offset by a different mix of products. Products’ gross margin was 29.8%, growing 10 basis points sequentially, driven by cost savings, partially offset by a different mix. Services gross margin was 66.9% decreasing 30 basis points sequentially, mainly due to a different mix. Let me get into more detail for each of our product categories; iPhone revenue was $26.4 billion, as we did not have availability of new iPhone models during the September quarter this year, which we had mentioned during our call in July. While COVID-19 and social distancing measures impacted store operations in a significant manner, demand for iPhone remained very strong. In fact, through mid-September, customer demand for our current product lineup grew double digits, and was well above our expectations. Our active installed base of iPhones reached a new all-time high, thanks to the exceptional loyalty of our customer base and strength of our ecosystem. In fact, in the U.S., the last survey of consumers from 451 Research indicates iPhone customer satisfaction of 98% for iPhone 11, 11 Pro and 11 Pro Max combined. Turning to Services, as I said, we set an all-time revenue record of $14.5 billion. We grew strong double digits and set all-time records in App Store, Cloud Services, Music, Advertising and Payment Services. We also set an all-time record in Apple Care, as in-store traffic improved and we were able to support more customers. Our new services, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, Apple News+, and Apple Card, are also contributing to overall services growth, and continue to add users, content and features. The key drivers for our Services growth, all continue to be moving in the right direction. First, our installed base continues to grow and is at an all-time high across each major product category. Second, the number of both transacting and paid accounts on our digital content stores reached a new all-time high during the September quarter, with paid accounts increasing double digits in each of our geographic segments. Third, paid subscriptions grew more than 35 million sequentially, and we now have over 585 million paid subscriptions across the services on our platform, up 135 million from just a year ago. With this momentum, we are very confident to reach and exceed our increased target of 600 million paid subscriptions before the end of calendar 2020. Finally, as Tim mentioned, we continue to improve the breadth and the quality of our current services offerings, and are adding new service offerings that we think our customers will love, like Apple One and Apple Fitness+. Wearables, home and accessories established a new September quarter record, with revenue of $7.9 billion, up 21% year-over-year. We set September quarter records in every geographic segment and for each of the three product categories; Wearables, Home and Accessories. As a result, our wearables business is now the size of a Fortune 130 company. Importantly, Apple Watch continues to extend its reach, with over 75% of the customers purchasing Apple Watch during the quarter, being new to the product. We’re very excited about the future of this category, including the recent launches of our new products; Apple Watch Series 6 NFC, HomePod Mini, and the MagSafe ecosystem of accessories. Next, I’d like to talk about Mac; revenue was by far an all-time record at $9 billion, up 29% over last year and $1.6 billion above our previous record, in spite of supply constraints during the quarter. We grew strong double digits in each geographic segment and set all time revenue records in the Americas, and the rest of Asia Pacific, as well as September quarter records in Europe and Japan. We’ve seen amazing customer response to the new MacBook Air and MacBook Pro and very strong demand during the back to school season. IPad performance was also very impressive, with revenue of $6.8 billion, up 46%, and our highest September quarter revenue in eight years despite supply constraints. Demand exceeded our expectations around the world, as we grew very strong double digits in every geographic segment, including an all-time record in Japan and a September quarter record in the Americas. Both Mac and iPad are incredibly relevant products for our customers in the current working and learning environments, and we are delighted that the most recent surveys of consumers from 451 Research, measure customer satisfaction at 93% for Mac and 95% for iPad. With this level of customer satisfaction and with around half of the customers purchasing Mac and iPad during the quarter being new to that product, it is no surprise that the active installed base for both products reached a new all-time high. In the Enterprise market, our products are helping companies grow their business, while achieving their sustainability goals. One example is Vestas, a leading producer of wind turbines. Vestas is using Apple products and native iOS apps extensively across their operations to deliver renewable energy efficiently to customers worldwide. For instance, they use iPads to help optimize onsite construction operations, cutting crane usage on average by one day per project. Vestas field technicians are using iPhone for work orders, troubleshooting a remote collaboration, saving them 400,000 service hours annually. More recently, they’ve started piloting the augmented reality capability in iPads, to help customers visualize wind turbine installations. We ended the quarter with almost $192 billion in cash plus marketable securities. We issued $5.5 billion of new term debt, and decreased short term borrowing facilities by $6.2 billion during the quarter, leaving us with total debt of $112 billion. As a result, net cash was $79 billion at the end of the quarter, as we continue on our path to reaching a net cash neutral position over time. We returned nearly $22 billion to shareholders during the September quarter, including $3.5 billion in dividends and equivalents, and $18 billion to open market repurchases of 168.7 million Apple shares. We also retired an additional 3.1 million shares, in the final settlement of our 16th ASR. Before looking ahead, I want to provide just a few highlights for the amazing fiscal year we just completed. In fiscal ’20, we grew revenue by 6% to $274.5 billion, a new all-time record. We showed remarkable resilience throughout the year, as we were able to grow both revenue and installed base of active devices in every quarter. During the September quarter, including $3.5 billion in dividends and equivalents and $18 billion through open market repurchases of 168.7 million Apple shares. We also retired an additional 3.1 million shares in the final settlement of our 16th ASR. Before looking ahead, I want to provide just a few highlights for the amazing fiscal year we just completed. In fiscal 20, we grew revenue by 6% to $274.5 billion and new all-time record. We showed remarkable resilience throughout the year as we were able to grow both revenue and installed base of active devices in every quarter. In spite of the most challenging economic environment we can remember, we said new revenue records in the Americas, in Europe and in the rest of Asia Pacific. We grow our business outside of iPhone by 16%. We grew earnings per share 10% to a new all-time record and most importantly, we continue to deliver innovative products and services that our customers love. As we move ahead into the December quarter, I’d like to provide some color on what we are seeing, which includes the types of forward-looking information that Tejas referred to, at the beginning of the call. Given the continued uncertainty around the world in the near term, we will not be issuing revenue guidance for the coming quarter. However, we are providing some insights on our expectations for the December quarter for our product categories. These directional comments, assume that COVID related impacts to our business in November and December are similar to what we’re seeing in October. We just started shipping iPhone 12 and 12 Pro, and we’re off to a great start. We are also excited to start preorders on iPhone 12 Mini and 12 Pro Max next Friday. Given the tremendously positive response, we expect iPhone revenue to grow during the December quarter, despite shipping iPhone 12 and 12 Pro four weeks into the quarter, and iPhone 12 Mini and 12 Pro Max seven weeks into the quarter. We expect all other products in aggregate to grow double digits, and we also expect services to continue to grow double digits. For gross margin, we expect it to be similar to our most recent quarters, despite the costs associated with the launch of several new products. For OpEx, we expect to be between $10.7 billion and $10.8 billion. We expect OI&E to be around $50 million, and the tax rate to be around 16%. Finally today, our Board of Directors has declared a cash dividend of $0.205 per share of common stock, payable November 12, 2020 to shareholders of record as of November 9, 2020. With that, let’s open the call to questions.
Tejas Gala:
Thank you, Luca. We ask you that you limit yourself to two questions. Operator, may we have the first question please.
Operator:
Certainly we'll hear first today from Shannon Cross, Cross Research.
ShannonCross:
Thank you very much. Tim, can you talk a bit more about China? And in terms of linearity, I think Luca, you'd mentioned that services in all regions were up at an all time high. I'm not sure exactly what your comment was. But, maybe give us a little idea of, whether you're seeing any blowback or benefits in the Huawei situation and just dig a bit more into the trends we're seeing in China, and then have a follow up. Thank you.
TimCook:
Thanks, Shannon. If you look at China, and look at last quarters, I'll talk about both last quarter and this quarter, the last quarter, what we saw was our non iPhone business was up strong double digit for the full quarter. And then if you look at iPhone and you look at it in two parts one, pre mid September, which is pre the point at which the previous year, we would have launched iPhones that period of time which was the bulk of the quarter iPhone was growing from a customer demand point of view. And of course not shipping new iPhones for the last two weeks of September makes that number in the aggregate a negative but the net is the underlying business in China last quarter was very strong and perhaps very different than you might think from just a quick look at the stated number In terms of this quarter, given the explanation for last quarter and the momentum that we've got, and as importantly given the initial data points that we see on iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro, although we don't guide to revenue as Lucas said, I would tell you that we're confident that we will grow this quarter in China. And so we're very bullish on what's going on there. A little more color on last quarter, we had a much more significant inventory draw down on the channel side than other regions. And so that is one reason why the numbers are different than other regions. And additionally, the new products in the year ago quarter were a higher percentage of our iPhone sales than they were in other regions. So hopefully that explains what's going on in China. In terms of the market there, 5G is fairly advanced there. They're forecasting 600,000 base stations by the end of the year. And so we're entering the market at a very good time, and with the reception that we've gotten so far; we're very confident there.
ShannonCross:
Okay, great. And then can you talk a bit about just overall in the world, the cadence that you see sort of for the 5G adoption launch, what you see will be sort of the key drivers, obviously, there's a fair amount of subsidies going on in the US at this point. Thank you.
TimCook:
Yes, we're working hard to provide the best experience for iPhone users. To do so we've been collaborating closely with carriers all around the world to ensure iPhone has great throughput and coverage and battery and call quality. We've completed 5G testing so far on over 100 carriers in over 30 regions. And so it's pretty, it's pretty pervasive around the world. But grantedly, it will continue to roll out in more places as carriers continue to expand their coverage. And this will happen every week. And so it's just going to get better. There are obvious places in the world where it's more ahead than others. But we feel like we are entering at a sort of at exactly the right time.
Operator:
That will be from Jeriel Ong from Deutsche Bank.
JerielOng:
Yes, thank you so much. I guess I appreciate the guidance for revenue to grow but I guess my question, perhaps, if I could, is relative to seasonality, you guys over the last five years of seasonality is typically above 50% quarter-on-quarter, do you think that you can beat that, even with the later release? And I have a follow up.
LucaMaestri:
So as I said, Jay, we're not providing a range, for the reasons that I explained during my prepared remarks. So you need to keep in mind a couple of things that are unique about this quarter versus the past. And that I mentioned again, the launch timing of the phones is different from the past. So we are launching the new iPhones, four weeks into the quarter for two models for the 12 and 12 Pro and seven weeks into the quarter for the other two, the iPhone Mini and for 12 Pro Max. So that is something to keep in mind as you think about the growth rates. With regard to all the other product categories, as I said, we are expecting to grow double digits essentially across the board for the rest of our products and for services. And so we are incredibly optimistic about what we've seen so far. Obviously, we started taking pre orders five days ago and it's a bit early for the phone. But we think that there are a lot of tailwinds this year for iPhone for the entire cycle. Some of the comments that Tim has already made, right, we've got the best lineup of iPhones that we've ever had. We got an install base of iPhone that is very large continues to grow. It's an all time high. Obviously, 5G is a once in a decade, opportunity. And as you've seen in some markets, certainly here in the United States, carrier offers are very aggressive. And so that is very good for consumers and ultimately, very good for us. So very, very optimistic, given what we've seen so far.
JerielOng:
Awesome, thank you so much for that context and given us some of the levers to think about. I'd like to ask a little bit more of a strategic one, a little bit longer term in nature. I think one thing is interesting about the Apple one bundle is the desire two bundles in the first place, I guess. I'm wondering, and some investors have asked me this as well, is that why wouldn't you also take that rationale perhaps in hardware, perhaps maybe AirPods and iPhone or AirPods watch and iPhone? Because if it makes sense to bundle services, would it also make sense to bundle hardware? And if that's not the case, then are there benefits of services, bundling that don't necessarily translate to hardware bundling? Thanks.
TimCook:
Yes, we don't have anything to announce today at our hardware bundle but backing up a bit. And we do view that people like to pay for their hardware are at least some substantial portion of it monthly. And so that's the reason that we have implemented installments in our stores and online. And that's the reason you see in some of the channels too selling the hardware on a per month kind of basis. If that begins to look like a subscription, perhaps to some buyers because they're used to holding the phone for a fixed period of time and then turning it over and using the residual value of that phone in a way that gives them a de facto kind of subsidy on a new phone. And so there is something today in the market that works somewhat similar. On the services side; we have -- we had customers coming to us and asking for an easier way to buy all of our services. And we wanted to provide that and we're looking forward to tomorrow to getting Apple one out there.
Operator:
It will come from Katy Huberty with Morgan Stanley.
KatyHuberty:
Thank you. Good afternoon. New technologies, including the chips that support 5G put upward pressure on cost this year. But you managed to leave ASPS for iPhones relatively unchanged this product cycle. How should we think about the margin profiles of iPhone 12 relative to past iPhone cycles?
LucaMaestri:
Hi, Katy. Obviously, we don't provide any outlook at the gross margin level for product categories. What I said in my prepared remarks, we expect gross margins in total for the company to be pretty much in line with what we've seen during the last quarter. Because obviously, as you said, it's very good, right, because we are offering the new phones at price points that are essentially unchanged. And we are taking on a lot of new technology into the phones. I would say the commodity environment is good. For the first time in many, many quarters, I don't have to say that foreign exchange is a headwind and getting into the quarter is not going to be a factor during the quarter. As we've made it clear in our comments, we are bullish about our sales performance expectation, so we should be getting some leverage. And so I think that the gross margin dynamics are good and it's very good to see that we're able to offer so much more technology and still able to deliver the level of gross margins that I think investors are expecting.
KatyHuberty:
Okay and shifting to the services business. This isn't dependent on certainly any one service but licensing and other historically has been a driver of growth. That's where the ad based revenue comes in. When you think about the Google antitrust pressure, what's the risk that you see some shrinkage in your licensing and others segment within services and do you see opportunities for other services to make up for any potential weakness?
KatyHuberty:
We've got Katy, as you know; we've announced a number of services over the last couple of years. And we are ramping those between Apple TV plus and Apple News plus and Apple Kay, we've got Apple Card. We've got Apple Fitness Plus coming. We've got a number of services that have been launched a bit longer that are doing really well from the app store to iCloud, and So there's a lot of room their input and potential there. I have no idea how the DOJ suit will go, but I think it's a long way from a conclusion on it.
Operator:
That will come from Evercore's Amit Daryanani.
AmitDaryanani:
Thanks for taking my question. I guess I have two as well. First off, Tim, on iPhones, you talked about the iPhone install data thing being the highest and largest ever been satisfaction rates, obviously pretty high. And our data would suggest replacement cycles are getting elongated. And if I take all of that together, along with the fact that, if iPhone user like me with embarrassingly high weekly usage rate, does that in aggregate give you better confident, better clarity that we could enter an extensive period of iPhone revenue growth versus what we seen the last couple of years.
TimCook:
We're very bullish on this cycle, very bullish on it, because as I sort of step back from it and look at what we've now done, we have for the first time ever, we've launched four iPhones. And there is an iPhone for everyone there. It is the strongest lineup we've ever had by far, we have -- we do have a very large, loyal and growing install base. And we're also reaching out to switchers. And so I'm very optimistic there. We've got a once in a decade opportunity with 5G. There's a lot of excitement around 5G. And we've got some aggressive offers in the marketplace. And so when I think about all of those, I'm really and I look at the initial data points that we've got on the iPhone 12 and the 12 Pro, we are off to a great start.
AmitDaryanani:
Got it. And I guess, Luca had a follow up to you on the services gross margin it just was to kind of continue to move higher rather nicely. Do you think this level at 67% essentially is sustainable? And what do you think are the two or three factors that are enabling these gross margins to remain here as we go forward?
LucaMaestri:
I mean, obviously, we're very pleased with the level of gross margins in services, as you said; they've been expanding almost 300 basis points on a year-over-year basis. The reason for that is, of course that, we are growing the services revenue, and therefore we're getting leverage on a lot of these services, right. Some of it, as explained in the past, we have a portfolio of services that got different margin profiles. And so sometimes, depending on the mix of products we have, we can see margin expansion through mix, as well. And so, but we're also launching new services that where we need to invest heavily up front. And but we think we've been able to show, for example, this year that we've launched a lot of new services, made all the necessary investments and still being able to expand gross margin. So we feel quite confident about that trajectory that we have, that we have for services and we're very, very happy to see the customer response to really all of them, because as we've mentioned earlier, I mean, we've seen revenue records across essentially every category and in across the entire world, right? We've seen September quarter records in every geography around the world. So of the dynamics, all the levers that we have in the services business are working very well right now. And that translates also into margin, of course.
Operator:
We'll hear from Samik Chatterjee with JP Morgan.
SamikChatterjee:
Hi, thanks for taking the question. I just want to start off with the iPhone lineup here, particularly as you mentioned, the carrier subsidies that you see mixed optimistic about iPhone sales. I think just looking at some other factors here. Earlier in the year, you had mentioned that iPhone sales was seeing an uptake with stimulus checks going out to consumers helping in the consumer spending overall here in the US. So as we see some delays here on that front, are you seeing anything change on the consumer spending side as a macro impacting? How you think about iPhone sales, particularly with -- even with the new product lineup? And I have a follow up. Thank you.
TimCook:
It's prior to mid September, we were seeing double digit growth in customer demand on iPhone. So there's a lot of momentum there. And there is a lot of momentum even much more so now given the launch of the 12 Pro and the iPhone 12. If you're asking whether it could have been even more with a different macro spending environment? I believe the answer to be yes. But you can't run the experiment. And so I don't know for sure. But I suspect that just the COVID in general take something off from a worldwide economic point of view.
SamikChatterjee:
Perfect. And if can just follow up just following up on that COVID discussion. We are potentially here looking at a second wave, right. And I think all companies are trying to prepare for that which you discussed as well in your prepared remarks. But if you can share any kind of thoughts about how you're preparing in relation to either inventory levels, or sourcing from the supply chain, to prepare for any potential disruption, like we had earlier this year?
TimCook:
Well, we're doing everything we can do. But we're prioritizing safety first, obviously. And so with our stores as an example, we've come up with a new concept that puts an essentially turns the store into an express storefront. And we've implemented that in a number of places where we believe that helps from the safety of our employee and the safety of the customer's point of view, but still allows for an interaction to take place. And so we've also put a lot more people on the phones because a lot more people are reaching out to us in that way. And of course, the online store has stayed up and running through the whole of this. I think if you take some of those, the channel is doing some similar things and then some different things as well. And so I think everybody to the best of their ability is putting in contingency plans and finding a way to adapt to the environment. But it is difficult to call and there's a level of uncertainty in it, obviously. And that's what Luca was referring to earlier.
Operator:
That will come from Krish Sankar from Cowen and Company.
KrishSankar:
Hi, thanks for taking my question. I have two of them, first on palooka. I understand you don't want to give color on gross margin by products or segments. But Luca you mentioned growth margin should be similar in December versus September. And so it should grow double digit, there's a general view that on the iPhone side, the bond cost would be headwind for gross margin, but carrier subsidies would be attainment. So I'm kind of curious, how should we think about the different, like gross margin levels into December quarter? And I have a follow up.
LucaMaestri:
Yes. And so typically during the December quarter, we have positive factors because we have the typical seasonal leverage, right, sequentially as we go from September to the holiday season. And we also have an improved mix between products, particularly this year, as we've launched the new iPhone, at the same time, we shouldn't forget that we have launched a lot of new products. During the last several weeks, we launched four new models of iPhone; we launch new models of Apple watch new, models of iPads. And so, clearly every time we launch a new product, the cost structure is higher. And so that is going to be the other side of the coin. So but we think that those two things should balance out and again, as I was saying earlier, and we are accomplishing this while delivering a lot of new technologies, a lot of new features to our customers. This time for an exchange is not a factor and that's something that is a bit different from the past. So but that those are the pluses and minuses.
KrishSankar:
Got it. Definitely helpful, Luca. And then a follow up for Tim. Tim, I kind of surprised you didn't say a lot about the payments ecosystem in this prepared comments kind of curious to find out from your advantage point, how you think of your whole payments ecosystem including Apple Card, Apple Pay, Apple Cash; now you're disaggregating the whole FinTech environment.
TimCook:
Thanks for the question. There's just a limited number of things I can talk about is kind of a reason I didn't talk about it. We continue to be very enthusiastic about the whole Payment Services area. Apple Card is doing well. And Apple Pay is doing exceptionally well. As you can imagine in this environment, people are less want to hand over a card. So this contactless payment has taken on a different level of adoption in it that I think will never go back. The US has been lagging a bit in contactless payment. And I think that the pandemic may well get put the US on a different trajectory there. And so we are very bullish about this area and view that there are there are more things that Apple can do in this space. And in so it's an area of great interest to us.
Operator:
That will come from Kyle McNealy with Jefferies.
KyleMcNealy:
Hi, thanks for the question. I wanted to ask a little bit about the supply chain. Given your latest start from manufacturing to the flagship phone line of this year, do you think that supply will be able to meet demand through the end of the calendar? Are there any component shortages that you're seeing? Or are there any actions that you can take to increase weekly output versus last year? Thanks.
TimCook:
Yes, Kyle, I don't know what you're talking about iPhone in particular. But if you look at iPhone, we are constrained today. And that's not a surprise where at the front end of the ramp, if you will, and how long we will be supply constrained, it's hard to predict. I mean, we haven't taken orders yet for the iPhone 12 Mini or the Pro Max either. And so those are coming in. So we shall see. But right now we are supply constrained, we are also supply constrained for avoidance of any confusion where supply constrained on Mac, we are supply constrained on iPad. And we're supply constrained on some Apple watches as well. And so we have a fair number of areas right now of focus, and we're working really, really hard to remedy those as quickly as we can. But at this point, I can't estimate when we'll be out of that.
KyleMcNealy:
Okay, great. Thanks a lot. And then switching to Mac and iPad. How do you think about the durability of the strength you've seen there with Mac and iPad? Is there any potential for stronger than seasonal pullback after the strong back to school season and holiday season? And these supply constraints make it feel like there's a good chance for continuation of the strong demand trends and in flow through of that. What do we think about the seasonality into December and March quarter being more positive in seasonal or less positive in seasonal? Thanks.
TimCook:
Yes, we placed our thoughts in the color that Luca provided when he said that all products excluding iPhone, all products and services excluding iPhone or all products, rather excluding iPhone would grow in the double digits. And so we continue to be bullish on what Mac and iPad can do. I think the moves that have taken place to remote learning and remote work are not going to go back to normal, normal will become something different. Because I think people are learning that there are aspects of this that work well. And so I don't believe that we're going to go back to where we were. And I think that means that iPads and Macs are even more important in those environments. The growth in both of these last quarter were phenomenal as you can tell from your from datasheet with Mac at 29 and iPad at 46. These are tremendous numbers and as Luca said the September quarter was the all time high for Mac in the history of the company, and by not by little bit by $1.6 billion. And so it was a substantial difference that we did have aggressive promotion for college students that were going back to going back to school. And so that invariably part of it. But I think the other part of it during the remote work thing is not something that's going to snap back to the way it used to be anytime soon.
Operator:
That will come from Chris Caso with Raymond James.
ChrisCaso:
Yes, thank you. I guess first question is on iPhone pricing. And there was some changes in the iPhone price back this year, the iPhone, the price point for iPhone 12 moves up a bit, I guess the difference the gap between 12 and 12 Pro is smaller. And I guess that's after you made some adjustments years prior where the price point came down a bit? Can you talk through the thought process behind that and the potential implications for either unit out elasticity or blended ASP as a result of the price changes?
TimCook:
Well, I the iPhone 12 family start at $699. In many places, because you can get in the deals that people are really paying are very different than that, because a lot of people, particularly in this country, but also in several other countries in the world connect to a carrier plan. And of course, those offers are much more aggressive. And so the price that our customers paying is probably the most important one. The iPhone 12 is at $799. And so I think what you're saying is there's a $200 difference there. But I would guess that people are viewing it more as a $300 difference between the 12 Mini and the 12 Pro. And so we'll see what the mix turns out. Right now we have no data other than 12 and 12. Pro, we like the data on the 12 Mini and the Pro Max, because we're not taking orders yet. But what we try to always do in pricing is give the customer a great value. And I feel like we really did that this year. And that's despite, as was mentioned earlier, all of the extra features that we placed into the phones, including 5G.
ChrisCaso:
As a follow up you mentioned, some of the carrier incentives we've seen here in the US. And if you could provide some more color about that, about what you're seeing now. And obviously, as we went through, years ago, the incentive from carriers were a lot larger. Is this mark some shift in the approach of carriers as we're moving into 5G? What's the extent of the permanence of some of these incentives? And then, as 5G rolls out around the world and into other geographies, is this something we should expect that as either they try to protect from switchers or kind of promote the 5G networks will see a higher prevalence of incentives and carriers as we go forward?
TimCook:
I don't want to speak for our carrier partners that would be up to them to talk about their plans. Generally, I think it's to the vast, vast majority of carriers around the world to their interest to move customers to 5G. And I think it's in the customer's interest to move to 5G and obviously, we like that as well. And so I think you have a situation where everyone's whoring in the same direction. And that's a very different kind of situation than normally we would have. And so it is one of the things as I alluded to earlier that makes me very bullish, only one, the other things are very important to the size of the install base, the product lineup, these things are critically important as well.
Tejas Gala:
Thank you, Chris. A replay of today's call will be available for two weeks on Apple podcasts, as a webcast on apple.com/investor and via telephone. The numbers for the telephone replay are 888-203-1112 or 719-457- 0820, please enter confirmation code 9501153. These replays will be available by approximately 5 PM Pacific time today. Members of the press with additional questions can contact Kristin Huguet at 408-974-2414; financial analysts can contact me with additional questions at 669-227-2402. Thank you again for joining us.
Operator:
And again, that does conclude today's conference. Thank you all for joining us today.
Operator:
Good day, everyone. Welcome to the Apple Incorporated Third Quarter Fiscal Year 2020 Earnings Conference Call. Today's call is being recorded. At this time, for opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn things over to Mr. Tejas Gala, Senior Manager, Corporate Finance and Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.
Tejas Gala:
Thank you. Good afternoon and thank you for joining us. Speaking first today is Apple's CEO, Tim Cook; and he'll be followed by CFO, Luca Maestri. After that, we'll open the call to questions from analysts. Please note that some of the information you'll hear during our discussion today will consist of forward-looking statements including without limitation those regarding revenue, gross margin, operating expenses, other income and expense, taxes, capital allocation, and future business outlook, including the potential impact of COVID-19 on the company's business and results of operations. Actual results or trends could differ materially from our forecast. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in Apple's most recently filed periodic reports Form 10-K and Form 10-Q and the Form 8-K filed with the SEC today along with the associated press release. Apple assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements or information, which speak as of their respective dates. I'd now like to turn the call over to Tim for introductory remarks.
Tim Cook:
Thanks, Tejas. Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining the call today. Before we begin, I joined the many millions across this country in mourning and memorialize Congressman John Lewis, who was laid to rest earlier today. We've lost a hero who walked among us, a leader in the truest sense who urged this country to aim higher and be better until the very end. I was humbled and fortunate to know him and as an Alabama native his example inspires me still. It now falls to every American to be a living memorial to John Lewis and to carry forward the work and the mission that defined his life. Throughout the call I'll speak in greater detail about Apple's support for equity and justice topics of great urgency on a number of fronts, but first I want to pull the lens back to consider the quarter and full. In an uncertain environment Apple saw a quarter of historic results demonstrating the important role our products play in our customers' lives. We set a June quarter record with revenue of $59.7 billion, up 11% from a year ago. Both products and services set June quarter records and grew double-digits and revenue grew in each of our geographic segments, reflecting the broad base of this success. As always and especially in times of real adversity, what makes us proud as a company is not merely what we did, but how we did it. As millions March for justice in big cities and small towns alike, we committed a $100 million to launch Apple's racial equity and justice initiative as well as new and renewed internal efforts to foster diversity and inclusion at all levels of the company. As COVID-19 continues to represent great risks for individuals and great uncertainty for our communities, care and adaptability are defining how we conduct our work wherever we work. In some places that has met responsibly reopening our operations and retail stores with enhanced health and safety precautions. In others, where the virus has reemerge it's meant taking the challenging, but necessary step of re-closing stores. I'll touch on these topics more in a little bit. But first I want to offer some more context on the quarter's results. Due to the uncertain and ongoing impacts of COVID-19, we did not provide our typical guidance when we reported our results last quarter, but we did provide some color on how we expected the June quarter to play out. I'd like to contextualize our results in terms of that color across each of our product categories beginning with iPhone. iPhone revenue grew 2% this quarter. In April, we expected year-over-year performance to worsen, but we saw better-than-expected demand in May and June. We attribute this increase in demand to several interactive causes including a strong iPhone SE launch, continued economic stimulus, and potentially some benefit from shelter in place restrictions lifting around the world. We expected iPad and Mac growth to accelerate and we saw very strong double-digit growth for these devices this quarter. This remarkable performance came in spite of supply constraints on both products. We're working hard to get more iPads and Macs into customers' hands as quickly as possible recognizing how integral they have become to working and learning from home providing entertainment and staying connected with loved ones. Wearables growth decelerated as we expected, but still grew by strong double-digits and set a revenue record for a non-holiday quarter. Building on powerful new features built into watchOS 7 and AirPods Pro announced this quarter, we are very excited about the many opportunities in front of us for this product category. These strong results helped drive our installed base of active devices to new all-time records across each of our product categories. Reflecting the deep integration of hardware, software and services, services generated a June quarter record of $13.2 billion, up 15% year-over-year. As we mentioned during our last call, there were two distinct trends we were seeing and they played out as we thought. First, results for advertising and AppleCare were impacted by the reduced level of economic activity and store closures to a degree that was in line with our expectations. Second, we had strong performance in our digital services with all-time revenue records in the App Store, Apple Music, video and cloud services as well as elevated engagement on iMessage, Siri and FaceTime. Customers are loving new offerings across Apple services like Apple News today, our new daily audio briefing and Greyhound, our new summer blockbuster starring Tom Hanks. In fact, Apple TV+ just hit a history making 95 awards nominations and 25 wins and accolades. Based on these results and our performance over the last four quarters, we are proud to announce that we have achieved our goal of doubling. Our fiscal 2016 services revenue six months ahead of schedule. We're conscious of the fact that these results stand in stark relief during a time of real economic adversity for businesses large and small and certainly for families. We do not have a zero-sum approach to prosperity and especially in times like this, we are focused on growing the pie, making sure our success isn't just our success and that everything we make, build or do is geared towards creating opportunities for others. The App Store is a great example. This quarter, a new study by independent economists at the Analysis Group founded the App Store facilitated more than 0.5 trillion in commerce globally in 2019 alone. Especially in a time of COVID-19, you can measure economic resilience in the ways in which the App Store supports remote ordering for restaurants, digital commerce for small businesses and an enduring entrepreneurial opportunity for creators and visionaries. Keeping learning vibrant and impactful in the time of COVID-19 is a priority everyone shares. Earlier this month, we announced significant enhancements to the development Swift and Everyone Can Code curricula and we launched a new professional learning course available exclusively to educators. In just two weeks ago, our Community Education initiative added 10 more historically black college and university regional coding centers to our roster, bringing the total to 24 locations nationwide, 12 of which are HBCUs and 21 of which serve majority black and brown student populations. In Apple's backyard, we announced that we are allocating $400 million of our multi-year $2.5 billion affordable housing commitment to new housing construction, homebuyer assistance programs and support for those at greatest risk of experiencing homelessness across Silicon Valley. Apple's results this quarter are only possible due to our people and their ongoing ingenuity, flexibility, resilience and determination during these ever-changing times. I want to thank our AppleCare and retail teams who have paired exceptional service during a time of intense demand with great adaptability during a quarter where stores have reopened in some places and reclosed in others. A dedicated team of specialists and experts has shouldered the task of caring for the well-being of our teams and communities store by store, location by location with evidence driven granularity and agility that is unrivaled anywhere. Innovation from adversity certainly define this year's Worldwide Developers Conference as well. This is an event where traditionally Apple's worldwide community of developers gathers together to share, celebrate and do big things together. Though we could not be together in person, Apple set a new standard for what online events can achieve with our celebrated all virtual event. The results here speak for themselves. More than 22 million viewers tuned in across all of Apple streams. For our developers we distributed more than 72 hours of video content. That's three full days of video. The weak saw more than 200 direct video engineering and design sessions and about 4500 person to person appointments with developers across 227 virtual labs. And of course that's even before you get to this year's announcements from iOS 14, which boasts the radical redesign to the home screen, powerful updates to messages, streamlined and effortless app clips and even greater privacy transparency and controls to major updates to Apple Pencil, Siri and calling and iPad OS 14 to much anticipated sleep tracking, new fitness and wellness features and unprecedented customization and watchOS 7 to the new macOS Big Sur boasting the biggest redesign upgrade to macOS since OS X. No less important for Apple's innovation roadmap is our transition to Apple silicon for the Mac. This two-year effort will achieve both unprecedented performance for the Mac and a common architecture across all Apple products. Looking forward, we are profoundly optimistic about Apple's future and we recognize that with this success comes some real responsibility to lead with our values because those values help make that success possible in the first place. We are just as proud of our announcement this month that Apple will be fully carbon-neutral by 2030 across our entire supply chain and including the energy use of every device we make as we are of any hardware innovation because they spring from the same instinct to leave the world better than we found it. We're committed to standing with those marching for the lives and dignity through our new $100 million commitment to Apple's racial equity and justice initiative, and we're deepening our diversity and inclusion efforts internally because our future as a business is inextricably linked with the future of our communities. There are times when things seem to move slowly when needed progress, economic or social themes bogged down when the instinct to turn away from the horizon and hold onto what you've got fields and ex-capable, and then there are times like this when people of goodwill step forward, when progressed on Moore's itself, when the insistence of hope forces something new. This is an immensely challenging moment. COVID-19 is still devastating many places and we have work left to do to care for the health and well-being of the communities in which all of us live and work. But no community of people, whether a company or a country, can afford to miss this call when it comes. At Apple, we never have and we don't intend to start now. With that, I'll hand things off to Luca.
Luca Maestri:
Thank you, Tim. Good afternoon, everyone. Our June quarter was a testament to Apple's ability to innovate and execute during challenging times. Our results speak to the resilience of our business and the relevance of our products and services in our customers' lives. Total revenue was $59.7 billion, a new June quarter record, up 11% from a year ago, despite a 300 basis point headwind from foreign exchange. Our performance was strong across our entire portfolio as we grew revenue in each of our product categories and set June quarter records for Mac, for Wearables and for services. Similarly, our results were very strong all around the world with growth in all geographic segments and new June quarter records in the Americas, in Europe, in Japan and Rest of Asia-Pacific. Products revenue was $46.5 billion, up 10% and a June quarter record. iPhone returned to growth and we saw very strong double-digit growth from iPad, Mac and Wearables. Lockdowns and point of sale closures were widespread during April and impacted our performance, but we saw demand for all products improve significantly in May and June. As a result of our strong performance and the unmatched loyalty of our customers, our installed base of active devices reached an all-time high in all of our geographic segments and all major product categories. Our services continue to grow strongly up 15% year-over-year and reached a June quarter record of $13.2 billion. We set all-time records in many services categories and June quarter records in each geographic segment. I'll cover this in more detail later. Company gross margin was 38%. This was down 40 basis points sequentially due to unfavorable FX of 90 basis points and a different mix of products partially offset by cost savings and services mix. Products gross margin was 29.7% decreasing 60 basis points sequentially due to FX and a different mix partially offset by cost savings. Services gross margin was 67.2% up 180 basis points sequentially mainly due to mix. Net income was $11.3 billion and earnings per share were $2.58, up 18% and a June quarter record. Operating cash flow was also a June quarter record at $16.3 billion, an improvement of $4.6 billion over a year ago. Let me get into more detail for each of our revenue categories. iPhone revenue grew 2% to $26.4 billion with customer demand improving as the quarter progressed. COVID-19 was most impactful during the first three weeks of April when lockdowns and point of sale closures became more widespread in many countries. We saw marked improvement around the world in May and June, which we attribute to an improved level of customer demand helped by the very successful launch of iPhone SE and economic stimulus packages. Our active installed base of iPhones again reached an all-time high as a result of the loyalty of our customer base and strength of our ecosystem. In fact in the US the latest survey of consumers from 451 Research indicates iPhone customer satisfaction of 98% for iPhone 11, 11 Pro and 11 Pro Max combined. Turning to services, as I said, we set a June quarter record of $13.4 billion of revenue. We had all-time record performance and strong double-digit growth in the App Store, Apple Music, video and cloud services. Our new services Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, Apple News+ and Apple Card are also contributing to overall services growth and continue to add users’ content and features. At the same time customer engagement in our ecosystem continues to grow at a fast pace. The number of both transacting and paid accounts on our digital content stores reached a new all-time high during the June quarter with paid accounts increasing double-digits in each of our geographic segments. In aggregate, paid subscriptions grew more than 35 million sequentially and we now have over 550 million paid subscriptions across the services on our platform, up 130 million from a year ago. With this momentum we remain confident to reach our increased target of 600 million paid subscriptions before the end of calendar 2020. Wearables, Home and Accessories established a new June quarter record with revenue of $6.5 billion, up 17% year-over-year. Our Wearables business is now the size of a Fortune 140 company and we set June quarter records in the majority of markets we track. Importantly Apple Watch continues to extend its reach with over 75% of the customers purchasing Apple Watch during the quarter new to the product. Next, I'd like to talk about the impressive performance of Mac. Revenue was $7.1 billion, up 22% over last year and a June quarter record. We grew double digits in each geographic segment and set all-time revenue records in Japan and rest of Asia-Pacific as well as June quarter records in the Americas and Europe. Customer response to our new MacBook Air and MacBook Pro launches has been extremely strong. iPad performance was equally impressive with revenue of $6.6 billion, up 31% and our highest June quarter revenue in eight years. Demand was strong around the world with double-digit growth in each of our geographic segments, including a June quarter record in Greater China. The launch of our new iPad Pro has been received incredibly well in every region of the world. Both Mac and iPad are extremely relevant products in the new working and learning environments and the most recent surveys of consumers from 451 Research measured customer satisfaction at 96% for Mac and 97% for iPad. Around half of the customers purchasing Mac and iPad during the quarter were new to that product. And as a result, the active installed base for both products reached a new all-time high. Our retail business had record June quarter revenue. Thanks to the performance of our online store which had records in all geographic segments and grew across all major product categories. In June, we launched Apple Card Monthly Installments for more products in our US stores allowing customers to pay for their devices all the time with 0% interest. We're very pleased with the level of customer interest this new offering has generated. In the enterprise market, we continue to see companies leverage Apple products and offerings to successfully navigate their businesses through COVID-19. In healthcare, we are seeing rapid acceleration of telehealth to support a more flexible model of patient care. Many hospitals such as UVA Health, Rush University Medical Center and UC San Diego Health are using apps on iPad and iPhone to have triage, monitor and care for patients who are at home. This helps free up hospital capacity to support patients who need inpatient care while enabling continued care for patients who do not require in-person visits. Since many call center employees are currently working remotely, Apple Business Chat has proven an invaluable tool for staying connected with customers. This quarter HSBC deployed Apple Business Chat in its US and UK contact centers. Apple Business Chat provides a flexible and secured channel for digital banking assistance through a native Apple experience improving the efficiency and experience for both customers and agents. We are seeing similar adoption by hundreds of other organizations. Let me now turn to our cash position. We ended the quarter with almost $194 billion in cash plus marketable securities. We issued $8.5 billion of new term debt, retired $7.4 billion of term debt and increased short-term borrowing facilities by $1.1 billion during the quarter leaving us with total debt of $113 billion. As a result, net cash was $81 billion at the end of the quarter and we continue on our path to reaching a net cash neutral position over time. We returned over $21 billion to shareholders during the June quarter, including $3.7 billion in dividends and equivalents and $10 billion through open market repurchases of 31.3 million Apple shares. We also began a $6 billion accelerated share repurchase program in May resulting in the initial delivery and retirement of 15.2 million shares. And finally, we retired an additional 4.8 million shares in the final settlement of our 15th ASR. As we move ahead into the September quarter, I'd like to provide some color on what we are seeing, which includes the types of forward-looking information that Tejas referred to at the beginning of the call. Similar to last quarter, given the uncertainty around the world in the near-term, we will not be issuing revenue and margin guidance for the coming quarter. However, we will provide some additional insight on our expectations for the September quarter for our product categories. On iPhone, we expect to see recent performance continue for our current product lineup, including the strong customer response for iPhone SE. In addition, as you know, last year we started selling new iPhones in late September. This year we project supply to be available a few weeks later. We expect the rest of our product categories to have strong year-over-year performance. For services, we expect the September quarter to have the same trends that we have observed during the June quarter except for AppleCare where during the September quarter a year ago we expanded our distribution significantly. As a consequence, we expect a difficult comp for AppleCare also considering the COVID related point of sale closures this year. For gross margin, keep in mind that we will have a different mix than in prior years as I just explained. For OpEx, we expect to be between $9.8 billion and $9.9 billion. We expect the tax rate to be about 16.5% and OI&E to be $50 million. Also today our Board of Directors has declared a cash dividend of $0.82 per share of common stock payable on August 13, 2020 to shareholders of record as of August 10, 2020. And finally, today we're announcing a four for one split of Apple common stock to make our stock more accessible to a broader base of investors. Each shareholder of record at the close of business on August 24, 2020 will receive three additional shares for every outstanding share held on the record date and trading will begin on a split-adjusted basis on August 31st, 2020. With that let's open the call to questions.
Tejas Gala:
Thank you, Luca. We ask that you limit yourself to two questions. Operator, may we please have the first question?
Operator:
Yes, that will be from Katy Huberty with Morgan Stanley.
Katy Huberty:
Thank you. Good afternoon. Tim in light of the economic adversity that you talked about in the prepared remarks, can you just walk us through how Apple is leveraging finance and trade-in programs to make technology more affordable and accessible during this period, while also addressing the opportunity to recycle and reuse products and maybe also extend that to how these programs might expand over time and then I have a follow-up.
Tim Cook:
Yes. As Luca mentioned, in June we actually rolled out to the overwhelming balance of our other products the ability to do interest rate, interest free financing in our stores with payments. And that's in addition to trade-in which is becoming a more common trend now which I think is terrific because it is great for the environment and it acts as a subsidy, if you will, against the price of the new phone. And so when you compound these two things with the financing and the trade-in it makes the product super affordable. And we're really happy with what we're seeing in that regard.
Katy Huberty:
And then, as a follow-up, just specifically to iPhone the category returned to growth. As you pointed out, the installed base is larger today. Our math would suggest that replacement cycles in some cases are elongated. And then you have the affordability element that you just discussed. Does all of that combine to build confidence that we're entering a longer period of iPhone revenue growth after what's been six quarters of decline?
Tim Cook:
We're very pleased with how we did on iPhone. It was better than we thought largely because as we pointed out in the prepared remarks May and June were much better. If you look at iPhone in totality the things that get me very optimistic is the size of the active installed base. The fact that if you look in the major geographies like the US, we had the top two selling smartphones. In the UK we had three of the top four. In Australia, we had five of the top six. And in Japan we had the top four. Urban China we were, iPhone 11 was the top selling smartphone in the country. And so these are some very different geographies with their very different competitive situations and we're doing fairly well. The iPhone SE, it's also clear that from the early data we're seeing a higher switcher number than we did in the previous year, which we feel very good about. And it also seems to appeal to some people that were holding onto the device a little longer because they wanted a smaller form factor phone. And so the combination of the smaller form factor and an incredibly affordable price made the iPhone SE very popular. iPhone 11 is still the most popular smartphone, but iPhone SE definitely helped our results. And as we -- as Lucas said in his outlook, we do see that continuing into this quarter currently.
Tejas Gala:
Thank you, Katy.
Katy Huberty:
Thank you. Congrats on the quarter.
Tim Cook:
Thank you so much.
Tejas Gala:
Can we have the next question, please?
Operator:
Yes, that would be from Krish Sankar with Cowen & Company.
Krish Sankar:
Hi, thanks for taking my question. I have two of them. First one, Tim, when you look at the services business and in terms of your TV+ content production have the movement restrictions impacted the content production efforts? And along the same path four years ago your premonition on services being a $50 billion business in 2020 came sooner than expected, I don't know if you want to make any such forecast four years out and how you think services revenue is going to be. Then I have a follow-up for Luca.
Tim Cook:
I'm sorry. I missed that second question because the audio didn't come through. But I think I got the gist of the first. And that is production has been affected for Apple TV+ as I think it has for most people. We are working to get restarted. I don't have a precise date yet when we will get it restarted, but there will be some impact because we shut down in the March time frame and are yet to really restart in a significant way particularly for those that are shut in the LA area given the current status of the virus and those. And I'm sorry I missed your, the second part of your question.
Krish Sankar:
Yes, Tim, I was trying to see, four years ago you made a great prediction that services is going to be $50 billion by 2020. I wanted to see if you have any update to the prediction four years down the road?
Tim Cook:
We're not updating today. We feel good. We want to take the moment and feel good about achieving the doubling six months early. And we do have still hanging out there, as you know, the subscription number that we're shooting for later in the year at 600 million. So we do have that objective out there.
Krish Sankar:
If I could just squeeze in one for Luca. With the strong sales in Mac given the shelter-in-place, do you think the back-to-school season got pulled in by a quarter or do you expect the momentum to still continue? Thank you very much.
Luca Maestri:
As I said, when I was talking about providing some commentary for the September quarter, we expect all the non-iPhone product categories to have a very strong year-over-year performance. So we definitely, I mean, the back-to-school season is clearly this one and we are very excited not only for the Mac, but also for the iPad. We've got a fantastic lineup of products and we know that these products are incredibly relevant especially given the current circumstances. So we expect the performance that we've seen for Mac in the June quarter to continue.
Tejas Gala:
Thank you. Can we have the next question, please?
Operator:
Yes. From Cross Research we'll hear from Shannon Cross.
Shannon Cross:
Thank you very much. Tim, can you talk a bit about what you're seeing in China? I know the revenue was up 2% and I think Luca talked about record iPad, but just curious as to given their 5G [indiscernible] how you're seeing the market play out? And then I have a follow-up. Thank you.
Tim Cook:
Shannon, the growth that we -- we did see growth in Greater China for the quarter of 2%, currency affected China, a bit more than in other places, it affected 400 basis points. And so in constant currency, we would have grown at 6%. As I had mentioned before, the iPhone 11 has been our best-selling phone and has been number one in urban China and so we're very, very proud of that. iPad was helped in the June quarter there by the work from home and distance learning as it was in other geographies and the Mac also grew strong double digit during the quarter. And services set a new June quarter record there. We also continue to see extremely high new customer rates on Mac and iPad there, to give you a perspective, about three out of four customers that are buying the Mac are new in China and about two out of three that are buying the iPad are new. And so these are numbers that we're super proud of.
Shannon Cross:
Great. And then, can you talk a little bit more about the decision to bring Mac Silicon in-house, then the benefits that you expect to see or you've seen from vertical integration of acquisitions like the Intel modem business? Thanks.
Tim Cook:
Thanks. Yes, I mean, what we will end up -- what we'll end up with is a common architecture across all of our products, which gives us some interesting things that we can do in products that are -- that is sort of unleashes another round of innovation. And so I don't want to say a lot about it, other than we are extremely excited about it, it's something that we've worked on quite a while to get to this point and we're looking forward to shipping the first Mac with Apple Silicon later in the year.
Tejas Gala:
Thank you, Shannon. Can we have the next question please.
Operator:
That will come from Amit Daryanani with Evercore.
Amit Daryanani:
Thanks a lot for taking my question guys. I have one and a follow-up as well. Fortunately, I guess, Tim, if I think about the strength, you're seeing with iPhones right now, do you have a sense in terms of where is this trend coming from? Is it more replacement cycles getting shorter or which is getting new customers into the iOS ecosystem because, clearly these growth rates seem fairly impressive in the context of a pandemic and upcoming refresh cycle that we have?
Tim Cook:
I think, Amit, it's a combination of a strong launch with iPhone SE and some -- probably some pick up because of the economic stimulus that hit different countries at different points in time. And probably some of the reopening that took place across the quarter, particularly in May and June as Store started to reopen. And so it's a combination of all of those. And as you know, we've been having a strong cycle with the iPhone 11 and the 11 Pro. And so when you combine the -- a strong cycle plus and iPhone SE launch, plus the reopening of the stores, et cetera, I think there were a lot of things that we're going in the right direction there.
Amit Daryanani:
Perfect, that's helpful. And then I guess, Luca, if I could just follow up with you. I'd love to get your perspective on how do we think about the overall 38% gross margins? What do you think of the levers to improve this as you go forward, not really September quarter, but over the next one to two years? And in that context, do you see a point where the product gross margin starts to stabilize because they have been trending somewhat lower for the last couple of quarters now.
Luca Maestri:
Yes. Well, let me start with what we've seen during the June quarter. We were at 38%, we were down slightly sequentially but up the same amount on a year-over-year basis. And really the big negative impact that we felt for several quarters now has been the strength of the US dollar, so the foreign exchange impact on a sequential basis was 90 basis points on a year-over-year basis was 130 basis points. So obviously that is something to keep in mind. And then, the other aspect; I think it's always important to keep in mind, Amit, is that we sell many different products. They have different margin profiles. And so sometimes a different mix can have an impact on the aggregate level of products gross margins and we are very pleased to see the performance of Mac, iPad and Wearables but obviously, it's a different mix. Going forward, the variables are always the same, is that the foreign exchange will continue to play an impact, the mix of products there, we're going to be selling, will have an impact as well. The commodities market has been relatively benign and we'll see how that plays out over time. As you know now for several years, we've been managing gross margin, I would say, fairly well in spite of some difficult situations like the one with the strength of the dollar and we plan to continue to make a good trade off decisions between revenue and units and margins.
Tejas Gala:
Thank you, Amit. Can we have the next question, please?
Operator:
It will come from Kyle McNealy with Jefferies.
Kyle McNealy:
Hi, thanks a lot for the question. Our team in Asia recently, we did some survey work on smartphones in China. It showed that there is still a high proportion of the installed bases on 6, 7, 8 devices. I know you talked about the trade-in programs and promotions that you've been doing there. I wonder if you can tell us whether there is anything else that you're doing to get these customers in your latest technology? What made those customers be looking for and how should we think about when an upgrade cycle might come on more strongly there in China? Thanks.
Tim Cook:
Customers upgraded different at a different pace and I don't have in front of me the exact installed base data from China. But much like in other geographies, the upgrades have extended some, it extended some during the depths if you will of the pandemic in China and the rest of the world, and probably to some degree is happening still at this point. The key things that we can do is keep innovating, deliver product that people can't imagine, going through life about. And obviously keep rolling out these programs that makes the front-end purchase be much less, and this is things like the financing in the trade-in programs that you mentioned. And I do feel like those are going quite good in a number of geographies.
Kyle McNealy:
Okay, great, thanks. And one more if I may. Congrats again on the strong iPad and Mac results, that's really impressive. I guess the obvious question is, should we ever think about how much of that might be pull-forward and what might be the future upgrades in next few years? Anything else you can share on how you think about growth from here or whether there is a hangover period maybe after the back-to-school season or holiday season. That would be helpful. Thanks.
Tim Cook:
The installed base is growing and the new customer numbers that Luca went over in the aggregate are still very high in the close to 50% kind of range. And so, that to me, makes the -- bodes well for the future. There is clearly, as we had indicated, there is some amount of work from home and remote learning that do affect the results of Mac and iPad positively. They probably affect wearables and iPhone, the other direction. And -- but on Mac and iPad, these are productivity tools that people are using to stay engaged with their work or stay engaged with their school work. And we believe we're going to have a strong back to school season. Sitting here today, it certainly looks like that.
Tejas Gala:
Thank you, Kyle.
Kyle McNealy:
Great. Thanks very much.
Tejas Gala:
Can we have the next question, please?
Operator:
That will come from Cleveland Research's Ben Bollin.
Ben Bollin:
Good evening, everyone. Thanks for taking the question. Tim, I was hoping you could share a little bit about where you think channel inventory is? You talked about the tightness you saw exiting the June quarter for Mac and iPad. Interested, where you think inventory is across major product categories. And then I had a follow-up for Luca.
Tim Cook:
We usually -- we've gotten away from talking about channel inventories. But to give you a perspective sitting here looking at it, on iPhone the inventory is slightly less than it was a year ago and that's I'm saying that at a quarter end point, so at the end of Q3. And obviously iPad and Mac are constrained and so both of those are less than they were in the year ago quarter.
Ben Bollin:
Okay. And then, Luca, I'm interested, any color you could share about the impact COVID had on OpEx in the quarter, be it work from home, stipends, travel, other employee support costs. And also how the company is thinking about the longer-term opportunity of employees working remotely maybe more permanently many considerations and how that could influence the future OpEx? Thanks.
Luca Maestri:
Well, on the OpEx front, there are being obviously certain things that have been affected in terms of cost reductions. Obviously, travel, it is a perfect example. The number of meetings that we have internally, some of those costs have been reduced. We've also invested heavily in initiatives for example, we're really trying to help during a very difficult circumstances. For example, we have had a program for example where we match our employee donations, we made donations directly as a company around the world to many institutions and governments. On a net basis, I would say probably the cost have outweighed the savings both during the March and the June quarter, but we think it's absolutely the right thing to do. From an employee perspective, what we said so far is that here in the United States, in most -- the majority of our population will continue to work from home until the end of the year. And then we'll see, I mean, we've taken an approach that we try to understand how the virus is evolving over time. We've taken a very cautious approach of both with our corporate facilities and with our retail stores. I think what you've seen with retail stores is that we have reopened in number of geographies around the world. We've reopened here in the United States. We've had to re-close some of the stores yet here in the United States, as the number of cases has gone up. And we will continue to track how the virus is doing. And hopefully at some point, we're going to get to a point where there is a vaccine or there is a cure. And so we will make those decisions as we get more information.
Tejas Gala:
Thank you. Can we have the next question, please?
Operator:
That will be from Jeriel Ong with Deutsche Bank.
Jeriel Ong:
Yes, thank you so much. I have two questions as well. I'd like to focus on the gross margin expansion within the services line all-time record for the quarter. I'm just curious whether you think that will sustain, I understand within services is a pretty wide range of gross margins by business, and I'm wondering if that should continue to improve.
Tim Cook:
Well, as you've seen, obviously, we've had a sequential expansion in gross margin for services. And that was driven primarily by mix as you said, right. We have a very broad portfolio and depending on which one of the services does better than we have an impact on Services gross margins. We like the Services business because it is -- it's a recurring type of revenue and the margins are accretive to company margin. We did over 67% this quarter, but we want to offer very competitive services across the board and the same -- I think I'm going to make the same comments that I made on products. What matters to us is to be successful with everything that we do and provide great products and services to our customers. So the relative success of our products and services in the marketplace will drive to a certain extent with our margins are, that's the margins are a byproduct of our success in the marketplace.
Jeriel Ong:
Got it, really appreciate that. And I wanted to ask question on the Wearables segment. It seems to me that you're categorizing the Wearables business as maybe being a little bit impact from pandemic similar to the iPhones. And it's the first time that Wearables hasn't materially upsided and at least a while in recent memory. I guess the drivers of the Wearables being Watch and predominantly Watch and AirPods. What are your thoughts going forward on whether there is a little bit of pent-up demand perhaps that might resume ads that will get back to a more normalized environment?
Tim Cook:
I think on the Watch in particular is like the iPhone more affected by store closures, because people -- some people want to try on the Watch and see what it looks like, look at different band choices and those sorts of things. And so I think as stores closed, it puts more pressure on that. I was -- we did come out sort of the way we told you last quarter, we were going to come out from the color that we gave you. So we knew things would decelerate because of the closures. So we will end up being, we're very pleased with how we did. But the store closures definitely affect the wearables and the iPhone.
Tejas Gala:
Thank you, Jeriel.
Jeriel Ong:
Got it. Really appreciate that.
Tejas Gala:
Yes. Can we have the next question, please?
Operator:
That will come from Jim Suva with Citigroup.
Jim Suva:
Thank you very much. And I have two questions. I'll ask them at the same time and it's one for Tim and one for Luca. Tim, the coronavirus, your company has done a fantastic job at overcoming one of the hurdles. So congratulations to you. As you look forward, say to the Christmas holiday shopping season, and given the economic challenges around the world of virus, coronavirus and your product launches and things like that. Can you give me commentary maybe how this Christmas you're looking forward, to say, maybe some past cycles of Christmas? Because it just seems like it's a little bit different, but Apple is really showing a lot more strength coming into this Christmas than may be some of the past years. And then for Luca, I think you made a quick comment, Luca, that you mentioned something about a few weeks later, was Apple like iPhone, iPhone chips or product launches or maybe expand upon that. I know things are more difficult, but I didn't quite keep the commentary, it was in your prepared comments, we'll go about a few weeks late that let's just have a quick little blood. Thank you so much, gentlemen.
Tim Cook:
Yes, we take it one quarter at a time. And so, we'll give you color on the December quarter and October. Generally speaking, I think we need to see a vaccine or therapeutic or both. And there is some optimism around that and in that particular timeframe. And so, we'll see, I don't have any information that is publicly available there. But I think that would boost consumer confidence quite a bit if it begins to happen and I think that any kind of consumer style company would benefit from that.
Luca Maestri:
And Jim, on the iPhone, I said in my remarks that we launched a year ago, we launched the new iPhone in late September. So I was referring to the new product. And I said that this year, the supply of the new product will be a few weeks later than that.
Jim Suva:
Great. Congratulations to you and your entire organization and teams. Thank you so much.
Tim Cook:
Thanks so much.
Tejas Gala:
Thank you. Can we have the next question, please?
Operator:
That will come from Wamsi Mohan with Bank of America.
Wamsi Mohan:
Hi. Yes, thank you. I was wondering if you can maybe comment on the penetration of Apple Card users in the iOS installed base? And have you seen any change in the buying behavior of Apple Card users in terms of accelerating spend on more Apple products and services? Then I have a follow-on.
Tim Cook:
We saw changes in consumer spending as the shutdowns occurred and the store closures occurred, we could see that across the Card. It affected the categories that you would guess the most like travel and entertainment et cetera. But overall if you sort of pull the lens out on the Apple Card, we're very happy with the number of people that have Apple Card. We believe based on what we've heard that it's the fastest rollout in the history of credit cards and so we feel very good about that.
Wamsi Mohan:
Okay. Thanks, Tim. And as a follow-up, now that Apple has Apple Silicon for Macs. Would you ever consider monetizing this as a merchant silicon vendor or is this going to be forever for Apple use?
Tim Cook:
Well, I don't want to make a forever comment, but there are -- we are a product company and we love making the whole thing. And because if we can -- on the user experience in that way and with the goal of delighting the user. And that's the reason that we're doing the Apple Silicon is because we can envision some products that we can achieve with Apple Silicon that we couldn't achieve otherwise. And so that's how we look at it.
Wamsi Mohan:
Thanks, Tim.
Tejas Gala:
Thank you, Wamsi. A replay of today's call will be available for two-week on Apple podcasts as a webcast on apple.com/investor and via telephone. The numbers for the telephone replay are 888-203-1112 or 719-457-0820. Please enter confirmation code 2630782. These replays will be available by approximately 5:00 PM Pacific Time today. Members of the press with additional questions can contact Kristin Huguet at 408-974-2414. Financial analysts can contact me with additional questions at 669-227-2402. Thank you again for joining us.
Operator:
And again, that will conclude today's conference.
Operator:
Good day everyone. Welcome to the Apple Incorporated Second Quarter Fiscal Year 2020 Earnings Conference Call. Today’s call is being recorded. At this time for opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn the call over to Mr. Tejas Gala, Senior Manager, Corporate Finance and Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Tejas Gala:
Thank you. Good afternoon and thank you for joining us. Speaking first today is Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, and he will be followed by CFO, Luca Maestri. After that, we’ll open the call to questions from analysts. Please note that some of the information you’ll hear during our discussion today will consist of forward-looking statements, including without limitation those regarding revenue, gross margin, operating expenses, other income and expense, taxes, capital allocation and future business outlook including the potential impact of COVID-19 on the Company’s business and results of operations. Actual results or trends could differ materially from our forecast. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in Apple’s most recently filed periodic reports on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q and the Form 8-K filed with the SEC today, along with the associated press release. Apple assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements or information, which speaks as of their respective dates. I’d now like to turn the call over to Tim for introductory remarks.
Tim Cook:
Thanks, Tejas. Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. I hope you’re staying safe and well. Today Apple reports $58.3 billion in revenue, an all-time record for Services, and a quarterly record for Wearables, Home and Accessories. It was also a quarterly revenue record for Apple Retail powered by phenomenal growth in our online store. Amid the most challenging global environment in which we’ve ever operated our business, we’re proud to say that Apple grew during the quarter. But before we dive more deeply into the numbers, I want to speak just for a bit on COVID-19. This is something Apple has been contending with since January. And I think that how we have responded, what we have been inspired to do, tells an important story about Apple’s great durability as a business, and the enduring importance of our products in our customers’ lives. It also speaks to Apple’s unmatched capacity to be creative, to think always in terms of the long term and to forge ahead when others may feel an instinct to pull back. Before COVID-19 was on the horizon, we anticipated that Q2 was going to be a prolific and energetic period for Apple. And when the pandemic did strike, our teams not only succeeded in growing the business in introducing powerful new products, and in meeting our customers’ needs, but they also rose to the occasion in terms of meeting our broader obligations to the communities in which we live and work. Let’s look quickly across the business. At the same time that they were leaving no stone unturned to get our latest generation of devices manufactured and into our customers’ hands, our worldwide network of supply chain partners, logistics and operations folks in every part of the Company were also sourcing more than 30 million masks for frontline medical workers, ensuring they’re donated to places of greatest need in every region around the world. While our product teams were preparing to launch a new iPad Pro, Magic Keyboard, MacBook Air and the new iPhone SE, all of which have been very well received by reviewers and consumers alike, they were also working with our suppliers to design, test, manufacture and distribute more than 7.5 million face shields, and we continue to ship more than 1 million of these every week to the doctors, nurses and medical personnel on the frontlines. In a quarter where our Services teams achieved strong growth, which Luca will dig into in a minute, and which speaks to the real durability of our Services strategy, these teams were also putting COVID-19 front and center. As Apple News, reached 125 million monthly active users, we elevated trusted information from reliable sources through a special COVID-19 vertical. We let customers skip payments without incurring interest on Apple Card for March and April in light of financial hardship for many families. We worked with everyone from Oprah to Lady Gaga to inform, entertain and give back through Apple TV and services like FaceTime and Messages set new all-time records for daily volume during this quarter as users relied on their devices to stay connected in a new reality. In software, at the same time that our teams worked with great creativity and excitement as we prepare to deliver our first ever all online Worldwide Developers Conference later this quarter, they also worked with the same creativity and speed to put together our COVID-19 symptom checking website and app in partnership with the CDC. As of today, the app has been installed nearly 2 million times and the web tool has received over 3 million unique visits. And just this month, to accelerate contact tracing, we are launching a joint effort with Google to enable the use of Bluetooth technology to help governments and health agencies reduce the spread of the virus with user privacy and security central to the design. We paired these programmatic efforts with a broader strategy to get back where it’s needed most. We’ve made major corporate donations to response efforts around the world to support global citizens as well as a new fund for Americans experiencing food insecurity as a result of the crisis. When you tally these things up and consider our ongoing 2 to 1 match for employee donations, Apple’s contributions to the global response are significant, diverse, and a great source of pride for the whole chain. We’re also doing what we can to help our employees, their families, and by extension their communities stay safe and well by modifying our operations where appropriate. This extends of course to our retail employees, they are Apple’s face to our customers and an instrumental part of our business and we’re compensating them normally despite store closures. During a quarter where circumstances evolve by the hour, we have been gratified by the resilience and adaptability of our global supply chain. While we felt some temporary supply constraints in February, our operations team, suppliers and manufacturing partners have been safely returning to work and production was back at typical levels toward the end of March. At this time of social distance, of shuttered school and gathering places, of delayed plans and new ways of socializing, we have seen significant evidence that our products have taken a renewed importance for customers. Teachers and students around the world are relying on our technology to teach, learn, and stay connected with each other. We are in the process of deploying major orders of iPads to school systems working to keep learning going strong at a distance, including tens of thousands in Ontario, Canada; Glasgow, Scotland and Puerto Rico, a 100,000 to the city of Los Angeles and 350,000 to New York City, our largest educational iPad deployment ever. Since early March, we’ve seen unprecedented demand for a pro app from students, enthusiasts and creative professionals. These folks are keeping us all entertained and inspired as we stay at home. And to help them do it, we made Final Cut Pro X and Logic Pro X available for free for 90-days for everyone. And the reaction has been overwhelming, driving software downloads and usage to record levels. And doctors and medical professionals are making even greater use of Apple Watch and other health features to communicate with patients and to treat them safely from a distance when necessary. With new FDA guidance on non-invasive remote patient monitoring, for example, the ECG app on Apple Watch is increasingly being used to facilitate remote ECG measurements and recordings for telemedicine usage, reducing patient and healthcare provider contact and exposure. Many hospitals such as Geisinger Health System, NYU Langone Health, and Stanford Health Care are using apps on iPad and iPhone to support communication and video conferences between hospitalized patients and their care teams. This enables the care teams to keep a close watch on patients without entering isolation rooms, which helps to minimize exposure and reduces some of the need for personal protective equipment. Now, when you step back and tally all this up, when you consider all the ways COVID-19 has touched Apple, our customers and the way we work, this may not have been the quarter it could have been absent this pandemic, but I don't think I can recall a quarter where I've been prouder of what we do or how we do it. As I said at the outset, we achieved revenue of $58.3 billion and underneath that was product revenue of $45 billion. The performance of our product business had three very different phases during the March quarter. Based on Apple’s performance during the first five weeks of the quarter, we were confident we were headed toward a record second quarter at the very high end of our expectations. In the next five weeks of the quarter, as COVID-19 started impacting China, iPhone supply was temporarily affected, as well as demand for our products within China. This caused us to withdraw our revenue guidance in February. At that point, demand for our products outside of China was still strong and in line with our expectations. During the last three weeks of the quarter, as the virus spread globally and social distancing measures were put in place worldwide, including the closure of all our retail stores outside of Greater China on March 13th, and many channel partner points of sales around the world, we saw downward pressure on demand, particularly for iPhone and Wearables. Given the lack of visibility and uncertainly in the near term, we will not be issuing guidance for the coming quarter. Over the long term though, we have a high degree of confidence in the enduring strength of our business. Our global supply chain is profoundly durable and resilient. We have shown the consistent ability to meet and manage temporary supply challenges like those caused by COVID-19. We have continued to deliver innovative new products across multiple categories that appeal to a broad cross-section of customers, including the all-new iPhone SE, which achieved unmatched technological capacity at an incredible value. Our teams worldwide have tackled the complexities of this moment with unmatched creativity, good humor and dedication to our customers. For a company whose business is innovation, there are real upsides in periodically having to figure out how to do just about everything in a brand new way. Our long-running investment in our Services strategy is succeeding. This business is growing and is a reflection of our enduring large and growing installed base. We expect to meet our longstanding goal of doubling our fiscal 2016 Services revenue in 2020. We have always run Apple for the long term. We entered this period with unmatched financial strain, a robust cash position and our best product pipeline ever. Major investments, including our five-year commitment to contribute $350 billion to the economy here in the United States are moving forward full speed ahead. It’s in these moments that we set ourselves apart. We’ve always managed through difficult moments by doubling down and investing in the next generation of innovation. And that’s our strategy today. And so, while we can’t say for sure how many chapters are in this book, we can have confidence that the ending will be a good one. Apple will continue to do everything we can do to help the global response and to keep our customers learning, creating, sharing, and connecting so that life can remain as normal as it can during this challenging time. With that, I’ll hand things off to Luca.
Luca Maestri:
Thank you, Tim. Good afternoon, everyone. It has been a very different quarter than we were expecting when we last talked to you at the end of January. But, we could not be more proud of our Apple teams around the world, our role in supporting local communities and our partners throughout the value chain, and how resilient our business and financial performance has been during these challenging times. So, the revenue for the quarter was $58.3 billion, up 1% from a year ago, despite the extreme circumstances from the impact of COVID-19 and a headwind of a 100 basis points from foreign exchange. Products revenue was $45 billion, down 3%. After a very strong January, our performance was impacted particularly during the last three weeks of the quarter when lockdowns and point-of-sale closures increase due to COVID-19 spreading around the world and affected our product sales. However, on a demand basis, our performance was stronger than our reported results as we reduced iPhone channel inventory more than we did a year ago. Importantly, our installed base of active devices reached an all-time high in all of our geographic segments and all major product categories. Services revenue followed a different trend with very strong year-over-year growth of 17%. We set a new all-time revenue record of $13.3 billion with all-time records in many of our Services categories and in most countries we track. I’ll provide more details on this later. Company gross margin was 38.4%, flat sequentially with cost savings and mix shift towards Services offset by the seasonal loss of leverage. Products gross margin was 30.3%, decreasing 380 basis points sequentially due to loss of leverage and unfavorable mix. This drop was more pronounced than under normal circumstances due to the COVID-19 impact I mentioned earlier. Services gross margin was 65.4%, up 100 basis points sequentially, driven by favorable mix. Our reported tax rate for the quarter was 14.4%. This was lower than our 16.5% guidance due to onetime discreet items. Net income was $11.2 billion and earnings per share with $2.55, up 4%. Operating cash flow was very strong at $13.3 billion, an improvement of $2.2 billion over a year ago. Let me get into more detail for each of our revenue categories. iPhone revenue of $29 billion, declined 7% year-over-year as both iPhone supply and demand were affected by the impact of COVID-19 at some point during the quarter. On the supply side, we suffered from some temporary supply shortages during February, but we’ve been extremely pleased with the resilience and adaptability of our global supply chain, as well as its ability to get people back to work safely when circumstances allow. Our operations team and manufacturing partners put forth an extraordinary effort to restore production quickly, and we exited the quarter in a good supply position for most of our product lines. On the demand side, after very strong first five weeks, we saw the impact of COVID-19 affect demand in China for the next five weeks, and then more broadly around the world for the last three weeks of the quarter, when lockdowns and point-of-sale closures became more widespread in many countries. While we did see a slight elongation in our replacement cycle towards the end of the quarter, which we attribute to the widespread point-of-sale closures, our active installed base of iPhones has reached an all-time high. This speaks to the quality of our products and strength of our ecosystem. In fact, in the U.S., the latest survey of consumers from 451 Research indicates iPhone customer satisfaction of 99% for iPhone 11, 11 Pro and 11 Pro Max combined. Turning to Services. We set an all-time revenue record of $13.3 billion with strong performance across the board with all-time revenue records in the App Store, Apple Music, Video, cloud services, and our App Store search ad business. And we also set a March quarter record for AppleCare. Our new services, Apple TV Plus, Apple Arcade, Apple News Plus and Apple Card continue to add users, content and features while contributing to overall Services growth. As Tim mentioned, we’re well on our way to accomplishing our goal of doubling our fiscal ‘16 Services revenue during 2020. App Store revenue grew by strong double digits, thanks to robust customer demand for both in-app purchases and subscriptions. Our third-party subscription business grew across multiple categories and increased over 30% year-over-year, reaching a new all-time high. Our first party subscription services also continued to perform very well. Apple Music and cloud services, both set all-time revenue record and AppleCare set a March quarter record. Paid subscriptions for all three of these services were up strong double-digits. Customer engagement in our ecosystem continues to grow strongly, and the number of both transacting and paid accounts on our digital content stores reached a new all-time high during the March quarter. In particular, the number of paid accounts increased double digits in all of our geographic segments. We now have over 515 million paid subscriptions across the services on our platform, up 125 million from a year ago. On a sequential basis, paid subscriptions grew by over 35 million. This is the highest sequential growth we have ever experienced. With this momentum, we’re confident we will reach our increased target of 600 million paid subscriptions before the end of calendar 2020. Wearables, Home and Accessories established a new March quarter record with revenue of $6.3 billion, up 23% year-over-year with strong double digit performance across all five geographic segments. Our Wearables business is now the size of a Fortune 140 company, and we’re very excited by the many opportunities in front of us for this product category. For example, Apple Watch continues to expand its reach as over 75% of the customers purchasing Apple Watch around the world during the quarter were new to the product. Next, I’d like to talk about Mac and iPad. Mac revenue was $5.4 billion; iPad revenue was $4.4 billion. Towards the end of the quarter, we launched a brand new iPad Pro that includes a first in class LiDAR scanner with some really exciting augmented reality applications; and MacBook Air with significantly improved performance at a lower price. We’re very pleased with the strong customer interest for both products. Importantly, around half of the customers purchasing Macs and iPads around the world during the quarter were new to that product and the active installed base for both Mac and iPad reached a new all-time high. And the most recent surveys of consumers from 451 Research measured customer satisfaction at 95% for iPad and 96% for Mac. In the enterprise market businesses everywhere have been making the transition to working remotely. We’ve created content to assist our customers in this transition including an on-demand video learning series focused on topics like remote deployments of iPad and Mac and security. We’ve also realigned our own retail business and enterprise teams to provide timely and relevant support to customers as they navigate new work environments. Some of our largest customers offering Mac to employees such as IBM and SAP have been able to pivot quickly to allow employees to easily set up and secure their devices from home, benefiting from Apple Business Manager and zero-touch deployment. And we’ve seen countless examples of new projects of remote deployments implemented in just a few hours. Peloton for instance, worked with our New York teams to deploy an entire fleet of Macs overnight, so their team could work remotely. In essential sectors, such as grocery and financial services, we’ve seen organizations adopt our technology to better serve their customers safely. Leading grocers around the world, like Trader Joe’s, Woolworths, Lawson’s, Sainsbury’s, Lidl, and Carrefour offer Apple Pay so customers can use contactless payments. And as stores shift to become fulfillment centers for online orders, organizations are leveraging apps for remote shoppers and food delivery to reduce foot traffic. In banking, where safety and securities are a top priority, one way to protect company and client information is by providing corporate iOS devices to employees who use mobile phones daily as part of their jobs. As an example, Bank of America is purchasing tens of thousands of additional iOS devices for their workforce. Let me now turn to our cash position. First, I want to note that liquidity has not been an issue for us during these highly unusual financial market conditions. We have an extraordinarily strong balance sheet, very deep access to capital markets, and unmatched free cash flow generation. We ended the quarter with $193 billion in cash plus marketable securities, total debt of $110 billion. And as a result, net cash was $83 billion at the end of the quarter. We returned $22 billion to shareholders during the March quarter, including $18.5 billion through open market repurchases of 64.7 million Apple shares, and $3.4 billion in dividends and equivalents. Finally, as we move ahead into the June quarter, I’d like to provide some color on what we are seeing, which includes the types of forward-looking information that Tejas referred to at the beginning of the call. As Tim mentioned, given the lack of visibility and certainty in the near term, we will not be issuing guidance for the coming quarter. However, based on what we have seen in April, and how we think things might play out, I would like to provide some additional insight on headwinds and tailwinds we’re facing. From a foreign exchange standpoint, the U.S. dollar has appreciated recently against most currencies around the world. And as a result, we expect our revenue to be negatively impacted by more than $1.5 billion on a year-over-year basis. Our global supply chain is back, up and running. We are in a typical supply position, including our usual ramp associated with new products recently launched. These newly launched products, iPad Pro, MacBook Air, and iPhone SE have all received outstanding customer response, even during these extreme circumstances. On iPhone and Wearables, we expect a year-over-year revenue performance to worsen in the June quarter relative to the March quarter; on iPad and Mac, we expect the year-over-year revenue performance to improve in the June quarter. On Services, we are seeing two distinct trends. First, customers are actively engaging with our ecosystem and digital services, and we believe the very strong recent performance in the App Store, Video, Music, and cloud services will continue throughout the June quarter. Second, due to the overall reduced level of economic activity, due to the lockdowns around the world, services like AppleCare and advertising are being impacted. AppleCare is comprised of our product repair business and the warranty agreements with our customers, both of which have been obviously affected by store closures and reduced level of customer traffic. Advertising, which is comprised of third-party agreements, our App Store search ads, and Apple News ads has been impacted by overall economic weakness and uncertainty on when businesses will reopen. For gross margin, sequential headwinds include foreign exchange, the mix within products, and the seasonal loss of leverage on our product business. Foreign exchange will have a 70 basis points impact sequentially and 130 basis points impact year-over-year. Regarding product mix, keep in mind the commentary we provided at the revenue level. Sequential tailwinds include cost savings and the mix shift towards services. With regard to capital allocation, our approach remains unchanged. We continue to invest confidently in our future while also returning value to our shareholders. We are in the midst of developing our most exciting pipeline of products and services ever while contributing over $350 billion to the U.S. economy and expanding our footprint in many cities around the country over a five-year period. We also continue to believe that there is great value in our stock, and we are maintaining our target of reaching a net cash neutral position over time. As a testament to the confidence we have in our business today and into the future, our Board has authorized $50 billion for share repurchases in addition to the over $40 billion authorization remaining under the current share repurchase plan. Our Board has also authorized a 6% increase in our quarterly dividend and today declared a cash dividend of $0.82 per share of common stock, payable on May 14, 2020, to shareholders of record as of May 11, 2020. Finally, and most importantly, we are managing Apple for the long term, as we’ve always done. During uncertain times historically, we have continued to invest in the business and this remains our philosophy. We will continue to stay focused on what we do best, investing in our product and service pipeline, managing the business wisely, and taking care of our teams and believe we will come out from this stronger. With that, let’s open the call to questions.
Tejas Gala:
Thank you, Luca. We ask that you limit yourself to two questions. Operator, may have the first question, please?
Operator:
Yes. That will come from Shannon Cross, Cross Research.
Shannon Cross:
Thank you very much for taking my question, and I hope everyone is well. Tim, you talked about seeing some improvement in the second half of April. So, I was wondering if you could just talk maybe a bit more on the segment, a geographic basis, what you’re seeing and in the various regions that you’re selling in and what you’re hearing from your customers. And then, I have a follow-up. Thank you.
Tim Cook:
Sure, Shannon. If you look at -- I’ll start with China. If you look at what happened in China, we were having a really good January. The lockdown started there toward the end of January, as you know. February, we saw a steep decline in demand. We closed our stores in February. As the lockdown completed in mid-February, toward the second half of February, we begin to open stores. We opened on a staggered basis that took about 30 days until mid-March. And from a demand point of view, we saw then an improvement in March over February. And if you look at, kind of where we are today, we’ve seen further improvement in April as compared to March. And so, that’s China. If you look at the rest of the world, we were doing great in January, the first five weeks of the quarter. And we do believe that we were headed toward the sort of the top end of our expectations that we had talked to you about on the last call. The next five weeks were spent sort of reacting and getting the supply chain back up in full force and working through the sharp decline in China that I already talked about. The real thing for the rest of the world happened in March when the shelter-in-place orders went in and the work-from-home began. For those two, three weeks period, at the end of the quarter, we saw a sharp decline in demand. If you now step out into April and look at that, early April started like the end of March, but in the second half of April, we’ve seen an uptick across really across the board. It’s not just related to a certain geo or a certain product. We think, by looking at it, a part of it is due to just our new products, a part of it is due to the stimulus programs taking effect in April, and then a part of it is probably the consumer behavior of knowing this is going to go on for a little while longer and getting some devices and so forth lined up to work at home more. In particular for as I think Luca shared, we believe that iPad and Mac are going to improve on a year-over-year basis during this quarter, and that’s customers that are either taking online education or working remotely. So, complex answer to your question, but that’s what we’re seeing.
Shannon Cross:
Thank you. That was helpful. Luca, unless I missed it, you talked about various puts and takes in the quarter, but didn’t really discuss operating expenses. I know you mentioned some cost savings on the COGS line. I’m curious how you’re thinking about your spending and OpEx, given some of the macro challenges that you may be facing. Thank you.
Luca Maestri:
Yes. So, Shannon, as we said, we manage the Company for the long term, right? So, we know that the core of the business, the core of the Company is innovation and product and services development. So, we will continue to invest in our pipeline. We’re very excited about what we have in store. And so, we will continue to invest there. Obviously, we are aware of the environment and so, we will manage the SG&A portion of the company tightly. We are making new investments in the new services that we launched recently. As you know, we purchased the baseband activities from Intel. And obviously, we want to develop that technology because we consider it’s a core technology for us. And so, we will try to balance the need to continue to invest during difficult circumstances and the fact that we like to manage the business wisely.
Tejas Gala:
Thank you, Shannon. Can we have the next question, please?
Operator:
That will be from Wamsi Mohan from Bank of America.
Wamsi Mohan:
Yes. Thank you. Tim, I think I speak for everyone on the call that we’re all very appreciative of Apple’s contribution during this pandemic. We all appreciate it.
Tim Cook:
Thank you very much for that.
Wamsi Mohan:
Tim, in past downturns, we have not really seen Apple pull back from investing. And you as a company have largely maintained the product introduction cadence. But given these are unprecedented times and there are a lot of challenges associated with product development, during a time when you have a global footprint for such activities and unable to really do a lot of things in person, how should we think about the product development and introduction cadence as we go over the next several quarters? And I have a follow-up.
Tim Cook:
Well, we’re continuing to operate. And so, as you can tell, along with everything else going on, we were able to launch and ship the iPhone SE, the iPad Pro with the Magic Keyboard, and the MacBook Air. And so, the business continues and the new products are our lifeblood. And so, we’re continuing to work. Everybody’s getting used to the work-at-home. In some areas of the Company, people maybe even more productive, in some other areas they’re not as productive. And so, it’s mixed, depending upon what the roles are. But, as you can tell from what we did this quarter, despite the environment, we have our head down, are working because we know that our customers want the products that we’ve got. They’re even more important in these times.
Wamsi Mohan:
Thank you, Tim. As a follow-up, I know you’re doing a lot with both the Apple Card and financing plan for iPhones to get your products in the hands of customers. But, I was wondering, would you consider using the strength of your balance sheet maybe a little differently, structure maybe deferred payments or things like that, or do you think that there could be other steps like bundling that you will consider versus what you already currently do? Thank you.
Tim Cook:
Well, as you know, we launched the payment plan earlier on Apple Card for iPhone. We’re working on doing that for other products as well. And you’ll see something on that shortly. So, we’re very-focused on the affordability point. The trade-in programs also are fairly wide across the board and act as both something great for the environment, also something great from a way to get that entry price down. In terms of deferred payments, nothing to announce today. But, as you know, having access to the card, at least in the United States, gives us more degrees of freedom. And that is not using our balance sheet. But, we play a key role in deciding what kind of programs go with the card.
Tejas Gala:
Thanks, Wamsi. Can we have the next question, please?
Operator:
That will come from Morgan Stanley’s Katy Huberty.
Katy Huberty:
Thank you for the question. I hope the whole team is staying healthy and safe. Tim, I want to start on a longer term question. Where do you see structural changes on the back of this health crisis that might present opportunities for new revenue streams at Apple? And I’m particularly thinking about your past comments on health and augmented reality. But I’m sure there is even more areas of inspiration and creativity coming out of the company. And then, I have a follow-up.
Tim Cook:
I think, there are things from just a great reminder of how important our products are for remote work. And it’s pretty clear to me that where things will get a lot closer to normal than they are today, obviously. I think many people are finding that they can learn remotely. And so, I suspect that trend will accelerate some. I think that’s probably also true about working remotely in some areas and in some jobs. And so, I think we have significant solutions and products for all of those groups. On the health area, I gave some examples in my opening comments about the ECG being used on the Watch. You can bet that we’re looking at other areas in this. We were already doing that because we viewed that that area was a huge opportunity for the Company and a way for us to help a lot of people. And so, you will see us continue on that. I wouldn’t say that the health door opened wider. I would say, it was already opened fairly wide.
Katy Huberty:
Okay. And then, as a follow-up, the $50 billion share repurchase authorization is impressive in absolute terms, but it is a bit lower than the last couple of years. So, just any context around the thought process of landing on $50 billion. And then, related to that, you have one of the strongest balance sheets in the world. Does the current environment change your thinking at all around M&A opportunities?
Luca Maestri:
Let me answer that, Katy. First of all, on the buyback. As I said, in general, our approach to capital allocation has remained the same for the last several years and it’s not changing now. Keep in mind here, we’re talking about just the authorization, right? And when you look at our actual results at the end of every quarter, you see how much we actually do in terms of share repurchases. The $50 billion is in addition to over $40 billion that is still remaining from the past authorization that we’ve received from our Board, right? So it’s the total available or outstanding in terms of authorization is over $90. And as you look at our run rate during the last several years, you know that that is a very adequate amount. And as you know, we will provide an additional update a year from now. So, nothing really has changed there. And nothing has changed on our approach for M&A. We’ve been quite active over the last several years. We purchase companies on a very regular basis. We’re always looking for ways to accelerate our product roadmaps or fill gaps in our portfolio, both on the hardware side, on the software side, on the services side. So, we will continue to do that. And so, also on the M&A front, nothing has changed.
Tejas Gala:
Thanks, Katy. Can we have the next question, please?
Operator:
That will come from Amit Daryanani with Evercore.
Amit Daryanani:
Thanks for taking my question. I have two as well. I guess, first off on the channel inventory. I was hoping if you could talk about how did channel inventory look like in the March quarter, because it sounds like it may be below the historical ranges. And then, the discussion you had for June quarter performance of iPhones, what are you embedding from a channel building back inventory levels in that expectation.
Tim Cook:
Amit, it’s Tim. If you look at the iPhone channel inventory during Q2, the reduction of it was more than the reduction from the previous year. It’s not unusual that we reduce in Q2. In fact, if you look back, generally speaking, in the first half of the calendar year, we reduce channel inventories; during the second half of the calendar year, we generally raise channel inventories. That’s a seasonal thing. And sitting here today, I believe that will happen this year as well. So, hopefully, that answers your question. And by the way, we ended in a comfortable position. You could conclude from that that we were within a target range.
Amit Daryanani:
That’s really helpful. Maybe just for follow-up. Tim, I was hoping you could maybe talk a little bit about, how do you think about Apple’s manufacturing strategy and perhaps need for some diversity, especially given everything in the Company and everyone has gone through over the last 12 months, how do you think about that? And do you feel comfortable that the supply chain and the manufacturing base is well situated today to launch the traditional fall products that they used to get from Apple?
Tim Cook:
As you know, our supply chain is global. And so, our products are truly made everywhere. And I would focus on that versus focus on one element of the manufacturing process, which tends to get more visibility, which is the final assembly. We have some final assembly in the United States; we have final assembly in China as well. I think, you’d have to conclude, or at least I conclude that if you look at the shock to the supply chain that took place this quarter, for it to come back up so quickly really demonstrates that it’s durable and resilient. And so, I feel good about where we are. That said, we’re always looking at tweaks. And it’s just not something we talk about, because if we view it as confidential and competitive information. And so, we will look at the -- as we get out of this totally, we will look to see what we learned and what we should change.
Tejas Gala:
Thank you, Amit. Can we have the next question, please?
Operator:
We’ll hear from Jeriel Ong with Deutsche Bank
Jeriel Ong:
Hi, guys. Thanks for letting me ask a couple of questions. So, I want to focus my question on Services. The segment was solid in the quarter despite overall macro weakness. I can kind of see the logic behind it being strong despite product weakness overall. As you kind of look at the rest of the year, do you think that sustains or at some point does the macro impacts worldwide impact the Services line?
Luca Maestri:
Jeriel, let me take that one. We typically don’t give a lot of specifics about our categories. But I’ve said, as we look into the June quarter, we see two distinct trends in our services business overall. Our ecosystem is very strong. Our customers are very engaged. We are continuing to grow double digits, the number of transacting accounts and paid accounts. And so, we expect our digital services to continue at the same level of performance that we have seen during the March quarter. And that includes the App Store, of course, our video business, our music business, cloud services. So, we expect all these businesses to continue to grow very strongly. Given the overall economic environment, the level of demand right now, there are two businesses that we believe are going to be impacted during the June quarter. One of them is AppleCare. AppleCare is essentially comprised of our product repair business and the warranty agreements that we signed with our customers when they purchase our devices. Both these businesses have been affected obviously by the store closures. And not only our retail stores, but also our partners points of sale, and obviously, the reduced level of customer traffic because of the social distancing measures. Right? And we do expect AppleCare to be affected during the during the June quarter. The other business, which we think is going to be impacted by the overall economic weakness and the uncertainty on when businesses will reopen is advertising, which is the sum of our advertising business on the App Store, on Apple News, and the third party agreements that we have on the advertising front. So, these are two things that during the June quarter will create a headwind for the Services business.
Jeriel Ong:
Got it. I appreciate that. My second question is about the overall purchasing decisions the consumers are making. So far, through April, have you seen increased perhaps downtick across your product line? So for example, somebody might have shift maybe toward the lower end of the storage mix of certain products. And do you expect that going forward, as unemployment uptick and macro impacts kind of layer on through the rest of ‘20? Thanks.
Tim Cook:
I haven’t seen what you’re asking. No. I have seen a strong customer response to iPhone SE, which is our most affordable iPhone. But it appears that those customers are primarily coming from wanting a smaller form factor with the latest technology, or coming over from it from Android. So, those are the two principal kind of segments versus somebody buying down, as you’re talking about it. We’ve also seen -- we launched the iPad Pro in the midst of all of this and the reception there has also been incredibly good. And that’s obviously our top of the line iPad. And so, I’m not seeing what you’re alluding to, at least at this point.
Tejas Gala:
Thanks, Jeriel. Can we have the next question, please.
Operator:
That will be from JP Morgan’s Samik Chatterjee.
Samik Chatterjee:
Hi. Thanks for taking my question. If I can just start with a question on kind of what you’re seeing in China. You mentioned going to the pickup in activity. But, is that driven by more kind of footfall in the stores, or what’ve you seen relative to online activity, and how much of this recovery is being driven online? Any thoughts on that, please?
Tim Cook:
Yes. What we saw in China for the full quarter -- and I’ll speak about mainland China because I think that’s the source of your question. We saw strong results in iPad and in Wearables, and in Services. And if you look up underneath the full quarter, we saw a strong January, and then a significantly reduced demand in February as the shelter-in-place orders and the lockdowns went into effect in China and the stores closed. And then, in March, as stores reopened, the recovery began. And then, we’ve seen further recovery in April. Where that goes, we will see. But that’s kind of what we’ve seen so far there. To your question about store traffic, store traffic is obviously up from where it was in February, but it is not back to where it was pre the lockdown. There has been, however, more move to online. And as I mentioned earlier in my remarks, it’s pretty phenomenal actually. Retail had a quarterly record for us during the quarter. And that’s despite stores being closed for the three-week period around the world. And ex China -- and then China was closed prior to that three weeks. And that’s partly because the online store had such a phenomenal quarter, and that included in China, but it was also other regions as well. So, there is definitely a move. And whether that’s a permanent shift, I would hesitate to go that far, because I think people like to be out and about. They just know that now is not the time to do that.
Samik Chatterjee:
If I can just follow up on your previous comment about the strong demand you’re seeing for iPhone SE. Just given the price point, I’m wondering if you are expecting any change in terms of the geographic mix of where the demand comes from relative to typically what do you see for other iPhones from the line up on, just giving the lower price point?
Tim Cook:
I think, it plays in every geo, but I would expect to see it doing even better in areas where the median incomes are less. And so, we’ll see how that plays out. And I expect some fair number of people switching over to iOS. So, it’s an unbelievable offer. It’s, if you will, the engine of our top phones in a very affordable package. And I think -- and it’s faster than the fastest Android phones. And so, it’s an exceptional value.
Tejas Gala:
Thank you. Can we have the next question, please?
Operator:
Certainly. Our last question today will be from Chris Caso with Raymond James.
Chris Caso:
Yes. Thank you. I wanted to follow up with another question on iPhone SE and the decision to bring it back and where it sits within the total iPhone strategy. And I guess, coupled with the fact that iPhone 11, you made the decision to bring that at a lower price point. What does that tell us with respect to your approach to iPhone pricing and flexibility? Is this helping to add users and kind of bring people into the ecosystem? And if so, what does that imply for gross margins?
Tim Cook:
Chris, we’ve always been about delivering the best product at a good price. And that fundamental strategy has not changed at all. As you know, we did have an SE for a while. It’s great to bring it back. It was a beloved product. And so, I wouldn’t read anything into that other than we want to give people the best deal that we can while making the best product.
Chris Caso:
Okay. As a follow-up -- the follow-up question is on commodity pricing. And I think, you had expected to see some commodity price declines through the March quarter. If you could talk about what you expect, as you go through the year, perhaps in this new environment, and again, whether that turns into a challenge or a headwind for gross margins as you go into the second half?
Tim Cook:
Yes. For March, Chris, we saw NAND pricing increase slightly while DRAM and displays and the other commodities declined. For the June quarter, we would expect NAND and DRAM pricing to remain at this historically low level, while displays and most other commodity prices we expect to decline.
Tejas Gala:
Thank you, Chris. A replay of today’s call will be available for two weeks on Apple Podcasts as a webcast on apple.com/investor and via telephone. The numbers for the telephone replay are 8888-203-1112 or 719-457-0820. Please enter a confirmation code 3229513. These replays will be available by approximately 5 pm Pacific Time today. Members of the press with additional questions can contact Kristin Huguet at 408-974-2414. Financial analysts can contact me with additional questions at 669-227-2402. Thank you again for joining us.
Operator:
And that does conclude today’s conference. Thank you all for joining us today.
Operator:
Good day, everyone. Welcome to the Apple Incorporated First Quarter Fiscal Year 2020 Earnings Conference Call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time for opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn the call over to Tejas Gala, Senior Analyst, Corporate Finance and Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Tejas Gala:
Thank you. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us. Speaking first today is Apple's CEO, Tim Cook, and he'll be followed by CFO, Luca Maestri. After that, we'll open the call to questions from analysts. Please note that some of the information you'll hear during our discussion today will consist of forward-looking statements, including without limitation, those regarding revenue, gross margin, operating expenses, other income and expenses, taxes, capital allocation and future business outlook. Actual results or trends could differ materially from our forecast. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in Apple's most recently filed periodic reports on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q and the Form 8-K filed with the SEC today, along with the associated press release. Apple assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements or information, which speaks as of their respective dates. I'd now like to turn the call over to Tim for introductory remarks.
Tim Cook:
Thanks, Tejas. Good afternoon, and thanks to all of you for joining us. We're thrilled to report Apple's biggest quarter ever, which set new all-time records in both revenue and earnings. We generated revenue of $91.8 billion, which is above the high-end of our guidance range, with revenue growth accelerating for the third consecutive quarter. Geographically, we set all-time records in the Americas, Europe and rest of Asia Specific and saw Greater China return to growth. Our record performance was fueled by iPhone where December quarter revenue was up 8% year-over-year and by our fifth consecutive quarter of double-digit growth outside of iPhone including a new all-time record for services and another blowout quarter for Wearables. Our active installed base of devices has now surpassed 1.5 billion, up over 100 million in the last 12 months alone, reaching a new all-time high for each of our main product categories and geographic segments. Not only is our large and growing installed base a powerful testament to the satisfaction, engagement and loyalty of our customers, but it's also fueling our growth across the board, particularly in services. Let’s take each category one by one. On iPhone, revenue in the December quarter was $56 billion, again that’s up 8% over a year ago, thanks to the exceptional demand for the iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 11 Pro Max. In fact, iPhone 11 was our top-selling model every week during the December quarter and the three new models were our three most popular iPhones. We had double-digit growth in many developed markets, including the U.S., the UK, France and Singapore, and also grew double digits in emerging markets led by strong performances in Brazil, Mainland China, India, Thailand, and Turkey. These new models are by far the best iPhones we've ever shipped with advance technologies and unprecedented leap in battery life to easily get through the day and our best-in-class camera experience. We have been wild with the photos customers have shared in our all-new Night Mode photo challenge this month. Turning to services. Q1 revenue reached $12.7 billion, an all-time record, growing 17% over last year. Once again, we saw double-digit growth in all five of our geographic segments and established new all-time records from multiple categories including cloud services, music, payment services and our App Store search ad business, as well as setting a December quarter record for the App Store and AppleCare. 2019 was a historic year for our services business, and I’d like to touch on some highlights. For the App Store, 2020 started off strong with customers spending a new single day record $386 million on New Year's Day alone, a 20% increase over last year. Apple Arcade, our new game subscription service has been fast off the blocks with a catalog of over 100 new and exclusive games you won’t find anywhere else, all playable across Apple devices with new games and expansions added every month. Apple TV+ is off to a rousing start, and I want to congratulate the entire team at The Morning Show for their multiple Golden Globe nomination. Jennifer Aniston on her Screen Actors Guild award and Billy Crudup on his Critics Choice award. We continue to focus on telling stories that matter, like Little America, which recently premiered to widespread critical acclaim with much more great content still to come. Apple News now draws over 100 million monthly active users in the U.S., UK, Australia and Canada, and provides a curated and personalized experience using on-device intelligence to recommend stories. Apple News+ continues to add new titles, offering subscribers seamless access to the world’s top publications across all of their devices. For Apple Pay, revenue and transactions more than doubled year-over-year with the run rate exceeding 15 billion transactions a year. Apple Pay transit support expanded with customers paying for journeys on transport for London more easily with Apple Pay Express Transit. And in spring of 2020, iPhone and Apple Watch customers will be able to simply tap to ride trains and buses in even more cities including Shenzhen and Guangzhou. We are thrilled with the continued growth at Apple Card. And last month, the customers began using Apple Card monthly installments at Apple retail and online to purchase new iPhones and pay for them over 24 months. We see great promise for these recently launched services, and we're optimistic about what we've got in the pipeline for each of them. Now, turning to Wearables. We had another incredible quarter, setting an all-time record in virtually every market we track around the world, and this product category is now the size of a Fortune 150 company. Demand for AirPods continues to be phenomenal, particularly for our recently launched AirPods Pro, our new addition to the AirPods family that features active noise cancellation. Apple Watch had a great start to fiscal 2020, setting an all-time revenue record during the quarter. It continues to have a profound impact on our customers’ lives and it continues to further its reach as over 75% of the customers purchasing Apple Watch during the quarter were new to Apple Watch. Both AirPods and Apple Watch were must have holiday gifts, helping drive unprecedented results for the category, even as we face supply constraints for Apple Watch Series 3 and AirPods Pro. Mac and iPad generated $7.2 billion and $6 billion in revenue, respectively, and the high level of customer satisfaction and loyalty for both products drove the active installed base of both Mac and iPad to new records in all geographic segments. For iPad, we saw growth in key emerging markets like Mexico, India, Turkey, Poland, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam, with our current line-up of iPad Pro, iPad Air, iPad Mini and iPad, along with the new iPadOS will give the customers an unparalleled tablet experience integrating hardware, software and services in a way that only Apple can. This was also a very exciting quarter for the Mac as we launched our most powerful notebook ever. The 16-inch MacBook Pro, as well as Mac Pro and Pro Display XDR, the most powerful tools Apple has ever put into hands of Pros. And we’ve already seen a strong response from the Pro community from developers, photographers and music producers to filmmakers and scientists who rely on the Mac to create their life’s best work. We also want to take a moment to congratulate all the Grammy winning and nominated artists this past weekend who rely on Logic Pro 10 and the Mac to create incredible music we all love. I want to call out and celebrate the exceptional work of our retail and online teams. This quarter, we opened a beautiful new store in Kawasaki, Japan. And exciting things are taking place inside each and every store. Thanks in part to a doubling in iPhone trade-ins versus last year, our retail and online stores set an all-time record and delivered strong double-digit growth in iPhone. We see a very bright future for these efforts and we continue to innovate to ensure that everyone who visits an Apple retail location has a great experience. We began 2020 with our greatest product line-up ever and we are only deepening our commitment to do our part to make the world a better place. In November, we released a completely redesigned Everyone Can Code curriculum to help introduce more elementary and middle school students to the world of coding. The new curriculum includes even more resources for teachers, a brand new guide for students and updates Swift Coding Club materials. Today, millions of students in more than 5,000 schools worldwide use Everyone Can Code curriculum to bring their ideas to life and develop important skills, including creativity, collaboration, and problem-solving. November also saw the launch of our new research app, the latest in our ongoing effort to put the future of health in the hands of every user. Customers in the U.S. can enroll in three landmark multiyear health studies that we’re undertaking with leading academic and research institutions. The Apple Women's Health Study, the Apple Heart And Movement Study and the Hearing Study, as in everything we do, we build user privacy into the research app from the ground up. This quarter we also announced a $2.5 billion plan to help address the housing availability and affording crisis in our home state of California. We feel a great responsibility to help the region we have always called home stay vibrant and to ensure that it remains a great place for everyone to live and raise a family, including those who do so much to serve the community, like firefighters and teachers. In much more recent news, we’re closely following the development of the coronavirus. We're donating two groups that are working to contain the outbreak, we're working closely with our Apple team members and partners in the affected areas, and our thoughts are with all of those affected across the region. As we close the books on a record-breaking December quarter, we are already well underway on some new and exciting developments for the future. Apple’s strength will always be its boundless creativity and innovation, and this year will be no different. But for now, for more details on the results, I would like to turn the call over to Luca.
Luca Maestri:
Thank you, Tim. Good afternoon, everyone. Our business and financial performance in the December quarter were exceptional as we set new all-time records for revenue, net income and earnings per share. Revenue for the quarter was $91.8 billion, up $7.5 billion or 9% from a year ago, in spite of a $1 billion headwind from foreign exchange. Geographically, we established all-time revenue records in many major developed and emerging markets including, among others, the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Brazil, the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam. Products revenue was $79.1 billion, up 8% as iPhone returned to growth, and we had incredibly strong results in Wearables where we set all-time records for both Apple Watch and AirPods. Services revenue grew 17% to a new all-time record, $12.7 billion with double-digit growth in every geographic segment and new all-time records across our portfolio. Company gross margin was 38.4%, up 40 basis points sequentially, driven by leverage from higher revenue, despite of a negative 60 basis-point impact from foreign exchange. Products gross margin was 34.2%, up 260 basis points sequentially, thanks to leverage and favorable mix. Services gross margin was 64.4%, up 30 basis points sequentially, driven by favorable mix. Our reported tax rate for the quarter was 14.2%. Before discrete items, the rate was 16.5%, exactly in line with our guidance. A favorable one-time item impacted the rate by 230 basis points. Net income was an all-time record of $22.2 billion, up $2.3 billion or 11% over last year. Diluted EPS was also an all-time record at $4.99, up 19% and operating cash flow was a very strong $30.5 billion, an improvement of $3.8 billion over a year ago. Let me get into more detail for each of our revenue categories. iPhone revenue of $56 billion grew 8% year-over-year, as we saw a great customer response to the launch of our newest iPhones. We set all-time revenue records in several countries, including the U.S. Mexico, the UK, France, Spain, Poland, Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam. Our active installed base of iPhones has reached an all-time high and is growing in each of our geographic segments. In the U.S., the latest survey of consumers from 451 Research indicates iPhone customer satisfaction of 98% for iPhone 11, 11 Pro and 11 Pro Max combined. Among business buyers planning to purchase smartphones in the next quarter, 84% plan to purchase iPhones. Turning to services. We set an all-time revenue record of $12.7 billion with double-digit growth in all of our five geographic segments. As Tim mentioned, we established new all-time records for Apple Music, cloud services, payment services and our App Store search ad business and December quarter records for the App Store and AppleCare. We are well on our way to accomplishing our goal of doubling our fiscal year ‘16 services revenue during 2020. We've actually already reached that goal on a run-rate basis with the results of the December quarter. Customer engagement in our ecosystem continues to grow and the number of both, transacting and paid accounts on our digital content stores reached a new all-time high with paid accounts growing double digits in all of our geographic segments. We now have over 480 million paid subscriptions across the services on our platform, up 120 million from a year ago. And at this point, we expect to hit our goal of surpassing the 500 million mark already during the March quarter. Given the tremendous momentum we're experiencing across our services offerings, we're increasing our target for paid subscriptions and aim to reach 600 million before the end of calendar 2020. App Store revenue grew strong double digits, thanks to robust customer demand for both in-app purchases and subscriptions. Our third-party subscription business grew across multiple categories and increased almost 40% year-over-year. Our first-party subscription services also continued to perform extremely well. Apple Music set an all-time revenue record, offering a catalog of over 60 million songs to our customers. iCloud also generated an all-time revenue record, growing very-strong double digits while offering our customers a safe, secure and seamless experience across all their devices. It was a December quarter record for AppleCare, thanks to strong service agreement attach rates and expanded distribution, many of our partners have come to appreciate the strength of the AppleCare brand and our ability to deliver the very-best service and support in the world. That value resonates with both our partners and our customers, and we are very happy to see that quality of experience delivered to more and more of our users. Next, I’d like to talk about Mac and iPad. Mac revenue was $7.2 billion and iPad revenue was $6 billion. Both products had a difficult year-over-year comparison due to the launches of MacBook Air here, Mac mini and iPad Pro during the December quarter a year ago and the subsequent channels fill. Despite the tough compare, on a demand basis, our performance for both Mac and iPad was around even to last year. Importantly, around half of the customers purchasing Macs and iPads around the world during the quarter, were new to that product. And the active installed base of both Mac and iPad reached a new all-time high. The most recent surveys from 451 Research measured a 93% customer satisfaction rating for iPad from consumers and 92% from businesses, and among both consumers and businesses were planning to purchase tablets in the March quarter 78% plan to purchase iPads. Wearables, home and accessories established a new all-time record with revenue of $10 billion, up 37% year-over-year with very strong double-digit performance across all five geographic segments and growth across Wearables, accessories and home. We set all-time records for Wearables in virtually every market we track, even as we experience some product shortages due to very strong customer demand for both Apple Watch and AirPods during the quarter. We also continued to see strong demand for our products in the enterprise market as our technology solutions enable businesses to do their best work. 100% of Fortune 500 companies in the healthcare sector use Apple technology in areas such as patient experience, clinical communications and nursing workflows, and we're also seeing smaller companies in this sector drive innovation with our technology and apps. One example is Gauss Surgical, which uses Core ML in iOS to more accurately estimate blood loss during child birth and surgery. This helps clinicians have more complete and timely information on whether a patient needs an intervention, which can impact both, clinical outcomes and costs. Another example is Butterfly Network, a medical imaging company, which makes handheld ultrasound device that connects to iPhone or iPad to enable clinicians to take an ultrasound anywhere at a cost that is dramatically lower than other solutions in the market today. Let me now turn to our cash positions. We ended the quarter with $207 billion in cash plus marketable securities. We issued a 2 billion euro-denominated green bond, retired $1 billion of maturing debt and reduced commercial paper by $1 billion during the quarter, leaving us with total debt of $108 billion. As a result, net cash was $99 billion at the end of the quarter and we maintained our target of reaching a net cash neutral position over time. We returned nearly $25 billion to shareholders during the December quarter. We began a $10 billion accelerated share repurchase program in November, resulting in the initial delivery and retirement of 30.4 million shares. We also repurchased 40 million Apple shares for $10 billion, through open market transactions, and we paid $3.5 billion in dividends and equivalents. As we have done for the last several years, we would share our plans for the next phase of our capital return program when we report results for the March quarter. Finally, as we move ahead into the March quarter, I'd like to review our outlook, which includes the types of forward-looking information that Tejas referred to at the beginning of the call. We expect revenue to be between $63 billion and $67 billion. The wider than usual revenue range comprehends uncertainty related to the recently unfolding public health situation in China. We expect gross margin to be between 38% and 39%. We expect OpEx to be between $9.6 billion and $9.7 billion. We expect OI&E to be about $250 million and we expect the tax rate to be about 16.5%. Also today, our Board of Directors has declared a cash dividend of $0.77 per share of common stock, payable on February 13, 2020 to shareholders of record as of February 10, 2020. With that, let's open the call to questions.
Tejas Gala:
Thank you, Luca. We ask that you limit yourself to two questions. Operator, may have the first question, please?
Operator:
Yes. That will be from Amit Daryanani with Evercore.
Amit Daryanani:
Thanks a lot. Good afternoon, guys. I guess, first one for me on Wearables, fairly impressive to see, it’s already a $10 billion business for you guys. Could you just touch on the growth that you are seeing on the Wearables side? How much the growth you think is coming from first time buyers of AirPods or Apple Watch versus folks that seem to be just upgrading the products that they have, because it looks to us the adoption rate is fairly low in your installed base, so there should be a long run way, but love to just understand how you see the growth divided between those two buckets.
Tim Cook:
Yes. Amit, it’s Tim. If you look at the Apple, the Wearables as a category within the Wearables, Home and Accessories revenue, Wearables grew 44%. So, it was very strong, as you say. Both Apple Watch and AirPods did very well in terms of collecting new customers. Apple Watch in particular, 75% of the customers are new to the Apple Watch. And so, it’s still very much a selling to new customers at this point.
Amit Daryanani:
Perfect. And I guess, Luca, you could just touch on gross margins. The March quarter guide I think implies gross margin of flat to actually up 10, 15 basis point. It's rare for you guys to actually guide gross margins up in March I think because you have a fairly high seasonal sales deleverage happening. So, what are the offsets that's enabling what looks like a better than seasonal guide for gross margins?
Luca Maestri:
Yes. That's right, Amit. It’s about flat sequentially, and by the way significantly higher on a year-over-year basis. But on a sequential basis, you are right, on one side we got the loss of leverage from the usual seasonality but we expect that that loss of leverage will be offset by better mix and cost savings.
Tejas Gala:
Thank you, Amit. Can we have the next question, please?
Operator:
That will come from Tom Forte with D.A Davidson.
Tom Forte:
So, congrats on the launch of Apple TV+. I wanted to know internally, how you're getting success, is it truly on critical acclaim, is it on number of consumers that are using the service, contribution and service revenue, et cetera, et cetera? Thank you.
Tim Cook:
Hey, Tom, it’s Tim. We are primarily measuring our sales on the number of subscribers. As you can tell from the way that we launched the product, we started with a very aggressive price at $4.99. And in addition to that we have our bundle where if you buy pretty much any device, you’re getting a year for free. And so, we're very focused on subscribers. That said, the product itself is about storytelling. And we think if we do that well, then we will find that there will be some number of those that will also be critical acclaimed. And we're seeing that with the morning show, we're seeing that with Little America and others.
Tom Forte:
Great. And then, my second question is I think you indicated that last month we started offering consumers the ability to use their Apple Card to buy an iPhone on an installment basis. Can you talk about how that’s had an impact on your unit sales for iPhones?
Tim Cook:
So, retail stores did fantastic on iPhone, very strong double-digit growth in iPhone from a year-over-year point of view. And one of the factors that enabled that was the -- getting to a monthly payments on the Apple Card to make it very simple. Of course, that’s U.S. only at this point, but the U.S. is very key market for us. And so, it was an important part of it.
Tejas Gala:
Thank you, Tom. Can we have the next question, please?
Operator:
That will come from Shannon Cross, Cross Research.
Shannon Cross:
Thank you very much. I wanted to go back to revisit China. Tim, can you talk about what you are seeing in the region -- what you were seeing in the region prior to the health crisis? And then, can you also update us a bit in terms of your manufacturing strategy, dual-sourcing, geographic diversification, even with the region, just so we have some idea of how this will be managed? Thank you.
Tim Cook:
Yes. Thanks,, Shannon. In terms of China, the results from last quarter, and then I will get into the coronavirus in a second. For the results from last quarter, we had double-digit growth for iPhone in Mainland China. So, that was an important change from where we've been running. We also had double-digit growth in services in Mainland China and we had extremely strong double-digit on Wearables. And so, really, there were a number of different factors in terms of the things that customers are responding to. iPhone 11 is doing well there, the product has been very well-received with its battery life and the camera is unbelievable. We also, as you probably know, have certain trading programs going and financing programs. These have also been well received. And so, it’s sort of the sum of all of this. And we are tracking quite a large percentage of new customers on products like the Mac. Three quarters of the customers buying a Mac in China are new, and nearly two-thirds of the customers buying iPad are new. So, it was a terrific quarter. We had three of the top four selling smartphones in urban China according to Kantar. In terms of the coronavirus, as I mentioned earlier, first and foremost, our thoughts are with all of those that are affected across the region. And as I've mentioned, we’re donating to groups that are working to contain the outbreak. We are also working very closely with our team and our partners in the affected areas, and we have limited travel to business critical situations as of last week. The situation is emerging and we're still gathering lots of data points and monitoring it very closely. As Luca had mentioned, we have a wider than usual revenue range for the second quarter due to the greater uncertainty. I'll talk about supply chain and customer demand some to give you some color. With respect to the supply chain, we do have some suppliers in the Wuhan area. All of these suppliers, they’re our ultimate sources, and we’re obviously working on mitigation plans to make up any expected production loss. We've factored best thinking and the guidance that we've provided you. With respect to supply sources that are outside the Wuhan area, the impact is less clear at this time. The reopening of those factories after Chinese New Year has been moved from the end of this month to February 10th, depending upon the supplier location, and we've attempted to account for this delayed start up through our larger range of outcomes that Luca mentioned earlier. With respect to customer demand and sales, we've currently closed one of our retail stores and a number of channel partners have also closed their store fronts. Many of the stores that remain opened have also reduced operating hours. We're taking additional precautions and frequently deep-cleaning our stores as well as conducting temperature checks for employees. While our sales within the Wuhan area itself are small, retail traffic has also been impacted outside of this area, across the country in the last few days. And again, we have attempted to account for this in our guidance range that we’ve provided you. I hope that gets you some color.
Shannon Cross:
Yes. That was very helpful. Luca, maybe if you could just touch on from a gross margin from perspective, the commodity pricing environment and availability. Obviously, there has been some movement on DRAM and NAND. So, if you can talk about how you are thinking about inventory levels and managing that going forward? Thank you.
Luca Maestri:
Yes. As I said earlier to the question around the gross margin guidance for the March quarter, we are seeing a benign commodity environment. Most commodities have been declining during the December quarter, and we expect the same to happen in the March quarter. As always, and as you probably know, we look at the way these prices move and at times when we feel it’s appropriate we buy certain commodities in advance. And so, we will continue that practice as we go through the year.
Tejas Gala:
Thank you, Shannon. Can we have the next question, please?
Operator:
That will come from Katy Huberty from Morgan Stanley.
Katy Huberty:
Luca, can you address the modest slowdown in services growth this quarter, 17% versus 18% in September? Which services categories accelerated versus where did you see some deceleration in the growth?
Luca Maestri:
Katy, let me make a couple of comments here. The 17% during the December quarter, we look at it against our fiscal year ‘19 growth rate, which was 16%. So, we feel very good about the results for the December quarter. As Tim and I mentioned during our prepared remarks, it was very broad-based growth because we grew double digits in services across all the five geographies. We set all-time records for many, many categories, music, cloud, search ads, payment services, December records for the App Store and the AppleCare. If you remember, we had set two goals for ourselves in the services segment. The first, we set a goal to double our fiscal ‘16 revenue during 2020. And when we look at it on a run rate basis, we’ve already achieved that goal with the results of the December quarter. We also set a goal to pass 500 million paid subscriptions during 2020. And given that we are already at 480 at the end of December, we expect to pass that mark during the March quarter. So, now, we are setting a new target for ourselves for paid subscriptions. And so, we are now aiming to reach 600 million before the end of calendar 2020. So, we feel that the services business is growing incredibly well. Of course, we have launched new services very recently. For example, Apple TV+ just launched in November. And so, while these services did not have a material impact in our December quarter results, we expect that over time they start contributing to the growth of the services business. But, we feel very happy with the 17%.
Katy Huberty:
Thank you for that. Tim, as a follow-up, at some point in the future, Apple will launch a 5G iPhone. How big of a demand driver do you view 5G capability in a handset? And what's your view as to what the killer app will be from a consumer perspective?
Tim Cook:
Sorry. We don’t comment on future products. And so, I will try to sidestep a bit. With respect to 5G, I think it’s -- we're in the early innings of its deployment on a global basis. We obviously couldn’t be prouder of our lineup and are very excited about our pipeline as well and wouldn’t trade our position for anybody.
Tejas Gala:
Thanks, Katie. Can we have the next question, please?
Operator:
We’ll hear from Kyle McNealy with Jefferies.
Kyle McNealy:
So, we were seeing some signs of new spectrum being deployed for 5G deployments and even additional 4G capacity, and it’s already having a positive impact for handset upgrades to use that new capacity? Do you get the sense that wireless carriers are getting more incentivize to upgrade handsets to get a leverage out of these new network investments? How much might this be helping, and do you think it will continue to accelerate?
Tim Cook:
I think that we’ve had some great partners, not only in the U.S. but also around the world that are really helpful this quarter, as partners. And so, I think that probably a part of that is the level of investments they have. And then, a part of it is probably making sure that those customer stick with them in a environment where there's a lot of trading back and forth. So, I am optimistic that it will continue.
Kyle McNealy:
Okay, great. And then, the comment that you made about capacity in the Wearables division with AirPods Pro and Apple Watch 3, what should we think about the timeline of when those capacity constraints might be alleviated? And will they come from capacity additions or the natural workout of unit shipments and something on the demand side?
Tim Cook:
I'm hopeful that the Series 3 will come in to balance during this quarter. On AirPods Pro, I don't have estimate for that for you. I just can't predict when at this point. We seem to be fairly substantially off their and we're working very hard to put in additional capacity.
Tejas Gala:
Thanks, Kyle. Can we have the next question, please?
Operator:
Yes. Wamsi Mohan, Bank of America.
Wamsi Mohan:
Hi. Thank you. Tim, Apple has a very valuable installed base of users. Can you see a future where Apple can become larger in the advertising market, as you build out TV+, given you could have the unique position and ability to drive targeted ads to users without compromising on privacy?
Tim Cook:
I think, it is possible to have advertising in a straightforward manner that doesn’t encroach on people's privacy. I wouldn’t want to conjecture about us in that business. I think for the TV+ business, we feel strongly that what the customer wants is an add-free product, and so that's not our aversion to ads, it’s what we believe that a customer wants.
Wamsi Mohan:
Okay. Thank you. And Luca, can you just clarify if the services revenue this quarter had any impact of deferrals associated with TV+ at all? And how can you help us maybe size the impact of the amortization of the content costs associated with TV+ as we think about the next couple of years? Thank you.
Luca Maestri:
Yes. So, yes. Of course, we launched the service and so there was a very small contribution to revenue from the deferral, and there was also contribution to revenue from the people, the subscribers that are actually paying for the service. When you think about what goes into the Apple TV+ revenue, at this point, there are two components. There is paid subscribers, these are the customers that pay for the service and we recognize revenue over the subscription period. And then, we got the what we call the Apple TV+ bundle subscribers. These are the customers that buy an eligible hardware device and redeem the offer for a three-year of TV+ services. We deferred revenue for this offer, based on three items, the first one is the value of the service that is being provided, the one year of Apple TV+. The second one is the number of customers that are eligible for the offer. And the third one is our estimate of the expected number of customers that will redeem the offer. So, you need to keep in mind that from our total eligible device sales, you need to make a number of reductions for family sharing, for multiple device purchases and for geographic availability. Also, the take rate can also be impacted by the availability of local content, and we also require a payment method on file. So, this estimate is reviewed quarterly and gets updated based on actual trends of the offer. So, these inputs provide us with the amount of revenue that we deferred for each device sale that then gets recognized over the one-year period that the TV plus service has provided. So, when you take the combination of paid subscribers and bundled subscribers, you get the Apple TV+ revenue. Of course because we’ve launched the service very recently, the amount of revenue that we recognized during the quarter, was immaterial to our results. With regard to the cost of developing the content, we -- essentially as we incur these costs, we put them on the balance sheet and then we amortize over a certain period of time depending on the type of content that we produce.
Tejas Gala:
Thanks, Wamsi. Can we have the next question, please?
Operator:
We’ll hear from Cowen and Company's Krish Sankar.
Krish Sankar:
I had two questions. First one, Tim, I just wanted to pick your brain a little bit on the overall smartphone market. There is a general view that when 5G phones come out they’re going to be more expensive due to higher component costs, but at the same time, it looks like you guys have proven that there is a market for low cost geographies to phones like iPhone SE. So, how do you see these two different segments within the smart phone market evolving over the next one to three years? And then, I had a follow-up for Luca.
Tim Cook:
Again, I’m going to stay away from commenting about future products. But, generally, I think it’s important when you think about 5G is to look around the world at the different deployment schedules. And some of those look very different perhaps than what you might be seen here. And so, that’s very important. In terms of the price, I wouldn’t want to comment on the price of handsets that aren’t announced.
Krish Sankar:
And then, a follow-up for Luca. OpEx as a percentage of sales for March looks like e about 15% higher than in your prior quarters. Kind of curious how much of that is -- part of it is driven by some of your Intel modem asset purchases or TV+ in the OpEx or how do we think about it on a go forward basis?
Luca Maestri:
Yes. I think we felt good about our OpEx results, because they were at the low end of our guidance range. But clearly, we want to make all the necessary investments in the business. And in terms of the new services, not only for TV+ but all the new services that we launched during 2019, this is period where we’re making the necessary investments in advertising and marketing, and that level of investment is reflected in our OpEx results. And also, as you correctly stated, we completed the acquisition of the Intel baseband business unit in December quarter. And so, we had -- we reflected the run rate of the expenses related to that business, partially during the quarter, after the completion of the transaction. And that is a very important core technology for the Company. So, we will continue to make all the necessary investments also there. There is a third category of expenses that affected the December quarter, and it’s a fact that our revenue was very strong, and we have certain valuable expenses. For example, credit card fees that are associated with the higher volume and of course impacted our OpEx results.
Tejas Gala:
Thanks, Krish. Can we have the next question, please?
Operator:
That will be from Mike Olson with Piper Sandler.
Mike Olson:
Good afternoon. Thanks for taking the questions. So, slightly different take on an earlier question on Wearables, and that is, what impact you think Wearables is driving people into the Apple ecosystem? You mentioned 75% watch buyers are new to the Apple Watch, but are many of them new to Apple overall? I'm sure a lot of existing iPhone, iPads or Mac users are going to Wearables customers, but do you think Wearables bring people into the ecosystem to buy other devices in a material way?
Tim Cook:
I think that -- Mike, it’s Tim. With each Apple product that a customer buys, I think, they get tighter into the ecosystem because they like -- that's the reason that they're buying into it, is they like the experience, the customer experience. And so from that point of view, I think each of our products can drive another product. I would think, in that case it’s more likely that the iPhone comes first, but there's no doubt in my mind that there's some people that came into the ecosystem for the Watch.
Mike Olson:
Okay. And then, I think you recently mentioned that augmented reality will pervade our entire lives. And I'm wondering if you could share your thoughts about how you think it starts to impact our lives most significantly. For example, will the inflection point in AR come from gaming or industrial usage or some other category? In other words, where will the average person kind of first feel that impact of AR on their lives in a significant way? Thanks.
Tim Cook:
I think, when you look at AR today, you would see that there are consumer applications, there are enterprise applications. This is the reason I'm so excited about it is, you rarely have a new technology where business and consumer are both see it as key to them. And so, I think, the answer is --- that's the reason, I think it’s going to pervade your lives is because it’s going to go across business and your home life. I think, these things will happen in parallel. There are already companies that are deep into enterprise business that are working on applications for the enterprise. And of course you can see -- you go on to store, see thousands of apps that are AR kit enabled at this time and would even more coming.
Tejas Gala:
Thank you, Mike. Can we have the next question, please?
Operator:
That will come from Raymond James, Chris Caso.
Chris Caso:
Yes. Thank you. Good afternoon. I guess, the first question is on gross margins. And you spoke about the favorable mix. Wondering if you could expand on that a little bit. And clearly, iPhone is doing well within the overall mix that growing year-on-year. But, if you could talk about what's happening to the mix within iPhone, is that improving as well and also helping margins? And is there anything else you would point to with regard to the overall mix in margins?
Luca Maestri:
Yes. And I think that the mix helped us both in Q1 and it’s helping us with the guidance for Q2. And as you said, some of it is mix of iPhones. The customer response for iPhone 11, 11 Pro and 11 Pro Max is being exceptional. And that clearly has helped our mix. iPhone 11 was our top selling model throughout the quarter, every single week of the quarter. And so certainly, better mix within iPhone. The other point that I would like to point out is that as we move from Q1 to Q2, the proportion of revenue coming from services increases versus the holiday quarter. And given that fact that services are accretive to gross margin for the Company, we end up getting a better mix from services as well.
Chris Caso:
Okay. Thank you. And I guess, follow-on question with regard to OpEx. And it has been growing at a faster rate than revenue for I guess largely over the last three years or so. Can you set us some expectation with regard to when you get a return on that investment? I understand there are new investments that are happening now. But, how should we think about potential leverage going forward? Is there a point in time where the OpEx spending tend to level off and you get some return on that or is it just the function of a faster revenue growth in future?
Luca Maestri:
Well, I would start by saying that our expense to revenue ratio is incredibly competitive relative to other companies in our sector. There are years when our OpEx grows faster than our revenue but we also had years in the recent past where the opposite has happened. We continue to believe that we have a lot of great opportunities in front of us. And just if you look this past year, we launched many new initiatives, for example, on the services front, which we want to support with the appropriate level of investment, and not only marketing and advertising but also in R&D. As I mentioned earlier, we closed the acquisition of the Intel baseband business because we think it’s a very important strategic core technology for the Company going forward. And I think from the results that you’ve seen during this quarter and the guidance that we provided for the March quarter, I think we’re doing a pretty good job of balancing the level of investments that we’re making on the expense front, with the level of returns that we get both in terms of revenue and in terms of profitability that we’re getting. Our net income for example was up 11% during the December quarter.
Tejas Gala:
Thank you. Can we have the next question, please?
Operator:
That will come from Samik Chatterjee with JP Morgan.
Samik Chatterjee:
I just wanted to kind of ask on the iPhone revenue growth, definitely good to see return to growth. Based on the velocity and momentum you’re seeing for the products exiting the quarter, how comfortable are you feeling about sustaining growth in iPhone revenues through year? And I have a follow-up.
Tim Cook:
We have a practice of forecasting the current quarter. And so, we’ve given you the range that we expect for the current quarter and really don't give a range beyond that.
Samik Chatterjee:
Okay. So, if I can just maybe then follow up in terms of -- obviously, you’ve returned to growth in most of the regions you report. One of the regions that are declining is Japan. So, if you can share your thoughts on what actions you need to take there to return that segment and that geography to grow? And what are the product trends there and what's probably the headwind that's kind of limiting growth there?
Luca Maestri:
Yes. So, Japan was down 10% during the December quarter. It was primarily due to iPhone performance, which was challenged because there were some regulatory changes that took effect on the 1st of October where essentially the regulators decoupled the mobile phone pricing from the two-year contract and are capping the maximum amount of carrier discounts that can be made. At the same time, I would say, within a more difficult macro environment, iPhone did incredibly well during the quarter, six of the top seven selling smart models in Japan during the December quarter were iPhones. So, it was very strong performance by iPhone in a difficult environment. Also, in Japan, we had very strong double-digit growth from services, stronger than Company average; and very strong double-digit growth in Wearables, also stronger than Company average. So, we feel very good. Japan is a country where historically we’ve had great success. The customers are very loyal and very engaged and we have very strong position there, we feel we have a very good momentum.
Tejas Gala:
Thank you, Samik. A replay of today's call will be available for two weeks on Apple Podcasts, as a webcast on apple.com/investor, and via telephone. The numbers for the telephone replay are 888-203-1112, or 719-457-0820. Please enter confirmation code 682-6206. These replays will be available by approximately 5:00 pm Pacific Time today. Members of the press with additional questions can contact Kristin Huguet at 408-974-2414. Financial analysts can contact me with additional questions at 669-227-2402. Thank you again for joining us.
Operator:
Again, that will conclude today's conference. Thank you all for your participation.
Operator:
Good day, everyone. Welcome to the Apple Incorporated Fourth Quarter Fiscal Year 2019 Earnings Conference Call. Today's call is being recorded. At this time for opening remarks and introductions, I’d like to turn the call over to Nancy Paxton, Senior Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you. Good afternoon, and thanks to everyone for joining us. Speaking first today is Apple's CEO, Tim Cook, and he'll be followed by CFO, Luca Maestri. And after that, we'll open the call to questions from analysts. Please note that some of the information you'll hear during our discussion today will consist of forward-looking statements, including without limitation, those regarding revenue, gross margin, operating expenses, other income and expense, taxes, capital allocation and future business outlook. Actual results or trends could differ materially from our forecast. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in Apple's most recently filed periodic reports on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q and the Form 8-K filed with the SEC today, along with the associated press release. Apple assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements or information, which speak as of their respective dates. I'd now like to turn the call over to Tim for introductory remarks.
Tim Cook:
Thank you, Nancy. Good afternoon, and thanks to all of you for joining us, especially those of you listening in on our new noise-cancelling AirPods Pro which are available beginning today. This was Apple's highest revenue in a September quarter ever, and I want to take you through some of the highlights before we get into greater detail on the conclusion of a remarkable fiscal 2019 for Apple. We achieved revenue of $64 billion in the quarter at the high end of our expectations, even in spite of a predicted foreign exchange drag of almost $1 billion. Geographically, we set new Q4 revenue records in the Americas and rest of Asia-Pacific and saw further improvement in our revenue trends in Greater China. In iPhone, where customers have only begun to get their hands on the strongly popular and unmatched iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro models, our year-over-year performance continue to improve, more on that in a moment. Outside of iPhone, our September quarter revenue was up 17%. We reached a new all-time high for services with growth accelerating to 18%. We generated well over 50% revenue growth from Wearables, and I am thrilled to say that we set Q4 records for Wearables in each and every market we track. We’ve got a lot to cover, so let's dive right into the details. iPhone revenue in the September quarter was $33 billion. This 9% decline over last year is a significant improvement over the 15% decline we saw across the first three quarters. The significant upswing in demand in the final part of the quarter is mirrored in the overwhelmingly positive reviews, customer feedback and in-store response we've seen for this new generation of devices, not to mention a wave of the best photos you've seen from a smartphone. iPhone 11 features the Apple-designed A13 Bionic the fastest most powerful chip ever in a smartphone plus an all new dual camera system and even longer all day battery life all wrapped in six great new colors. Since its launch, the iPhone 11 has quickly become our best-selling iPhone. iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 11 Pro Max deliver even more advanced performance for users who want the very best out of their smartphone. The new Super Retina XDR display is the brightest ever in an iPhone, and the new triple camera system provides a pro level photography experience with an ultra-wide, wide and telephoto camera. All three of our new iPhones feature night mode delivering huge improvements to photo capture in low light environments either indoors or outdoors. They also produce the highest quality video in a smartphone supporting 4K video with extended dynamic range for more highlight detail and cinematic video stabilization. iOS 13 is driving user experience forward across the iPhone family with a bold new look in dark mode, major updates to the apps our customers use every day, such as photos and maps, new ways to help protect their privacy with sign-in with Apple and performance improvements across the entire system. For Services, revenue was $12.5 billion, that's up 18% over last year and it beats the previous record set in the June quarter by more than $1 billion. This isn't a local phenomenon. We saw double-digit services revenue growth and all-time records in all five of our geographic segments, and it wasn't a narrow success either. We established new all-time highs for multiple services categories including the App Store, AppleCare, Music, cloud services and our App Store search ad business. We are well on our way to accomplishing our goal of doubling our fiscal year '16 Services revenue during 2020. I want to touch on a number of services in brief. We had all-time record revenues from payment services. For Apple Pay, revenue and transactions more than doubled year-over-year with over 3 billion transactions in the September quarter exceeding PayPal's number of transactions and growing four times as fast. Apple Pay is now live in 49 markets around the world with over 6,000 issuers on the platform. We believe that Apple Pay offers the best possible mobile payment experience and the safest, most secure solution on the market. We're glad that 1000s of banks around the world participate. Apple Card launched in the US in August, and we've been thrilled by the positive reception we've seen. Users can apply for Apple Card through the wallet app on iPhone in minutes and start using it right away in stores, in apps and on websites. They've told us they love Apple Card's simplicity, privacy, security and transparency, which has helped them make healthier financial choices. Apple Card has absolutely no fees and major apps and retailers like Uber, Uber Eats, Walgreens, Duane Reade, and T-Mobile have already joined to offer 3% daily cash back on Apple Card transactions. And I am very pleased to announce today that later this year, we are adding another great feature to Apple Card. Customers will be able to purchase their new iPhone and pay for it over it over 24 months with zero interest. And they will continue to enjoy all the benefits of Apple Card, including 3% cash back on the total cost of their iPhone with absolutely no fees and the ability to simply manage their payments right in the Apple Wallet app on iPhone. We think these features appeal broadly to all iPhone customers, and we believe this has been the most successful launch of a credit card in United States ever. Last month, we launched Apple Arcade, our groundbreaking game subscription service offering an all new way for the whole family to enjoy games online or offline. Apple Arcade's subscribers get unlimited access to a curated selection of games from many of the most innovative developers in the world with almost 100 new titles playable across iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac and Apple TV today and more are being added all the time. Customer feedback to date has been overwhelmingly positive, and we're very excited for the future of the service. We're also thrilled to be working with Oprah Winfrey to bring Oprah's Book Club to Apple Books connecting a community of readers worldwide to important stories by today's most thought-provoking authors. Together, we envision a vibrant global book club that has the power to bring the world together through reading. We've also expanded the reach of Apple News+ beyond the United States and Canada to readers in Australia and the United Kingdom, bringing together popular publications, such as the Times of London, the Australian and Hello Magazine, in addition to major publications like The Wall Street Journal, The LA Times, The New Yorker, People, GQ and much more. And rounding at our newest services just two days from now, we're launching the hotly anticipated Apple TV+ in over 100 countries and regions. It's the first all original video subscription service, which shows from the best, most ambitious and most creative minds in the industry. One of the great parts of this jobs is that I've gotten to binge-watch almost all of them, and while I won't spoil anything, there is so much to look forward to here for lovers of great storytelling. We premiered shows like See and The Morning Show in LA and New York over the past couple of weeks, and the stage is set for a truly exciting debut. And we're pleased that customers who have purchased qualifying Apple devices starting September 10 can opt into 12 free months of Apple TV+. Turning to Wearables, we had amazing results, thanks to the phenomenal popularity of Apple Watch, AirPods and Beats products. As I said at the outset, we set Q4 revenue records for Wearables in every single market that we track around the world. In September, we launched Apple Watch Series 5 with the Always-On Retina display, that means you never have to pause a workout or task to raise or tap the display. New location features help users better navigate their day while international emergency calling allows them to call emergency services directly from Apple Watch in over 150 countries even without an iPhone nearby. And combined with the power of watchOS 6, users are empowered to take charge of their health and fitness with new features like Cycle Tracking, the Noise app, Activity Trends. The ECG app now available in 32 markets including India has become a widely celebrated illustration of Apple's commitment to your health giving users the ability to document and monitor the functioning of their heart and provide critical data to their doctors. We're deepening Apple's commitment to medical research. We announced a new Research app paired with three unprecedented medical studies spanning Hearing, Heart and Movement and Women's Health. We are collaborating with leading health institutions to reach more participants than has ever been possible enabling them to contribute to potential medical discoveries and help create the next generation of innovative health products. Leveraging the devices customers use every day and world-class security and privacy, we hope to democratize medical research and bring everyone to the table to make the next big breakthroughs possible. Turning to iPad, we generated 17% growth driven by iPad Pro in the ongoing momentum of our wider line-up. In September, we introduced the seventh-generation iPad bringing more screen area and support for the full-sized Smart Keyboard to our most popular, most affordable iPad. For the first time, we also released iPadOS built on the same foundation as iOS but with powerful apps designed for iPads large multi-touch display, letting users multitask with intuitive gestures and drag and drop of file with the fingertip. For Mac, we generated $7 billion in revenue. We had a tough comparison to last year's fourth quarter when we updated both models of MacBook Pro, but for fiscal 2019 overall, we generated the highest annual revenue ever from our Mac business. In July, we updated our Mac portables with great pricing for students and MacBook Air in particular has been a hit in the back-to-school season. Earlier this month, we released macOS Catalina with all new entertainment apps, the innovative sidecar feature that uses iPad to expand the Mac workspace and new accessibility tools that enable users to control their Mac entirely with their voice. Catalina also brings the Apple Arcade experience to the Mac and we have already seen some amazing third-party developers bring their iPad apps to the Mac App Store with Mac Catalyst including Twitter, Post-it and more. And for our pro customers who push the limits of what Mac can do, we're very excited about the upcoming launch of our newly redesigned Mac Pro this fall, which we are proud to be manufacturing in Austin, Texas. Pulling back the lens from a single quarter, we are incredibly proud of our accomplishments over the course of a remarkable fiscal 2019, a year where we crossed $100 billion in revenue in the United States for the first time. We introduce new services from Apple Card to Apple TV+ and generated over $46 billion in total services revenue, setting new yearly services records in all five of our geographic segments and driving our Services business to the size of a Fortune 70 company. We delivered incredible new hardware in all our device categories. Our Wearables business showed explosive growth and generated more annual revenue than two-thirds of the companies in the Fortune 500. And we set a yearly revenue record for Mac. All told, outside of iPhone, our revenue grew by $17 billion to almost a $118 billion. Our overall success was achieved widely across our markets with annual revenue records in the U.S., Canada, Brazil, the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Poland, Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam. And as we head into the holiday season, we have an enormous amount to look forward to. We believe that we lead in innovation because we lead with our values. At the time of urgency and action on climate change, we continue to drive breakthroughs in clean power sustainable materials and device recycling. By running a 100% of our global operations on renewable energy and challenging our entire network of suppliers do the same, we are driving a virtuous cycle of demand for clean sources of power. And we see the award Apple recently received from the United Nation's Global Climate Action program as a mandate to deepen this vital work. We continue to invent and improve on cutting edge renewable materials, including the 100% recycled aluminum alloy found in many of our products, and we've added rare earth elements to our list of recycled materials with the introduction of iPhone 11. We're disassembling, recycling or refurbishing millions of devices every year with the help of Daisy, our recycling robot, and we're pushing the entire global supply chain toward recycled or renewable materials. We're driving access to critical coding skills development to educators and students through programs such as our teaching coding academies and our free everyone can code curriculum. We continue to put user privacy at the center of everything that we do and we know that Apple is strongest when our commitment to diversity and inclusion brings all voices to the table. I'd like to thank our customers, our developers, our business partners and our employees for making fiscal 2019 such a success, and I look forward to another great year in 2020. Now for more details on our September quarter results, I'll turn the call over to Luca.
Luca Maestri:
Thank you, Tim. Good afternoon, everyone. Revenue for the quarter was $64 billion, up 2% from a year ago to a new September quarter record as we had predicted foreign exchange negatively impacted our revenue by close to $1 billion, and in constant currency, our growth was 3%. Products revenue was $51.5 billion, down 1% from last year, mainly due to iPhone, but largely offset by very strong performance from Wearables and iPad. Services revenue grew 18% to $12.5 billion, up over $1.9 billion year-over-year and almost $1.1 billion sequentially to a new all-time record with broad-based growth around the world and across our portfolio. On a geographic basis, we set new fourth quarter revenue records in our Americas and rest of Asia-Pacific segments. We also saw continuous improvement in Greater China where year-over-year revenue comparisons became more favorable each quarter of fiscal 2019 from a 27% decline in the first quarter to a 2% decline in the fourth quarter. At a country level, we established new Q4 records in many major developed and emerging markets including the U.S., Canada, Germany, France, Korea, Singapore, Brazil, India, Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam. Company gross margin was 38%, up 40 basis points sequentially, driven by leverage from higher revenue. Products gross margin was 31.6%, up 120 basis points sequentially due to leverage and favorable mix. Services gross margin was 64.1% even with the June quarter. Net income was $13.7 billion. Diluted EPS was a Q4 record at $3.03 and up 4% year-over-year, and operating cash flow of $19.9 billion was also a Q4 record, up almost $400 million from the previous record we set last year. Let me get into more detail for each of our revenue categories. iPhone revenue was $33.4 billion a year-over-year decline of 9%. This was a meaningful improvement to the 12% decline in the third quarter and a 16% decline in the first half of the fiscal year. And we saw great customer response to the launch of iPhone 11, 11 Pro and 11 Pro max at the end of the quarter. Our active installed base of iPhone continues to grow to a new all-time high in each of our geographic segments. And in the U.S., the latest survey of consumers from 451 Research indicates iPhone customer satisfaction of 99% for iPhone XR, XS and XS Max combined. Among business buyers who plan to purchase smartphones in the December quarter 83% plan to purchase iPhones. Turning to Services, we had a very strong quarter with all-time record performance and growth accelerating from the June quarter. All five geographic segments set new all-time Services revenue records and all grew double-digits. We also established new all-time records for the App Store, Apple Care, Music, Cloud Services, Payment Services and our App Store search ad business. In total, services accounted for 20% of our revenue mix and 33% of our gross margin mix. Customer engagement in our ecosystem continues to grow and the number of both transacting and paid accounts on our digital content stores reached a new all-time high with double-digit growth in paid accounts in all our geographic segments. We now have 450 million paid subscriptions across the services on our platform compared to over 330 million just a year ago, and we are well on our way to our goal of surpassing the 500 million mark during 2020. Absolute revenue grew strong double digits, thanks to robust customer demand for both in-app purchases and subscriptions. Our third-party subscription business grew across multiple categories and increased almost 40% year-over-year. There are now more than 35,000 subscription apps on our platform, with the largest accounting for less than 0.25% of total services revenue. Among our many all-time services records, it was the best quarter ever for AppleCare. Thanks to strong service agreement attach rates and expanded distribution. And to better meet our customers' needs, we announced a new iPhone repair program making it easier for independent providers across the U.S. to tap into the same resources as our Apple Authorized Service Provider network and offering customers additional options for the most common out-of-warranty iPhone repairs. The new program complements our continued investment in our growing global network of over 5,000 Apple Authorized Service Providers the lead the industry for customer satisfaction and help millions of people with both in and out-of-warranty service for all Apple products. Next, I would like to talk about the Mac. Revenue was $7 billion, down 5% from last year due to a different mix of products, given the strength of our MacBook Air line-up and a difficult comparison to last year's launch of MacBook Pro models. Despite the tough compare, we generated an all-time revenue record for Mac in the US and in India and a fourth quarter revenue record in Japan. More than half of the customers purchasing Macs during the quarter were new to Mac, and the active installed base of Macs again reached a new all-time high. We had great results for iPad with revenue of $4.7 billion, up 17% from a year ago. iPad revenue grew in all five of our geographic segments with a Q4 revenue record in Japan. In total, over half of the customers purchasing iPads during the September quarter were new to iPad, and the iPad active installed base also reached a new all-time high. The most recent surveys from 451 Research measured a 95% customer satisfaction rating for iPad from consumers and 97% from businesses. And among both consumers and businesses who plan to purchase tablets in the December quarter more than 80% plan to purchase iPads. Wearables, Home and Accessories established a new fourth quarter record with revenue of $6.5 billion, up 54% year-over-year with growth accelerating from the third quarter across all five geographic segments. The performance was driven by tremendous growth across Apple Watch, AirPods, BIS products and accessories. And as Tim mentioned, we set Q4 records for our Wearables category in every single market we track around the world. Our retail and online stores produced fantastic results, generating record September quarter revenue in all five geographic segments, and strong double-digit growth across iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and accessories. We also continue to see great results from our trade-in program with more than five times the iPhone trade-in volume we had a year ago. Last month, we reopened the standing Apple Fifth Avenue store in New York with an even more welcoming layout beneath the landmark glass cube providing nearly twice the space of the original store. This iconic store is opened seven days a week, 24 hours a day, and provides an even better environment for customers to experience our latest products, meet with our geniuses, created pros and specialists, and attend our free daily Today at Apple sessions. We also opened our newest and largest store in Japan, and fifth store in Tokyo, in the Marunouchi business district across from the historic Tokyo Station, and we opened a beautiful new store in the heart of Mexico City's vibrant Polanco district to welcome visitors to experience the best of Apple in Mexico. We are seeing strong demand for our products in the enterprise market, with growth significantly ahead of our business overall, and we have great momentum transforming major industries. One example is retail. 80 of the 100 largest retailers in the world are choosing Apple to modernize their customers and employee experiences across all functions of their business. Retailers are using iPhone, iPad and Mac to optimize their back of house operations, modernize point of sale, and deliver differentiated customer and employee experiences. Customer engagement and assisted selling have been areas of particular focus and we're seeing great results for iconic brands such as Burberry, Ralph Lauren, Sephora USA, Gap Inc., and many others. We’re also having been government agencies around the world, use technologies to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the way they deliver critical services to the public. For example, the U.S. Census Bureau is making fundamental changes to the design and implementation of next year's census with a goal of producing quality results, while reducing costs by leveraging the mobility user experience and privacy of iOS. Hundreds of thousands of Apple devices will be deployed this fiscal year to support an innovative new model for the collection and management of Census data and we are proud that our products will play an important role in driving quality to this critical initiative while safeguarding the privacy and security of this data. CDW Apple's partner in this initiative will also utilize Apple Financial Services, our enterprise financing platform to help minimize the cost to the public by taking advantage of the uniquely strong residual value of Apple devices. Let me now turn to our cash position. We ended the quarter with almost $260 billion in cash plus marketable securities. We issued $7 billion of new term debt, retired $3 billion of maturing debt and reduced commercial paper by $4 billion during the quarter, leaving us with total debt of $108 billion. As a result, net cash was $98 billion at the end of the quarter and we continue on our path to reaching a net cash neutral position over time. We returned over $21 billion to shareholders during the September quarter, including almost $18 billion through open market repurchases of 86 million Apple shares and $3.5 billion in dividends and equivalents. We also retired an additional 7 million shares in the final settlement of our 14th ASR. As we move ahead into the December quarter, I'd like to review our outlook, which includes the type of forward-looking information that Nancy referred to at the beginning of the call. We expect revenue to be between $85.5 billion and $89.5 billion. This range includes a negative impact from foreign exchange of over $1 billion. We expect gross margin to be between 37.5% and 38.5%. We expect OpEx to be between $9.6 billion and $9.8 billion. We expect OI&E to be about $200 million and we expect the tax rate to be about 16.5%. Also today, our Board of Directors has declared a cash dividend of $0.77 per share of common stock, payable on November 14, 2019 to shareholders of record as of November 11, 2019. Before we open the call to questions, I also have a special announcement to make today. Nancy Paxton, our Head of Investor Relations for the last 23 years has decided to retire at the end of December after a wonderful 33 year career at Apple and 93 earnings calls. Nancy has been the face of Apple with analysts and investors over a period of incredible growth and success. Her passion for our company, her commitment and dedication to serve our entire investor base and her sense of humor will be missed greatly. Personally, I'm very grateful for the advice and support you have given me during this last six years. We all wish you the very best for the next and exciting phase of your life. With that, let us open the call to questions.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you very much for the kind remarks, Luca. It's obviously been a great privilege for me to engage with so many investors and analysts on behalf of Apple over the last couple of decades, and of course it's been an extreme pleasure to work alongside with some of the brilliant people here at Apple on a day to day basis. But let's get to the business at hand for the 93rd time, and open the call to questions. We ask that you limit yourself to two questions. Operator, may we have the first question please.
Operator:
Operator:
Certainly, today that will come from Katy Huberty with Morgan Stanley.
Katy Huberty:
Thank you. Good afternoon and congratulations on the quarter. iPhone revenue trajectory did improve, but it's still declined 9%. So can you talk about the drivers that will allow you to get that category back to growth? And if you think that's something that's realistic to expect in fiscal '20?
Tim Cook:
Katy, it's Tim. We are very thrilled with what we're seeing in early going on iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro and Pro Max. It's early but the trends look very good. So I don't want to make a long-range forecast here. We've put our current thinking in the guidance and you can tell from the guidance we are bullish.
Katy Huberty:
Great. And Luca on margins guidance is consistent with September, but there is a lot going on under the covers; tariffs could expand in mid-December; there is some impact from the TV+ bundle; you have some big currency in commodity price move. So can you just talk about the gives and takes that land you at the December quarter gross margin guidance?
Luca Maestri:
Yes. Katy, of course. As you said, I mean at the midpoint of the range, we are essentially flat sequentially. On one side, we expect -- on the positive side, we expect leverage from higher revenue. On the other side, foreign exchange for us continues to be probably the biggest headwind that we've got right now is going to be negative 70 basis points on a sequential basis. Also keep in mind that during the holiday season, we have a higher mix of products revenue than we have in other quarters, and that obviously is dilutive to the company -- to the company margin. On a year-over-year basis, we are also about flat. And on one side, we've got better commodity pricing, the environment is better than it was a year ago, but foreign exchange is a negative impact of 120 basis points on a year-over-year basis.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Katy. Can we have the next question please?
Operator:
Our next question will be from Mike Olson with Piper Jaffray.
Mike Olson:
Good afternoon, and thanks for taking my questions. So Wearables category has been strong, and it's hard to believe it's now essentially the same size as Mac. But related to Apple's initiatives in healthcare, do you think health-related features are a primary driver of Wearables growth and maybe conversely how important is a rising installed base of Wearables and the data that's associated with that to the ongoing innovation within Apple health? And then I have a follow-up.
Tim Cook:
Michael, it's Tim. The Wearables have done extremely well. It was acceleration further from the previous quarter. So we're thrilled with the results as to what's driving it it's the totality that's driving it. For some people it's about fitness; for some people, it's about health; for some other people, it's about communication; and for some people, it's all of the above. And I think the new feature of Always-On on Series 5 is a game changer for many of our users. And in terms of other health-related things that we have going, we will be continuing to build out our health records connection into the health app, really democratizes the information about people's health, and so they can easily go from doctor to doctor. We've got the research going that I had mentioned earlier, there will be more of those through time, and obviously we've got things that we're not going to talk about just yet that we're working on. But as I've said before, my view is there will be a day in the future that we look back, and Apple's greatest contribution will be to people's health.
Mike Olson:
Okay. Thanks. And then with the strong slate of content in Apple TV+, can you just talk about the strategy behind giving it away to those that are buying in applicable device versus charging for it? And my congrats to Nancy. And thank you.
Tim Cook:
Yes, it's a gift to our users, and from a business point of view, we'd like to -- we're really proud of the content. We'd like as many people as possible to view it. And so this allows us to focus on maximizing subscribers, particularly in the early going. And so we are - we feel great about doing that. I think it's a bold move. And the price also for those people that are not buying a device in the period of time that we offer this, the price is very aggressive as well. You think - think about the quality of content that you get for 499, and it's amazing. It is amazing.
Nancy Paxton:
Thanks, Mike. Can we have the next question please?
Operator:
That will come from Evercore’s Amit Daryanani.
Amit Daryanani:
Yes. Thanks a lot guys. I guess two questions from me as well. First one, Tim, if you think about the Services business, less than $2 billion away from the targets you had laid out a few years back. But I am wondering if you think about the growth rates you've had in the business over the last several years, the high-teens average, I think, how much of that do you think was driven by the installed base growing versus incremental monetization of the installed base. And do you see that ratio essentially flipping or changing as you go forward?
Tim Cook:
I think, we have opportunities, Amit, in both the growth of the installed base as Luca mentioned in his comments, we continue to grow across every category, hit new highs in the last quarter and we hit new highs in all of our top 20 markets. And so the installed base is clearly a piece of it getting the trade-in program going, and the secondary market moving has been helpful in that as well. And, of course, ultimately the thing that builds the installed base is to make customers happy, and that's our -- always our top objective is to have satisfied customers. The other thing that is obviously happening is in many areas, the ARPU is increasing. And so, as there is more offers out there, I mean the one that is today getting the attention is on the streaming side. But if you look at the number of services that have been added over the years, it's significant and people love them. And so it's really both of those. And obviously in - finally in getting more people that are enjoying things for free to - let to pay for some of the premium services. So it's sort of all three of those.
Amit Daryanani:
Got it. And if I was just kind of go back to the variables discussion, especially as I think about Apple Watch and AirPods, is there a central way to think about what's the attach rate today to iOS devices for Apple Watch and AirPod update. I just want to understand if I think about 900 million plus iPhone installed base, what kind of penetration do you have at Wearables and how long could this one maybe as you go forward?
Tim Cook:
We’re not releasing the precise numbers of our Wearables, but it is a really nice try and get me to say that. The -- what we're seeing in terms of new adds on the Watch, I think Luca may have mentioned this in his comments is about three-quarters of the Apple Watch buyers are new to Apple Watch. And so we are still insignificantly in the build mode there, and so don't think of the penetration as anywhere near sort of a mature penetration. We got lot left there, and the AirPods just keep hitting new highs. And I anticipate that will carry over to this quarter too and we are really proud to add another product out there for people wanting noise-cancelling with the AirPod Pro beginning to sell today.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Amit. Could we have the next question please?
Operator:
That will come from Shannon Cross with Cross Research.
Shannon Cross:
Thank you very much. First, Nancy, just want to send you our best wishes. We will definitely miss you. I'm sure, I agree with Luca, you've been very instrumental over the years.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you.
Shannon Cross:
My questions though with regard to China, and I don't know, Tim, if you can talk more about what you're seeing in China, the trends during the quarter, the reception specifically there to the iPhone, any thoughts on - you know, Hong Kong used to be a big market, there is obviously some turmoil there. So if you could provide some more in China that would be helpful? Thank you.
Tim Cook:
Yes, we had a very good September, Shannon, and the lead of that is sort of the reception of iPhone 11 and 11 Pro and 11 Pro Max, and so we feel really good about how we've gotten started there. As you can tell from the numbers, we've significantly improved since the beginning of the year. We've gone from minus well into the 20s to minus two last quarter. And if you looked at that in constant currency, we actually grew one. And so there is a very slight growth there. We obviously want that to be better. But we feel good about how we're doing. I think it's a combination of things that are - that have turned things around. On a macro basis, I think the trade tension is less and that clearly looks positive right now with the comments that we've been reading in the press. Secondly, the products have been extremely well received there. Third, the things that we've done from a pricing and monthly payments point of view and trade-in, getting the trade-in program up and running, all of these things have had moved the dial. And so it's sort of the sum of all of that. I would also say, it's not all about iPhone in China, the services area grew double digit. We began to see more gaming approvals in the quarter, or I should say some key gaming approvals. It's not all about quantity, but about which ones, we saw that. Also Wearables, Wearables are doing so great at a company level. They're doing even better in China. And so lots of positives there.
Shannon Cross:
Thank you. And then, I'm curious, Luca, maybe you can talk a bit about how you think about operating expense growth. It continues to grow significantly faster than revenue. So I am just curious as to where you're targeting the incremental spend? And then, is there a point at which we might just see some leverage? Thank you.
Luca Maestri:
Well, you know, Shannon, we've gone through different cycles. In some cases, our revenue growth exceeds our OpEx growth. In other cases, like fiscal '19, it was the other way around. But our approach frankly is not changing over time. We want to invest in the business. Our primary investments during the last few years have been in the R&D space, because obviously we want to continue to innovate, improve the user experience differentiate our products. We continue to run SG&A tightly. Obviously, if you look at what we had launched in the last few quarters and few years, we launched a lot of new products, and now we are launching a lot of new services. And when we do that we need to make the adequate investments in marketing and advertising to raise the awareness of the new products and new services and that is what you're seeing for example in the guidance that we provided for the first quarter as we’re launching new services right now, and so we're making investments both in engineering and in advertising to support the new launches.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Shannon. Could we have the next question please?
Operator:
That will come from Bernstein’s Toni Sacconaghi.
Toni Sacconaghi:
Yes. Thank you. I think this is for Luca, and then I have a follow-up as well. If I look at your guidance, the midpoint of your guidance for revenues on a sequential basis, it's up about 36.5%. Historically, fiscal Q4 to Q1 was up 50% or more, and even last year given that iPhone is a slower growing product, you guided for revenues to be up 45% sequentially. So given the enthusiasm about the iPhone 11 launch and the new Wearables products and the new services, I guess the question is, why is your guidance not stronger for Q1 on the top line? And is that sort of a reflection of conservatism given that there's a lot of uncertainty in the world and we certainly saw that last year? Or are there other forces at work that we should be considered?
Luca Maestri:
Toni, thanks for the question. The guidance that we are providing if you look at it at the midpoint implies an acceleration of growth from the performance that we've seen during the course of fiscal 2019. As I said earlier, foreign exchange is clearly a headwind for us right now. This is about $1.1 billion of negative foreign exchange on a year-over-year basis. So that is something to keep in mind. We feel very good as Tim said about the iPhone, the way the new cycle has started, and we do expect an improvement in our year-over-year growth rate on iPhone. Wearables has very, very strong momentum. The portfolio of services also has incredible momentum. One thing to keep in mind as we look at this guidance range is the fact that we also contemplated the comparison to the launch of the iPad Pro, a year ago for iPad as well as the new MacBook Air that was launched during the December quarter last year. So for the iPad and Mac categories, you need to keep in mind that our launch timing is different on a year-over-year basis.
Toni Sacconaghi:
Okay. Thank you for that. And then if I could follow-up, just on the bundling of Apple TV+, I guess for you, Tim, this is really the first time we've seen a significant bundling of services offering and hardware offering. And I'm wondering if you view this as kind of a strategic advantage of Apple and whether we might see more hardware plus services offerings - bundled offerings, and ultimately do you - do you ever believe that your hardware itself might be offered as a bundled service. And maybe while we're on that either you or Luca could give us the 30 second tutorial on how we should think about the deferred revenue accounting? Approximately how much of the $60 are you going to be deferring, and what's your expectation for attach rate on that? Thank you.
Luca Maestri:
Let me cover the accounting issue first. Obviously, we need to make some assumptions around the take rate of our customers on the -- on Apple TV+, right. And we don't want to get into the details of that because we do those assumptions as confidential and competitively sensitive. But you need to keep in mind that we contemplate a number of factors including the fact that we have family sharing as part of the service, the fact that there are multiple device purchases, the geographic availability around the world, the availability of local content at the beginning of the service, how many people do we have with payment methods on file. So we use all these things to make assumptions around what the take rate is going to be. Obviously, those assumptions will possibly change over time as we get more information on how the customers behave. We haven't launched the service yet - we're going to serve - serving our customers tomorrow. So we'll see how it goes, but we take into account all these different factors.
Tim Cook:
On the bundle question, Toni, we look at each service, and decide what's best to do for it and with TV+, we concluded that a great way to get more people to see the content would be to do this, and it would be a good gift for our users, and so that's what we're doing. You can also see that on the other services we're not doing that. And so it's not part of a broader pattern, or although I wouldn't want to rule out for the future that we might not see another opportunity at some point in time. In terms of hardware as a service or as a bundle, if you will, there are customers today that essentially view the hardware like that because they are on upgrade plans and so forth. And so to some degree that exists today, my perspective is that we will grow in the future to larger numbers that will grow disproportionately. And one of the things we are doing is trying to make it simpler and simpler for people to get on these sort of monthly financing kind of things. That's a part of what we announced with the Apple Card earlier in the call and so we are cognizant that there are lots of users out there that want sort of a recurring payment like that and the receipt of new products on some sort of standard kind of basis and we are committed to make that easier to do than perhaps it is today.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Toni. Could we have the next question please?
Operator:
That will be from Chris Caso with Raymond James.
Chris Caso:
Yes. Thank you. Good afternoon. And Nancy, congratulations to you too, and we're going to miss you.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you.
Chris Caso:
My first question is about pricing and the effect of some of the lower price points for iPhone 11 as compared to last year. And it looked like margins and revenues did well on that, and also followed some price adjustments you made in emerging markets last year, and obviously we've seen some improvement in China as well. So if you could talk about maybe what that tells us about pricing strategy in general and perhaps that you're willing to take a little more flexible approach to drive some elasticity if you think that's going to have a positive effect?
Luca Maestri:
Yes, Chris, I think that the price moves we've made have been smart and well received and do show a level of elasticity, but the most important thing by far is the product. And I think we've got the best line-up we've ever had in the customer response to the product and what the product does for them is really incredible. And photos I am getting from many users around the world are just incredible that people are taking. And so I think it's product first, and then prices sort of falls out of that, and we did decide to be more aggressive. And looking at the results in the early going, I think it was the right call. In terms of emerging markets we picked sort of locally relevant prices, and in some cases where the dollar had become stronger, we took an exchange rate that would have reflected a while back, instead of the current exchange rate. And in other words, we tried to stay as close as we could to a local price point that we knew was effective for that particular market. And those in addition to the U.S. price that has gotten more of a discussion had been extremely well received.
Chris Caso:
Thank you. As a follow-on, perhaps you could talk about the potential for some of the tariffs that are upcoming what -- do you have a view of what potential impact that could have going forward and how Apple is looking to address it? Will you need to adjust your own pricing if in fact the tariffs are imposed?
Tim Cook:
We are paying some tariffs today as you know, some that went into effect pre-September, and some others that went into effect in September. So we are paying some that's been comprehended. But in general, my view is very positive in terms of how things are going, and that positive view is obviously factored in our guidance as well. And just the tone I think has changed significantly and I have long thought that it was in both countries, best interests to get to an agreement that may be initially doesn't solve everything but solves some things that each party may want and get to a better place than where we're at and I'm hopeful that that's where we're headed.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Chris. Could we have the next question please?
Operator:
That will be from Samik Chatterjee with JPMorgan.
Samik Chatterjee:
Hi. Good afternoon. Thanks for taking my question. I just wanted to start off with one of the new services Apple Arcade, and if you have any insights in terms of what you're seeing for engagement or retention of customers beyond the initial trial period also how your partnerships with developers progressing there. How does the pipeline look like than any early projections of what that business longer term might look like?
Tim Cook:
We're not going to give out projections on it, but I would tell you that we were really pleased with the number of people that enter the trial period. People are just coming out of the 30-day trial period in the last few days or week or so. And so it's really too early to tell what the conversion rate will be. But I feel like we're off to a good start and the - most important of everything. The customer feedback to date has really been incredible and we're very excited for the future of the service.
Samik Chatterjee:
Great. As a follow-up if I can, trying to attack the Wearables question within the angle, what are you seeing in terms of -- I believe consumer behavior in upgrading Wearables like Apple Watch AirPods and how are you thinking about your ability to accelerate some of that replacement cycle by driving innovation?
Tim Cook:
I think we, because the Watch is relatively young. We haven't seen enough upgrade cycles to really establish a pattern as yet. And as I've mentioned before, 3 out of 4 customers buying an Apple Watch currently or last quarter I should say were buying an Apple Watch for the first time. And so there is still a very, very large new to Apple Watch in this regard. I do think the upgrade market will look at larger over time, but just don't have a current view as to -- how often and so forth. On the AirPods we're anxious to see the customers for the new AirPods Pro. But I would guess that one particularly in the early going will be people that have AirPods today and want to have -- also have a pair for the times that they need noise cancellation.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you. Samik. A replay of today’s call will be available for two weeks on Apple Podcasts, as a webcast on apple.com/investor, and via telephone. And the numbers to the telephone replay are 888-203-1112, or 719-457-0820. Please enter confirmation code 433-1479. These replays will be available by approximately 5:00 PM Pacific Time today. Members of the press with additional questions can contact Kristin Huguet at 408-974-2414, and financial analysts can contact Tejas Gala or me with additional questions. Tejas is at 669-227-2402, and I am at 408-974-5420. Thanks again for joining us.
Operator:
And that will conclude today's conference. Again, thank you all for joining us today.
Operator:
Good day, and welcome to the Apple Incorporated Third Quarter Fiscal Year 2019 Earnings Conference Call. Today's call is being recorded. At this time, for opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn the call over to Nancy Paxton, Senior Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you. Good afternoon, and thanks to everyone for joining us today. Speaking first is Apple's CEO, Tim Cook; and he'll be followed by CFO, Luca Maestri. After that, we'll open the call to questions from analysts. Please note that some of the information you'll hear during our discussion today will consist of forward-looking statements, including without limitation those regarding revenue, gross margin, operating expenses, other income and expense, taxes, capital allocation, and future business outlook. Actual results or trends could differ materially from our forecast. For more information please refer to the Risk Factors discussed in Apple's most recently filed periodic reports on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q, and the Form 8-K filed with the SEC today, along with the associated press release. Apple assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements or information, which speak as of their respective dates. I'd now like to turn the call over to Tim for introductory remarks.
Tim Cook:
Thank you, Nancy. Good afternoon and thanks to all of you for joining us today. We're thrilled to report a return to growth and new June quarter revenue record of $53.8 billion. We saw significant improvement in year-over-year iPhone performance compared to last quarter, very strong performances for both Mac and iPad and absolutely blowout quarter for Wearables, but we had accelerating growth of well over 50% and a new high watermark for services, where we set an all time revenue record of $11.5 billion. When you step back and consider Wearables and services together two areas where we have strategically invested in last several years, they now approach the size of a Fortune 50 company. Geographically, we are happy with our performance across the board including a return to growth in Mainland China. We accomplished these results despite strong headwinds from foreign exchange which impacted our top-line growth rate by 300 basis points compared to a year ago that's equivalent to about $1.5 billion of revenue. Importantly, in constant currency, our revenue grew in all five of our geographic segments. For iPhone, we generated $26 billion in revenue, while this is down 12% from last year's June quarter, it is a significant improvement to the 17% year-over-year decline in Q2. We are encouraged by the results we are seeing from the initiatives that we spoke about in January including strong customer response to our in-store trade-in and financing programs. In fact, iPhone our retail and online stores returned to growth on a year-over-year basis in the month of June. Our active installed base of iPhone reached a new all time high and was up year-over-year in each of our top 20 markets underscoring the quality of our products and the satisfaction and loyalty of iPhone customers around the world. Revenue excluding iPhone was up 17% from last year with growth across all categories. Starting with services, we generated all time record revenue of $11.5 billion that's up 13% year-over-year and if we exclude the $236 million favorable one-time item from the June quarter last year, services growth was 15% or 18% in constant currency which is consistent with our Q2 performance. Our strong services performance was broad based, we set new all-time records for AppleCare, music, cloud services and our app store search ad business and we achieved a new third quarter revenue record for the app store. What's more, we had double-digit services revenue growth in all five of our geographic segments. We surpassed 420 million paid subscriptions to services across our platform and we remain on track to double our fiscal year '16 services revenue in 2020. In May, we launched our all new Apple TV app in over 100 countries bringing together all the ways to watch TV in a single app across iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and select smart TV's. Monthly viewers in the Apple TV app in the United States are up over 40% year-over-year. We've seen our success being driven here by several factors. First, the fact that we have been able to integrate content from over 150 leading content providers all in one place. Second, the same ease-of-use and unmatched user interface that sets Apple apart in other categories sets us apart in TV as well. And third, we're benefiting from a broader secular move to over-the-top services. We're engaging with this third trend in five ways. Our Apple TV hardware, Apple TV channels where customers can choose to pay only for the channels they want. Our massive library of over 100,000 iTunes movies and TV shows, the app store where users can find their favorite streaming services and later this year, our original programming service Apple TV+. Apple Pay is now completing nearly 1 billion transactions per month more than twice the volume of a year ago. Apple Pay launched in 17 countries in the June quarter completing our coverage in the European Union and bringing us to a total of 47 markets currently. Based on June quarter performance, Apple Pay is now adding more new users than PayPal and monthly transaction volume is growing 4x as fast. In the United States, in addition to a successful integration into Portland's transit system in May, we're beginning to rollout of New York City transit and will launch in Chicago later this year. In China, Apple Pay launched the payment card for Didi the world's largest ride hailing provider. As I've said before, transit integration is a major driver of a broader digital wallet adoption, and we're going to keep up this push to help users leave their wallet at home in more and more instances. On a related note, thousands of Apple employees are using Apple Card every day in our beta test, and we plan to begin the rollout of Apple Card in August. As I mentioned at the outset, it was another sensational quarter for Wearables, with growth accelerating to well over 50%. We had great results for Apple Watch, which set a new June quarter revenue record and is reaching millions of new users. Over 75% of customers buying Apple Watch in the June quarter were buying their first Apple Watch. We continue to see phenomenal demand for AirPods. And when you tally up the last four quarters, our wearables business is now bigger than 60% of the companies in the Fortune 500. We had great performance from iPad, with revenue of over $5 billion, and growth driven by iPad Pro and by strong customer response to the new iPad Mini and iPad Air. This was our third consecutive quarter of growth, and with revenue up 15% year-to-date, we feel great about where we're headed with iPad. With our current lineup of iPad, iPad Mini, iPad Air, and iPad Pro, we've got the perfect device for everyone from young learners to professionals. We were also very happy with double-digit revenue growth from Mac, fueled by a strong performance of MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. Looking forward, there's an enormous amount to be excited about for Mac. On the heels of our Mac mini and iMac updates earlier in the fiscal year, we brought significant updates to the bulk of our notebook lineup in the last couple of months. We now have a $999 MacBook Air that is killer for college students. And for our pro users, who push the limits of what a Mac can do, we were thrilled to unveil the most powerful Mac ever, the new Mac Pro and the all new Pro Display XDR, which will be available this fall. They're designed for maximum performance, expansion and configurability and at breakthrough pricing and they're the most powerful tools Apple has ever put in the hands of pro customers. What's more, the Mac ecosystem as a whole is about to get a big boost. At our recent Worldwide Developers Conference, we announced a game-changing tool to help developers easily adapt their iOS and iPadOS apps for the Mac. I'll have a bit more to say on that in a moment. I'd like to provide some color on our performance in Greater China, where we saw significant improvement compared to the first half of fiscal 2019 and return to growth in constant currency. We experienced noticeably better year-over-year comparisons for our iPhone business there than we saw in the last two quarters and we had sequential improvement in the performance of every category. The combined effects of government stimulus, consumer response to trade-in programs, financing offers, and other sales initiatives and growing engagement with the broader Apple ecosystem had a positive effect. We were especially pleased with a double-digit increase in services driven by strong growth from the App Store in China. Turning to the future. Last week we announced an agreement with Intel to acquire the majority of its smartphone modem business. This is our second-largest acquisition by dollars and our largest ever in terms of staff. We're looking forward to welcoming all of them to Apple. We see this as a great opportunity to work with some of the leading talents in this field, to grow our portfolio of wireless technology patents to over 17,000, to expedite our development of our future products and to further our long-term strategy of owning and controlling the primary technologies behind the products that we make. We also had our best WWDC ever last month, packed with announcements of great new features coming this fall across our four software platforms making them more powerful, more personal and more private. For iPhone users, iOS 13 will take on a dramatic new look with Dark Mode, while delivering major updates to the apps you use every day, including photos, camera and maps. iOS 13 offers great new ways to help you manage your privacy and security, including Sign On with Apple, which uses Face ID or Touch ID to quickly sign into apps and Web sites without sharing your personal information. And improvements across the entire system will make iPhone even faster and more delightful to use than ever before. For the first time, iPad is getting its own version of iOS, called iPadOS, a strategic step forward that takes the iPad experience to a whole new level. The redesigned home screen, powerful new multitasking tools and deeper integration with Apple Pencil take productivity and creativity further, including using your iPad as an extended and interactive second monitor for your Mac. For Apple TV, tvOS 13 will make the big-screen experience even more personal. With a redesigned home screen and multi-user support, everyone in the family can get a more engaging and tailored experience with their favorite TV shows, movies, sports and news, along with Apple Music, photos and videos in iCloud, and an App Store with thousands of great games and apps. watchOS 6 is a major step forward in helping Apple Watch users stay healthy, active and connected. Apple Watch now has a dedicated App Store that users can access directly from the device and new watch faces, Siri enhancements, and music and audio features make Apple Watch more useful than ever. And of course, we continue to innovate on Apple Watch's promise to be an intelligent guardian for your health. watchOS 6 includes powerful new features like notifications that warn about high decibel noise to protect your hearing and cycle tracking to aid in women's health care decisions. In the June quarter, we expanded the availability of the ECG app and a regular rhythm notifications to five additional European countries and added Canada and Singapore just last week, making them available in 31 countries and regions around the world, with more to come later this year. We're very proud of the muscle we've built in bringing regulated products like these to market. This is an important competency that creates exciting opportunities for us moving forward. As I noted earlier, we believe macOS Catalina will be a breakthrough in the Mac ecosystem. A new tool included in macOS Catalina called Mac Catalyst gives developers a major head start in bringing their iOS apps to the Mac. Thousands of developers are already using it to bring their apps to the Mac ecosystem and we expect to see a wave of popular apps arriving for the Mac as early as this fall. Again, it's worth taking a step back and digesting the bigger picture here. These updates are the latest steps in a broader strategic effort to make the user experience across iOS, macOS, iPadOS, watchOS and tvOS more effortless and more intuitive. Apple is alone in offering this kind of value and ecosystem to its customers. And these devices and their platforms are unmatched in their ease-of-use, their seamlessness and their privacy and security. And while providing these things, we've created a dynamic environment where developers benefit greatly from creating for and distributing on these platforms. And our customers, of course, benefit greatly from access to all this creativity and innovation. We also unveiled other exciting technologies to make it easier and faster for developers to create powerful new apps. SwiftUI provides an intuitive new framework for building sophisticated user interfaces across our software platforms using simple easy-to-use code. Core ML 3 supports the acceleration of more types of advanced real-time machine learning models, and Create ML lets developers build machine learning models without writing code. We have the world's largest augmented reality enabled platform and thousands of they ARKit-enabled applications in the App Store. Building on this strategy, and our momentum in this area, we introduced three new AR-based technologies. ARKit 3 uses on device, real-time machine learning to recognize the human form and integrates people seamlessly into AR experiences. RealityKit is a new developer framework built from the ground up to provide all the tools and technologies required to make AR objects virtually lifelike. And Reality Composer brings AR content creation to tens of millions of developers who have no 3D experience. Our developers are already running with these new technologies and we think our customers are going to love some of the apps that these creators have in store in the months ahead. On so many fronts there's an enormous amount to look forward to over the next few months, including the launch of new services like Apple Arcade, Apple TV+, and Apple Card. And without giving too much away, we have several new products that we can't wait to share with you. Until then, thanks for joining us today. And for more details on the June quarter results, I'll turn the call over to Luca.
Luca Maestri:
Thank you, Tim. Good afternoon everyone. We're happy to report a June quarter revenue record of $53.8 billion, up 1% year-over-year. We return to growth in spite of a difficult foreign exchange environment around the world, which impacted our year-over-year growth rate by 300 basis points. We set June quarter revenue records in the Americas, in Japan and the rest of Asia Pacific and as Tim mentioned earlier all our geographic segments grew in constant currency. Overall, products revenue was $42.4 billion, down 2% year-over-year, which is significantly better than the 8% decline in products revenue that we experienced during the first half of the fiscal year. Product categories outside of iPhone grew 20%, with strong results in Wearables, Mac and iPad. Services revenue grew 13% to a new all-time record of $11.5 billion. Excluding the one-time item, we highlighted a year ago in connection with the final resolution of various lawsuits, services revenue growth was 15% and 18% in constant currency terms. On a geographic basis, we saw marked improvement in our year-over-year comparisons from emerging markets relative to the first half of this fiscal year, particularly in the BRIC countries, where year-over-year performance went from a 25% revenue decline in the first half to 3% growth in the June quarter. We set June quarter revenue records in several major developed markets, including the U.S., Canada, Germany, France, Japan, Australia and Korea. In emerging markets, we returned to growth in Mainland China, grew strong double digits in India and Brazil and we set new Q3 records in Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines. Company gross margin was 37.6%, flat sequentially and in line with our guidance. Products gross margin was 30.4% down about 80 basis points sequentially due to seasonal loss of leverage and product mix partially offset by favorable cost. Services gross margin was 64.1%, up 30 basis points sequentially, primarily due to a favorable mix. Net income was $10 billion, diluted earnings per share were $2.18 and operating cash flow was $11,600,000,000. Let me get into more detail for each of our revenue categories. iPhone revenue was $26 billion, down 12% compared to a year ago. This was significantly better year-over-year performance than last quarter's 17% decline, with sequential improvement in year-over-year comparisons in 15 of our top 20 markets. Our active installed base of iPhone continued to grow to a new all time high in each of our geographic segments and in the U.S., the latest survey of consumers from 451 Research, indicates iPhone customer satisfaction of 99% for iPhone 10R, iPhone 10S and 10S Max combined. Among business buyers who plan to purchase smartphones in the September quarter, 83% plan to purchase iPhones. Turning to services, we reached an all-time revenue record in spite of foreign exchange headwinds with double-digit growth from the App Store, Apple Music, cloud services, and AppleCare, and triple digit growth from Apple Pay and our App Store search ad business. All geographic segments had double-digit growth in services revenue and set new June quarter records with all-time records in the Americas and Rest of Asia Pacific. In total, services accounted for 21% of Apple revenue and 36% of gross margin dollars. Customer engagement in our ecosystem continues to grow. The number of transacting accounts on our digital content stores reached a new all time high in the June quarter and the number of paid accounts grew strong double digits compared to last year. We now have over 420 million paid subscriptions across the services on our platforms and we are well on our way to our goal of surpassing the 500 million mark during 2020. On the App Store, our growth accelerated sequentially. Our subscription business continues to grow strongly and is extremely diversified across many categories such as entertainment, lifestyle, photo and video and music. Third-party subscription revenue grew by over 40% and across all third-party subscription apps, the largest accounted for only 0.25% of total services revenue. Among our many services records, it was our best quarter ever for AppleCare. We are seeing an increase in service contract attach rates and are expanding distribution of AppleCare through our partners. We also recently expanded our authorized service provider network and nearly 1000 Best Buy stores across the U.S. are now offering expert service and repairs for Apple products. This expansion provides customers with an even more convenient access to repairs using parts certified for safety, quality and reliability. In addition to Apple retail stores there are over 1800 third-party Apple authorized service providers in the U.S., which is 3x as many locations as three years ago. Next, I'd like to talk about the Mac. Revenue was $5.8 billion, up 11% compared to last year. Mac revenue grew in 4 of our 5 geographic segments and set June quarter records in the U.S., Europe and Japan, as our overall market performance significantly outpaced the global PC industry. Nearly half of the customers purchasing Macs during the quarter were new to Mac, with revenue growing in both developed and emerging markets and the active installed base of Macs again reached a new all time high. We also had great results for iPad, with $5 billion in revenue, up 8%. iPad revenue grew in all 5 of our geographic segments, with a Q3 revenue record in Mainland China and double-digit growth in emerging markets. In total, over half of the customers purchasing iPads during the June quarter were new to iPad and the iPad active installed base also reached a new all time high. The most recent surveys from 451 Research measured a 94% customer satisfaction rating for iPad from consumers and among business customers who plan to purchase tablets in the September quarter, 75% plan to purchase iPads. Wearables, home and accessories revenue accelerated across all our geographic segments, growing 48% to over $5.5 billion and setting a June quarter record. This growth was fueled primarily by the strong performance of our wearables business, which was up well over 50% and has become the size of a Fortune 200 company over the last 12 months. In addition, we generated double-digit revenue growth from Apple TV and accessories during the quarter. Our retail and online stores produce their best June quarter revenue ever, with double-digit revenue growth across Apple Watch, iPad, Mac and accessories. Our trade-in program is showing great momentum, with more than 5x the number of iPhones traded in compared to a year ago. We opened stunning new stores in the Carnegie Library in Washington D.C. and the busy Shinji District in Taipei as well as a beautiful new location in the Dallas Galleria. We ended the quarter with 506 physical stores in 22 countries alongside our online store presence in 35 countries. In the enterprise market, we are gaining traction with our strategy of transforming major industries by expanding our leading positions in key functional areas to grow our reach and modernize customer and employee experiences. In the financial services industry, 90 of the largest 100 banks by assets size are deploying Apple products to improve efficiency and effectiveness across their organizations. iPhone and iPad are overwhelmingly the preferred mobile devices for bankers on the go. For example, 60% of the biggest banks are supporting iPads for wealth managers. In retail banking, two-thirds of top banks are deploying iPad for branch transformation and modernizing legacy interfaces with a unified iPad experience. One of the world's largest banks created an iPad suite that reduced customer on-boarding time from more than an hour to just 12 minutes. Bank branch employees are also using Apple Watch for communication and notifications and Apple TV for customer presentations from iPads using AirPlay. Financial institutions also tell us that they receive positive feedback from leveraging Apple solutions for direct customer engagement. American Express, Credit Suisse, Discover and T.D. Ameritrade have launched Apple Business Chat as a dynamic way to support and interact with customers. The intuitive interface of messages on iOS enables rich communication between customers and contact center staff. T.D. Ameritrade has also become the first brokerage in the world to enable immediate funding of accounts using Apple Pay, eliminating the 2 to 3 business days it used to take to fund accounts by wire transfer. Let me now turn to our cash position. We ended the quarter with almost $211 billion in cash plus marketable securities. We retired $3 billion of term debt and reduced commercial paper by $2 billion during the quarter, leaving us with total debt of $108 billion. As a result, net cash was $102 billion at the end of the quarter and we continue on our path to reaching a net cash neutral position over time. We returned over $21 billion to shareholders during the quarter, including $17 billion through open-market repurchases of almost 88 million Apple shares and $3.6 billion in dividends and equivalents. As we move ahead into the September quarter, I'd like to review our outlook, which includes the types of forward-looking information that Nancy referred to at the beginning of the call. We expect revenue to be between $61 million and $64 billion. This guidance includes almost $1 billion of year-over-year negative impact from foreign exchange. We expect gross margin to be between 37.5% and 38.5%. We expect OpEx to be between $8.7 billion and $8.8 billion. We expect OINE to be about 200 million and we expect our tax rate to be about 16.5%. Also, today our Board of Directors has declared a cash dividend of $0.77 per share of common stock payable on August 15, 2019 to shareholders of record as of August 12, 2019. With that, I'd like to open the call to questions.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Luca. And we ask that you limit yourself to two questions. Operator, may we have the first question, please.
Operator:
The first question will come from Amit Daryanani from Evercore.
Amit Daryanani:
Thanks a lot. Thanks for taking my question guys. I guess, two from me. First off, could you just talk about, when I think about the September quarter guide, it's implied I think up 16% or so sequentially. Historically, at least, in that guide has been in the 10% low double-digit kind of range. Just can you help us understand, what gives you the confidence for a better than seasonal guide in September, either from a geo or product basis would be helpful.
Luca Maestri:
Amit, it's Luca. Of course, this is our best estimate of where we think we will land. Clearly, we expect to have continued strong growth from the non-iPhone categories. We have great momentum in wearables. We mentioned that we were up almost 50% in the June quarter, or actually over 50% in the June quarter. Our services business, we set an all-time record in June. And so, these two categories have become really important and really large for us. And so, as we continue to grow, quickly that is going to help us as we go through the year. Keep in mind that the guidance includes an estimated almost $1 billion of foreign exchange headwind for the quarter.
Amit Daryanani:
Fair enough. That's really helpful. And I guess if I just follow-up on China, impressed to see the continued recovery you guys are seeing that despite all the headlines that are out there. Just curious, what are the few things that are driving the success in China, and how sustainable do you think those changes are for Apple as you go forward.
Tim Cook:
Yes, Amit, Hi. It's Tim, and I apologize for my voice, I'm suffering from an allergy. But what happened last quarter in China was a confluence of things. The government stimulus, this came in terms of a VAT reduction, a very bold one. We took some pricing action, we instituted our trade-in and financing programs in our retail stores and worked with certain channel partners on that as well. And we're seeing a growing engagement with the broader Apple ecosystem during the quarter. And so, when you look at it, each of our categories, iPhone, iPad, Mac, wearables, services, everything improved sequentially. So, we couldn't be happier with the progress. I would point out, I think I mentioned in my comments, that we actually grew in constant currency for Greater China and we grew in Mainland China on a reported basis. So, there's several things going on there that are quite positive.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Amit. Could we have the next question please.
Operator:
The next question will come from Shannon Cross with Cross Research.
Shannon Cross:
Thank you very much. Can you talk a bit about what's going on within services, some of the puts and takes? Luca, you gave us some color in terms of the growth rates in that, but I'm just curious and I know you won't talk about future products, but as you think about the opportunity, you think about what you've got now and in the future and then some of what’s been going on with China and that, is this something that could reaccelerate, or again, the 18% on a constant currency basis is obviously quite strong. But, how are you thinking about it?
Luca Maestri:
Yes. I think it's important to start with that 18% in constant currencies, Shannon. Our reported results are on a normalized basis, removing the one-time item from last year, was 15%. Clearly FX, plays a role around the world, 300 basis points of FX impact during the June quarter. In spite of that, it was an all-time record revenue. Our installed base continues to grow. It's growing in every geography and it's growing across all our major product categories, and that is very, very important for the services business. I would say, I'll give you a bit more color around two offsetting factors around this performance during the June quarter. On one side, the App Store, I mentioned in my prepared remarks that growth accelerated sequentially. We had double-digit growth on the App Store in every geography. In China, we saw significant acceleration. As you know, we tend to monetize in China on the App Store through game titles and the government has approved a few key game titles during the quarter. That has helped our performance there. On the other side, AppleCare, I mentioned AppleCare was an all-time record in June, so really strong performance, but our growth has decelerated in AppleCare due to factors that we fully expected, because we are comping this expansion of our coverage for AppleCare that we've had significant success during the last 18 to 24 months in really broadening our coverage of AppleCare around the world with some key partners, carriers and resellers. And obviously, as we go through the year those comps become a bit more difficult. Having said all that, that we've given ourselves a couple of targets and we feel very confident about reaching those targets. The first one is that, we wanted to double the size of the services business from our fiscal 2016 to 2020. We are on our way there. Paid subscriptions is another target, is important to us. It's an important way for us to monetize our ecosystem. We set a target of surpassing 0.5 billion paid subscriptions on the ecosystem during 2020. We’re already at 420 million now. So, we feel confident there. And of course, as you mentioned, we're very excited about the fact that we're going to be launching new services soon. As Tim said, we're starting the rollout of Apple Card in August, and there's two more very important services that we’re going to be adding to our portfolio during the fall. One is Apple Arcade, which is our gaming subscription service, and then of course Apple TV+, which is our video streaming service. So obviously these services will help us carry on with the momentum that we had in services.
Shannon Cross:
Great. Thank you. And this is probably for you too as well, Luca. Can you talk about gross margin? The guidance was pretty solid. Obviously, there are various things that are at play here. I know you mentioned $1 billion worth of top-line impact, I think from, currency last quarter. Then maybe if you can kind of talk about what went into your gross margin guidance.
Luca Maestri:
Yes. So of course, Shannon, as you've seen, our guidance for margin is 50 basis points higher than the guidance that we had given for June. I would say on the positive, we expect to benefit from leverage. As you've seen from our revenue guidance, and from cost savings, because as you know the commodity environment is fairly favorable right now. On the negative side, the headwind on gross margins on a year-over-year basis from foreign exchange is about 100 basis points. And so, we need to keep that in mind. But we feel pretty good about the guidance we provided.
Nancy Paxton:
Thanks Shannon. Could we have the next question please.
Operator:
Our next question will come from Katy Huberty with Morgan Stanley.
Katy Huberty:
Yes. Thank you. I'd like to go back to the discussion around strength in China in the quarter and understand what linearity looked like. I ask because there was some industry data around the smartphone market in China that seemed to deteriorate in the month of June, the App Store data deteriorated a little bit in June, and just curious if that’s something you saw in the business and if it at all informs your outlook around the pace of the China business as you go into September.
Tim Cook:
Katy, it's Tim. We obviously took into account all of the information that we had and coming out with the guidance including linearity across last quarter and how this quarter has started. And so, we obviously look at that in quite much detail.
Katy Huberty:
And then just on the App Store, appreciate there's not a lot of detail out around exact timing and even some pricing of the new services, but how should we think about the new services that launched in March impacting the overall services growth. Does that start to benefit the model in the back half of this calendar year, or will the impact be more longer term in nature and really show up in 2020?
Luca Maestri:
Katy, let me just talk about the new services that we've announced in March, and then also about the timing of how we get to revenue, right? We've announced Apple News+, and this is the service that is available for consumers right now. We've announced our channel service, which has also become available a few weeks ago. The other three services, the card is launching in August, the gaming service and the video service are starting in the fall. Keep in mind for all these services, there's a trial period up front, there's going to be different trial periods, we'll see what that what they look like. So, the road to monetization takes some time. Obviously, all of them will add to our base and will help us with growth rates as we get into next year.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Katy. Could we have the next question please?
Operator:
The next question will come from Krish Sankar with Cowen & Company.
Krish Sankar:
Hi. Thanks for taking my question. I have two of them. First one, on the iPhone trade-in program, how effective was it and what percentage of the iPhone sales came from the trade-ins and are there any other geographies where you are left to rule it out? Then, I have a follow-up.
Tim Cook:
Hi, it's Tim. In retail, it was quite successful. We got going in a larger way during that quarter, we were pretty much just ramping in the previous quarter. And trade-in as a percentage of their total sales is significant and financing is a key element of it. Those two things in the aggregate led the combination of retail and online, just short form that is retail Apple Store let to growth in June trajectory. We are obviously taking those programs and advocating those more widely and that is at different levels of implementation throughout different geographies. Because we're working with our carrier partners on those and retail partners.
Krish Sankar:
Got it. Got it. That's pretty helpful, Tim. And then, a follow-up for you, a much longer-term question. I understand we're in the very early innings of the services growth story. Is there a way to think about it down the road, 3 or 5 years down the road, would the services growth still be tethered to the hardware of the iPhone, or do you think at some point down the road services would be independent by itself and not really tied to your hardware installed base?
Tim Cook:
Well, there are elements today that are not necessarily tethered to iPhone, right? We have other products where people are both purchasing things, they're watching Apple TV. We offer Apple Music on Android, and so there's a series of things that are outside of that. And so we'll see what we do in the future. I don't want to really get into that. But, more broadly, to answer your question about growth as we go forward, the way I see it is, we have the strongest hardware portfolio ever, we've got new products on the way, the pipeline is full of great new stuff both on the product and the services side. We're very fortunate and work very hard to have loyal customers and to continue attracting an impressive number of switchers. The installed base is growing, hit a new record, that's obviously good. And it hit a new record across all geographies and across all categories. And so, this is a really good thing. And we've got the Wearables area that is doing extremely well. We stuck with that when others perhaps didn't and really put a lot of energy into this and a lot of R&D and are in a very good position today to keep playing out what's next there. At the same time, on the market side, we have emerging markets where we have low penetration. And during the quarter tactically the emerging markets had a bit of a rebound. And in fact, on a constant currency basis, we actually grew slightly in emerging markets. We still declined on a reported basis. India bounced back. During the quarter, we returned to growth there. We're very happy with that. We grew in Brazil as well. We're also continuing to focus on the enterprise market. Luca mentioned some of this in his comments and we think that continues to be a big opportunity for us. And then, we've got lots of what I would call core technology kinds of things like augmented reality, where we're placing big bets and bet that we have a big future, in addition to the health kinds of things that may fall out of the watch. And so hopefully that kind of gives you a view over the total. And so, we're focusing on products and services and there will be some services that aren't hooked and some that are hooked not on current period sales mostly, very much services are rarely connected on that today or at least not a high percentage by any means there. They're more correlated to the active installed base and also the level of transacting customers that are there and the amount per customer, which relates also to the offering that we have.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Krish. Could we have the next question, please?
Operator:
Next, we will go to Wamsi Mohan with Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
Wamsi Mohan:
Yes. Thank you. Tim, the China trade situation remains sort of fluid over here and more recently you asked for some tariff exceptions were not granted those. How are you thinking about the longer-term footprint for manufacturing and can you talk about any potential alternatives that you've looked at and considered in moving parts of production potentially out of China. And I have a follow-up.
Tim Cook:
Yes. I know there's been a lot of speculation around the topic of different moves and so forth. I wouldn't put a lot of stock into those, if I were you. The way I view this is, the vast majority of our products are kind of made everywhere. There's a significant level of content from the United States and a lot from Japan to Korea to China and the European Union also contributes a fair amount. And so, that's the nature of a global supply chain. Largely, I think that will carry the day in the future as well. In terms of the exclusions, we've been making the Mac Pro in the U.S., we want to continue doing that. And so, we're working and investing currently in capacity to do so, because we want to continue to be here. And so that's what's behind the exclusions. And so, we're explaining that and hope for a positive outcome.
Wamsi Mohan:
Okay. Thanks, Tim. And there is, Luca, maybe for you, there's been some significant destocking of inventory in the first calendar half of this year in iPhone. Can you comment about the broader channel inventory levels where you are in your typical ranges, especially given the comment around June iPhone sales being quite strong and do you expect anything atypical in channel inventory dynamics in the September quarter? Thank you.
Luca Maestri:
Yes, Wamsi, as you know we're not getting into this topic very much. But, I think I can give you some color here. You know that in general, we decrease our inventory during the March quarter and the June quarter. That has been traditionally what we've done. This year, we reduced channel inventory for iPhone slightly more than last year and that is true in total and it's true for Greater China as well. So, we feel very good about our channel inventory ranges as we get into the September quarter. Hope that helps you with that.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Wamsi. Could we have the next question, please?
Operator:
Our next question comes from Jim Suva with Citigroup.
Jim Suva:
Thanks very much. The first question is probably to Tim and second one for Luca. I will ask them at the same time, so you can continue which other one you want to answer, first or second. While the first one is for Tim, regarding the installed base comment you've made, which is quite encouraging, but yet when you look at the iPhone revenue year-over-year the past several quarters have been down. Can you help us bridge the gap of, how is the installed base growing? Is it mostly because secondary users are the new ones coming into the system as people are holding more phones longer? And what does that user typically bring in with them or something unique relative to what we historically know? And then for Luca, you've been investing a lot, a lot, lot and a lot of these services are now coming to pass whether it be AppleCare, Apple Cloud, all these wearables and soon Apple Pay and Arcade. Are we at a point where now a lot of harvesting is going to happen or do you kind of continue this relatively same investment that you've been doing for the future strategy. Thank you.
Tim Cook:
Hey, Jim, it's Tim, I'll start with your installed base question. Installed base is a function of upgrades and the time between those. It's a function of the number of switchers coming into the to the iOS, macOS and so forth [indiscernible]. It's a function of the robustness of the secondary market, which we think overwhelmingly hits an incremental customer. And it's a function still in the emerging markets and somewhat developed markets to a lesser degree of people knew that they’re buying their first smartphone. There are still quite a few people in the world in that category. And so, the reason that the installed base doesn't correlate to the 90-day clock is that what's happening underneath the numbers is, switchers are still a very key piece of what's going on. The secondary market is very key, and we're doing programs et cetera to try to increase that, because we think we wind up hitting a cost number that we don't hit in another way. And the upgrades where people are holding onto their device a bit longer than they were, they're staying in the ecosystem. And then, you have the people in the new category as well. And so, that's sort of the equation. I don't want to go into the specific numbers, but I think you can see readily, mathematically, how the installed base is growing in an environment where the iPhone revenue is declining within a 90-day kind of window.
Luca Maestri:
And Jim, on OpEx, obviously is very important for us to continue to invest in the business, particularly on the R&D side, because we will always want to bring more innovation into the market. We want to improve the user experience and differentiate our products and services in the marketplace. So, we will continue to do that. There are some types of investments, of course, that are very strategic for us and they will have long-term implications. You've seen the announcement that we made around the Intel acquisition. Very important strategically for us. It requires upfront investment, of course. As you've seen from this quarter and also from the past, we will continue to run our SG&A portion of OpEx tightly. Of course, we'll continue to invest in marketing and advertising. We talked about a lot of new services that we are launching during the fall and Apple Card next month, obviously they will require the appropriate level of marketing and advertising as we launch them to the general public. When you look in total, where we are in terms of our expense to revenue ratio for operating expenses, you know, quite well that we are extremely competitive relative to other tech companies. So, we want to continue to be competitive and at the same time we will not under-invest in the business.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Jim. Could we have the next question, please?
Operator:
The next question will come from Samik Chatterjee with JPMorgan.
Samik Chatterjee:
Hi. Thanks for taking the question. I just wanted to start-off with the announcement at WWDC around the independent App Stores for the Watch and the iPad. What level of interest have you seen from developers and how are they thinking about the ability to monetize services independently on those App Stores? And how does that help you position wearables more firmly into the health and fitness category?
Tim Cook:
We're seeing good interest across virtually everything that we announced at WWDC. I couldn't be happier with it. The developer tools around ARKit and AR in general that I went through earlier, lots of interest there, lots of interest from the Watch App Store, to the Catalyst that will be released with macOS Catalina, which allows developers quickly to port a iOS app to the Mac. We think this is huge and so great for the user experience. And so, you look at all of these and all the things that I talked about earlier and I couldn't be happier with the reception that we're getting and the work that is going on behind the scenes right now for the developers readying their apps for the fall.
Samik Chatterjee:
Got it. If I can just follow-up on the China market, one of the things that we're looking at is going into the New Year into 2020 there'll be a lot of 5G phones launching in that market from the Android players. How do you think about the competitive landscape there as you enter next year?
Tim Cook:
We don't comment on future products. With respect to 5G, I think most people would tell you, we're in sort of the extremely early innings of it. And even more so on a global basis. So, we couldn't be more proud of what our lineup is and we're excited about the great pipeline of both hardware and software and we wouldn't trade our position for anyone's.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Samik. A replay of today's call will be available for two weeks on Apple Podcasts as webcast on apple.com/investor and via telephone. And the numbers of the telephone replay are 888-203-1112 or 719-457-0820, please enter confirmation code 3057347. These replays will be available by approximately 5 Pm Pacific Time today. Members of the press with additional questions can contact Kristin Huguet at 408-974-2414. And financial analysts can contact Tejas Gala or me with additional questions. Tejas is at 669-227-2402, and I'm at 408-974-5420. Thanks again for joining us.
Operator:
That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for your participation.
Operator:
Good day, and welcome to the Apple Incorporated Second Quarter Fiscal Year 2019 Earnings Conference Call. Today's call is being recorded. At this time, for opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn the call over to Nancy Paxton, Senior Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you. Good afternoon, and thanks to everyone for joining us today. Speaking first is Apple's CEO, Tim Cook; and he'll be followed by CFO, Luca Maestri. After that, we'll open the call to questions from analysts. Please note that some of the information you'll hear during our discussion today will consist of forward-looking statements, including without limitation those regarding revenue, gross margin, operating expenses, other income and expense, taxes, capital allocation, and future business outlook. Actual results or trends could differ materially from our forecast. For more information please refer to the Risk Factors discussed in Apple's most recently filed periodic reports on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q, and the Form 8-K filed with the SEC today, along with the associated press release. Apple assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements or information, which speak as of their respective dates. I'd now like to turn the call over to Tim for introductory remarks.
Tim Cook:
Thanks, Nancy. Good afternoon and thanks to all of you for joining us today. This has been an exciting and productive quarter for Apple. In my letter to investors at the beginning of January, I wrote that one of Apple's great strengths is our culture of flexibility, adaptability, and creativity. This quarter featured some important announcements that speak to the power of our commitment to innovation and long-term thinking. I'd like to start with some top-line highlights and then move into greater detail with you. I'll get started with financial results. Our revenue was $58 billion toward the high end of our guidance range. We see this result as a positive outcome in light of ongoing headwinds from weaker foreign currencies relative to the U.S. dollar. In constant currency, our year-over-year revenue performance would have been 200 basis points better than our reported results indicate. We had great results in a number of areas across our business. It was our best quarter ever for Services with revenue reaching $11.5 billion. We had a blockbuster quarter for iPad, with revenue up 22% from a year ago. This is our highest iPad revenue growth rate in six years. And it was another sensational quarter for Wearables with growth near 50%. This business is now about the size of a Fortune 200 company, an amazing statistic when you consider it's only been four years since we delivered the very first Apple Watch. I'll talk more about these categories later. While we grew year-over-year in developed markets, and while we had record March quarter results in a number of major markets including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Japan, we did experience a revenue decline in emerging markets. But we feel positive about our trajectory. Our year-over-year revenue performance in Greater China improved relative to the December quarter, and we've seen very positive customer response to the pricing actions we've taken in that market, our trade-in and financing programs in our retail stores, the effects of government measures to stimulate the economy, and improved trade dialog between the United States and China. Our App Store results are still reflecting the impact of the slowdown in regulatory approval in gaming apps in China, but we're encouraged by the recent increase in the pace of approvals. We believe strongly in our long-term opportunity in China, thanks to our robust ecosystem, our talented developer community, and the country's growing population of tech-savvy consumers who value the very best products and services. For iPhone, while our worldwide revenue was down 17% from a year ago, declines were significantly smaller in the final weeks of the March quarter. Looking back at the past five months, November and December were the most challenging, so this is an encouraging trend. We like the direction we're headed with iPhone and our goal now is to pick up the pace. Importantly, our active installed base of devices continues to grow in each of our geographic segments, and set a new all-time record for all major product categories. That growing installed base is a reflection of the satisfaction and loyalty of our customers, and it's driving our Services business to new heights. In fact, we had our best quarter ever for the App Store, Apple Music cloud services, and our App Store search ad business, and we set new March quarter revenue records for AppleCare and Apple Pay. Apple Pay transaction volume more than doubled year-over-year, and we're on track to reach 10 billion transactions this calendar year. Apple Pay is now available in 30 markets, and we expect to be live in 40 markets by the end of the year. More and more transit systems are accepting Apple Pay and New York's MTA system will begin the rollout in early summer. As we've seen in places like London, Tokyo, and Shanghai, contactless entry into transit systems helps to spur broader Apple Pay adoption, and we believe this will get even more people using Apple Pay in the United States. And Ticketmaster has just announced that they will be accepting Apple Pay for ticket purchases on the web and through the Ticketmaster app, and over 50 of their entertainment and sporting event venues are launching contactless tickets this year, including the vast majority of NFL stadiums. Subscriptions are a powerful driver of our Services business. We reached a new high of over 390 million paid subscriptions at the end of March, an increase of 30 million in the last quarter alone. This was also an incredibly important quarter for our Services moving forward. In March, we previewed a game-changing array of new services, each of them rooted in principles that are fundamentally Apple. They're easy to use. They feature unmatched attention to detail. They put a premium on user privacy and security. They're expertly curated, personalized, and ready to be shared by everyone in your family. These features aren't just nice to have. They actually help to eliminate the boundary between hardware, software, and service, creating a singularly exceptional experience for our users. First, building on the great momentum of Apple News, which is already the number one news app in the United States and the United Kingdom, we launched Apple News+. It will bring together over 30 popular magazines, leading newspapers, and digital publishers into a beautiful, convenient, and curated experience within the Apple News app. Apple News+ builds on our commitment to supporting quality journalism from trusted sources, while providing the best magazine and news reading experience ever for mobile devices. Advancing our vision to replace the wallet, we announced Apple Card built on principles Apple stands for like transparency, simplicity, and privacy. Apple Card is integrated into the Wallet app and delivers all new experiences that only Apple can provide integrating our hardware, software and services in an elegant solution that places the customer at the center. It's the first card to encourage you to pay less interest, eliminate fees, and give you daily cash on all your purchases and customer interest to date has been terrific. We also previewed Apple Arcade, the world's first game subscription service for mobile, desktop, and the living room. With over 100 new games, all with no ads or ad tracking, no additional purchases, and respect for user privacy, we've created a service for players of all ages, kids to teens to adults and one that families can enjoy together. The App Store is already the world's biggest gaming platform and we think Apple Arcade is a great way to unleash the creativity of the game developer community with a collection of new games not available on any other mobile platform or in any other subscription service. We can't wait for our customers to experience it for themselves beginning this fall. We were thrilled to provide a peek at what's new for TV. Beginning in mid-May, the all-new Apple TV app will bring together the different ways to discover and watch shows, movies, sports news, and more in one app across iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Mac, smart TVs, and streaming devices. And users can subscribe to and watch new Apple TV channels like HBO Showtime and Starz paying only for services they want all on-demand available on and offline. And coming this fall, Apple TV+ will be the new home for the world's most creative storytellers featuring exclusive original shows, movies, and documentaries. We also had several major product introductions during the quarter. We launched a new, more powerful iMac with dramatic increases in both compute and graphics performance, making it a great update for consumers and pros alike. For our Mac business overall, we faced some processor constraints in the March quarter leading to a 5% revenue decline compared to last year, but we believe that our Mac revenue would have been up compared to last year without those constraints and don't believe this challenge will have a significant impact on our Q3 results. For iPad, we were very happy to return to growth in Greater China while generating strong double-digit growth in each of our other geographic segments. Our great iPad results were driven primarily by strong customer response to iPad Pro. Late in the quarter, we launched an all-new iPad Air with an ultra-thin design, Apple Pencil support, and high-end performance powered by Apple's A12 Bionic chip. In addition, we introduced a new iPad Mini, a major upgrade for iPad fans who love an ultra-portable design and like the new iPad Air, it delivers the power of the A12 Bionic and support for Apple Pencil. Last month, we introduced new AirPods, the second generation of the world's most popular wireless headphones and demand has been incredible. This is nothing less than a cultural phenomenon. With the new Apple-designed H1 chip, the new AirPods deliver faster connect times, more talk time, and the convenience of hands-free Hey Siri. Our retail and online stores continue to be a key point of innovation. As we mentioned in January, we've been working on an initiative to make it simple to trade in a phone in our store, finance the purchase over time, and get help transferring data from the old phone to the new phone. As part of this initiative, we rolled out new trade-in and financing programs in the U.S., China, the U.K., Spain, Italy, and Australia. The results have been striking. Across our stores, we had an all-time record response to our trade-in programs and with more than 4 times the trade-in volume of our March quarter a year ago. With each passing quarter, we're more inspired by the impact our products are having on people's fitness and health. This quarter, we brought the ECG app on Apple Watch Series 4 to Hong Kong and 19 European countries including France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the U.K. Just like when the ECG app launched in the United States, there's hardly a day that goes by that I don't get a letter or an e-mail from a customer in one of these countries talking about how this feature has significantly changed their life. We believe we're really just beginning to tap into what we can do to help our users actively manage their health and well-being. For example, last month Stanford Medicine reported results of the Apple Heart Study, the largest study ever of its kind, which enrolled over 400,000 participants from all 50 states in a span of only eight months. And hundreds of institutions are now supporting health records on iPhone with recent additions including Michigan Medicine and UT Health Austin. In February, we announced that we are working with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to make health records on iPhone available to veterans. This will be the first record sharing platform of its kind available to the VA, which is the largest medical system in the U.S. providing service to more than nine million veterans across more than 1,200 facilities. Apple's innovation extends beyond the impact we have in the lives of our customers to the impact we leave on the world around us. We recently marked Earth Day with several major announcements about our efforts to leave the world better than we found it. We've completed the allocation of our $2.5 billion green bond proceeds across 40 environmental initiatives around the world to projects ranging from solar power generation to water conservation to development of custom alloys for our products made from 100% recycled aluminum. We've announced a major expansion of our recycling programs, including quadrupling the number of locations where U.S. customers can send their iPhones to be disassembled by Daisy, our recycling robot. Each Daisy can now disassemble 1.2 million devices per year, allowing recovered materials to be recycled into the manufacturing process. And we partnered with a record number of our suppliers to follow our lead and transition to 100% clean energy. With the help of these 44 suppliers, we will exceed our goal of bringing four gigawatts of renewable energy into our supply chain by 2020 with over one additional gigawatt projected within that time frame. In the last calendar year alone, the partners that have joined this effort have generated enough clean energy to power over 600,000 homes in the United States. We're very proud of the progress that we and our partners are making, and hope our actions will inspire other businesses to do what they can to protect the world that we share. We are as excited as ever about our great pipeline of hardware, software and services and we're looking forward to sharing more information about the future of our four software platforms at our Worldwide Developer Conference now less than five weeks from now. Everyone here is hard at work to prepare for WWDC, and it's always a privilege to get to share the future of our platforms with the community of world changing developers who bring it to life. You are not going to want to miss this one. We're in the fortunate position of generating more cash than we need to run our business and invest confidently in our future, so today we're announcing the latest update to our capital return program including an increase to our share repurchase authorization and our quarterly dividend. For more details on that and our March quarter results, I'll turn the call over to Luca.
Luca Maestri:
Thank you, Tim. Good afternoon, everyone. Revenue in the March quarter was $58 billion near the high end of the guidance range that we provided 90 days ago and down 5% from last year. Our revenue decline reflects 200 basis points of negative foreign exchange, due to the strength of the U.S. dollar. Overall, products revenue declined 9% driven primarily by iPhone, while Services revenue grew 16% to a new all-time record. We also set a new March quarter record for Wearables Home and Accessories, and we recorded our best iPad growth rate in six years. Company gross margin was 37.6% in line with our guidance. Products gross margin was 31.2% down about 310 basis points sequentially due to the seasonal loss of leverage and headwinds from foreign exchange. Services gross margin was 63.8%, up 100 basis points sequentially due to a different mix and leverage from higher revenue. Net income was $11.6 billion. Diluted earnings per share were $2.46 and operating cash flow was $11.2 billion. Let me provide more color for our various revenue categories. iPhone revenue was $31.1 billion. We're seeing positive customer response to recent pricing actions in certain emerging markets, as well as enhancements to our trade-in and financing programs. And our year-over-year performance improved relative to our December quarter results in Greater China, in the Americas and in Japan. Our active installed base of iPhone reached a new all-time high at the end of March. This growing installed base reflects the industry leading satisfaction and loyalty of our customers. The latest survey of U.S. consumers from 451 Research indicates customer satisfaction of 99% for iPhone XR, XS and XS Max combined. And among business buyers, who plan to purchase smartphones in the June quarter, 81% plan to purchase iPhones. Turning to Services. As Tim said, it was our best quarter ever with $11.5 billion in revenue, an increase of 16% from last year. We generated double-digit revenue growth across the App Store, Apple Music, cloud services, AppleCare, Apple Pay and our App Store search ad business. And we set all-time services revenue records in four of our five geographic segments. We're very happy with this performance. As you can see from our new disclosures, Services accounted for 20% of our March quarter revenue and about one-third of our gross profit dollars. Customer engagement in our ecosystem continues to grow. The number of transacting accounts on our digital content stores reached another new all-time high during the quarter with the number of paid accounts, also setting a new all-time record and growing by strong double-digits over last year. And we now have over 390 million paid subscriptions across our Services portfolio, an increase of 120 million versus just 12 months ago. All subscription categories are growing strong double-digits and as we mentioned a quarter ago, we expect the number of paid subscriptions to surpass 0.5 billion during 2020. On the App Store, our subscription business is extremely diversified and is growing strongly around the world. In fact, the number of paid third-party subscriptions increased by over 40% compared to last year in each of our geographic segments. And across all third-party subscription apps, the largest accounted for only 0.3% of our total Services revenue. Next, I'd like to talk about the Mac. Revenue was $5.5 billion compared to $5.8 billion a year ago with the decline driven primarily by processor constraint on certain popular models. In spite of this challenge, we generated double-digit Mac revenue growth in Japan and Korea setting new all-time Mac revenue records in both markets. On a global basis, nearly half of the customers purchasing Macs during the quarter were new to Mac and the active installed base of Macs reached a new all-time high. We had great results for iPad with $4.9 billion in revenue and growth accelerating from the December quarter to 22%. iPad revenue grew in all five of our geographic segments, with a return to growth in Greater China and strong double-digit growth in all other segments. We had our best March quarter ever for iPad in Japan, and we were especially pleased by performance in Korea, Thailand and Mexico where revenue more than doubled over last year. In total, over half of the customers purchasing iPads during the March quarter were new to iPad and the iPad active installed base also reached a new all-time high. iPad revenue growth has been fueled primarily by the great customer response to our new iPad Pros. These completely redesigned iPads with full-screen Liquid Retina display, Face ID, powerful A12X Bionic chip with Neural Engine and support for the new Apple Pencil and Smart Keyboard make iPad Pro the perfect PC laptop replacement for both consumers and professionals. The most recent surveys from 451 Research measured a 93% customer satisfaction rating for iPad overall. Among customers who plan to purchase tablets 77% of consumers and 75% of businesses plan to purchase iPads. Wearables Home and Accessories revenue set a new March quarter revenue record of $5.1 billion fueled primarily by the strong performance of our Wearables business, which grew close to 50%. Within this category, Apple Watch is the best-selling and most loved smartwatch in the world and produced its best results ever for a non-holiday quarter. It's reaching many new customers with three quarters of purchases going to customers who have never owned an Apple Watch before. Interest in AirPods has been off the charts and we're working hard to catch up with the incredible customer demand. Turning to our retail and online stores. We generated very strong double-digit revenue growth from Apple Watch and iPad. We also announced 50 new Today at Apple sessions during the quarter in three new and expanded formats Skills, Walks and Labs free at our stores around the world. We're making important progress in the enterprise market, helping transform major industries. We're building on Apple's leading position in key functional areas to expand our reach and share within large accounts. Aviation is a strong example of this strategy at work. Across 450 airlines, iPad is overwhelmingly the preferred solution for the pilot's electronic flight bag. We've been making great progress expanding Apple's footprint beyond the cockpit into the cabin, where more than half of the top 50 airlines have now implemented iOS to enhance the guest experience as well as enable a new use case with mobile point-of-sale. We're also seeing traction with other mission-critical airline functions in ground operations and flight maintenance. For example, one of the largest airlines in the world tells us that the adoption of iPad has cut maintenance delays in half. Apple services are also making their way onboard, including growing adoption of Apple Pay for food and beverage purchases and in-flight access to Apple Music. We're also seeing significant iOS traction with large enterprise platforms which are the face of complex back-end systems to tens of millions of employees around the world. The end user employee experience is vital to engagement and productivity and with increasing mobility of today's modern workforce, those experiences are best on native iOS applications. We see great momentum through the growing number of iOS SDKs being delivered by the world's largest enterprise platforms. For instance, SAP's SDK for iOS continues to gain strong traction with their customers, growing by more than 40% in the last six months. And this past quarter Salesforce released its SDK enabling developers to build native iOS applications directly on top of the Salesforce platform. And finally, our enterprise channels continue to build momentum. In February, our Apple at Work initiative was launched with AT&T. This extension to our ongoing collaboration with AT&T will make it easy for more customers to choose the best Apple products for their needs in the enterprise and modernize their business. AT&T will enable business services for Apple products to help companies with their IT strategy, including device management, security, productivity and collaboration. Let me now turn to our cash position. We ended the quarter with $225 billion in cash, plus marketable securities. We also had $101 billion in term debt and $12 billion in commercial paper outstanding, for a net cash position of almost $113 billion. As a result, we are in a very strong position that allows us to invest confidently in all areas of the business, while continuing to return value to our shareholders. Just last year, we announced a commitment to contribute more than $350 billion to the U.S. economy over the next five years, including the creation of 20,000 jobs. More recently, we've announced a major expansion in Austin Texas and in other cities across the country. All these efforts are essential investments to make sure that we're incorporating innovative ideas and top talent wherever they emerge. As we execute those initiatives, we are also able to return over $27 billion to investors during the March quarter. We began a $12 billion accelerated share repurchase program in February, resulting in the initial delivery and retirement of 55.1 million shares. We also repurchased 71.7 million Apple shares for $12 billion through open market transactions and we paid $3.4 billion in dividends and equivalents. Our priorities for cash have not changed over the years. Most importantly, we always want to maintain the cash we need to run our business, maintain strategic flexibility, and invest in our future. We're well on our way towards meeting the investment projections we laid out early last year. We also want to work towards a more optimal capital structure and as we said before, it is our plan to reach a net cash neutral position over time. Given our confidence in Apple's future and the value we see in our stock, our Board has authorized an additional $75 billion for share repurchases. And because we know many of our investors value income, we're also raising our quarterly dividend for the seventh time in less than seven years to $0.77, an increase of about 5% from the previous amount. We paid over $14 billion in dividends and equivalents over the last four quarters alone, making us one of the largest dividend payers in the world. Going forward, we continue to plan for annual increases in dividends per share. As we move ahead into the June quarter, I'd like to review our outlook, which includes the types of forward-looking information that Nancy referred to at the beginning of the call. We expect revenue to be between $52.5 billion and $54.5 billion. This guidance range comprehends 300 basis points of negative foreign exchange impact year-over-year. Also as a reminder, in the June quarter last year, our Services revenue included a favorable $236 million one-time item in connection with the final resolution of various lawsuits. We expect gross margin to be between 37% and 38%. We expect OpEx to be between $8.7 billion and $8.8 billion. We expect OI&E to be about $250 million, and we expect the tax rate to be about 16.5%. Also reflecting the approved increase, today our Board of Directors has declared a cash dividend of $0.77 per share of common stock, payable on May 16, 2019 to shareholders of record as of May 15, 2019. With that, I would like to open the call to questions.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Luca. And we ask that you limit yourselves to two questions. Operator, may we have the first question please?
Operator:
Certainly. Our first question will come from Shannon Cross with Cross Research.
Shannon Cross:
Thank you very much for taking my question. Tim, can you talk a bit more about what you're seeing in China? Clearly, it looks like things are improving sequentially. You also mentioned that last few weeks of the quarter, were stabilizing in emerging markets, I believe. So what are customers saying there and what are your partners saying in China? And then I have a follow-up.
Tim Cook:
Yeah. Thanks for the question, Shannon. We're seeing -- in the iPhone space, we saw a better year-over-year performance in the last weeks of the quarter as compared to the full quarter or November and December, which was sort of a -- it appears to be the trough. I think there's a set of reasons for this. One, we made some price adjustments essentially backing out the weaker currency effect and then some. There's stimulus programs that the government has executed including -- and this happened in early April, VAT being reduced from 16% to 13%, so they've been aggressive in the stimulus side. Three, our trade-in and financing programs that we’ve implemented in our retail stores have been very well received there, and I'm happy with the results to date there. And then four, there's an improved trade dialog between the U.S. and China. And from our point of view, this has affected consumer confidence on the ground there in a positive way. And so, I think it's a set of all of these things and we certainly feel a lot better than we did 90 days ago.
Shannon Cross:
Great. Thank you. And then, I'm sure you're probably expecting a question on Qualcomm settlement. So what would you like to say on this settlement? How are you thinking about your component providers going forward? And how should we think about this with regard to -- I don't know your development plans in the future because I'm sure you're not going to talk about when you're going to do 5G, but clearly it helps that path. Thank you.
Tim Cook:
Yeah. Thank you, Shannon. We're glad to put the litigation behind us, and all the litigation around the world has been dismissed and settled. We're very happy to have a multi-year supply agreement, and we're happy that we have a direct license arrangement with Qualcomm, which was I know important for both companies, and so we feel good about the resolution.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Shannon. Can we have the next question, please?
Operator:
The next question will come from Samik Chatterjee with JPMorgan.
Samik Chatterjee:
Hi. Thanks for taking the question. Tim, you talked about China responding well to these pricing actions that you've taken in that market. Do any of those learnings kind of carry through into how you decide pricing in the remaining emerging markets, like India, et cetera as you get ready for the next product cycle?
Tim Cook:
We have made some adjustments in India, and we've seen preliminarily some better results there. Everything that we do does advise everything we do in the future, so we try to learn the best we can and hold [ph] that into our thinking, and we'll obviously do that with this as well.
Samik Chatterjee:
Thank you. I just had a quick follow-up for Luca on the Services side. Luca, we see that you're guiding to higher operating expenses quarter-on-quarter. How much of that incremental is going in to support the new services that you're planning to launch later in the year?
Luca Maestri:
Yeah. Of course, we are supporting both our products and services business and you can see the trajectory of our OpEx over the different quarters. Clearly as we add new services, we will need to make the necessary investments to support them. Our Services business has multiple streams. In total, it is accretive to company gross margins. You've seen the latest -- we're running services margins at over 60%. So, it's a very important business for us in many ways for our ecosystem and for our ability to monetize it. And so, clearly we will make all the necessary investments to ensure that the new services are successful, and we're really encouraged by the level of customer response that we received so far in anticipation for the launch of these services.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Samik. Can we have the next question please.
Operator:
The next question will come from Katy Huberty with Morgan Stanley.
Katy Huberty:
Thank you. Luca, if I look back over the past five years, June quarter revenue typically declines about 15% from the March quarter. You're guiding to an 8% drop this year. So can you just talk about, which regions or product segments you think can outperform that typical seasonality?
Luca Maestri:
Yes, Katy. And keep in mind by the way, we are reporting this guidance including a 300 basis point negative impact from foreign exchange, so actually in constant currency the numbers would be even stronger. At the product category level, we expect that we will continue to have strong revenue growth from the non-iPhone categories as we've had for the first half of our fiscal year. We're also expecting a relative improvement in our iPhone performance on a year-over-year basis in Q3 versus the first half. As Tim said, March was the strongest month of the quarter on a year-over-year basis and so this has given the confidence to provide the guidance that you've seen. Geographically, of course, as you've seen from our results for the March quarter, China is the geo where we found some challenges, but we believe the trajectory should improve over time.
Katy Huberty:
Thank you. And then just as a follow-up, Shannon said you're not going to talk specifics around the timing of the 5G phone, but Tim maybe you can talk about how the company approaches a new technology like this given the higher cost but also potentially significant benefit, how you think about the right timing for coming to market with a product, with those characteristics? And then just generally how meaningful you think 5G is as a demand driver for upgrades in your iPhone installed base? Thank you.
Tim Cook:
Katy, this is one that I'm going to largely punt on as you would probably guess. We look at a lot of things on the different technologies and try to look at the -- and select the right time that things come together and get those into products as soon as we can. And the -- certainly from a cost point of view there has been -- the technologies have had cost pressure over the last couple of years or so. On the flip side of that there's a number of things in the commodity markets going in the other direction at the moment like DRAM and NAND. And so it's difficult to project what happens next, but it's the aggregate of all of it that really matters from a price point of view.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Katy. So we have the next question, please.
Operator:
Jim Suva from Citi has our next question.
Jim Suva:
Thank you very much. A topic that's probably split or shared by both Tim and Luca on a response, but I'll ask the question and you can decide how to divide it up. In your opening remarks, Tim, you'd mentioned about pricing adjustments that you made in some of the markets and then Luca talked also about the strength of the trade-in program or maybe it was Tim also. Can you help us understand about what type of lessons or elasticity you've learned about pricing and the trade-in programs of how it impacts like revenues and COGS and margins and things? Thank you.
Tim Cook:
Yeah. Jim, in the opening remarks I was really talking about China specifically. And I mentioned four things that I believe are responsible for the better year-over-year performance in the Q2 relative to Q1 and also the final weeks of March being better than the Q2 average. And those four are the price reductions, but that's one of them. But there are three others and one of the others is the trade-in and financing programs that we instituted in our retail stores. Clearly, what we've learned here and it's not a surprise really is that the -- many, many people do want to trade-in their current phone. It does -- from a customer user point of view the trade-in looks like a subsidy, and so it is a way to offset the device cost itself. And many people in literally every market that we've tried this in, there is a reasonable number of people that want to take and pay for something on installments instead of all at once. And so, it's a little different in each market in terms of what the elasticity is, but you can bet that we're learning quickly on all of those. The other two items that are not insignificant in China that I don't want to lose here is that the stimulus programs, I believe, are having an effect on the consumer. And the one that I got much visibility in -- that happened in early April was the VAT reduction from 16% to 13%, so it's a very aggressive move. But there are other stimulus programs as well that likely have an effect to the consumer level. And then finally -- and this is not to be under weighted either -- I think the improved trade dialogue between the countries affects consumer confidence in a positive way. And so, I think it's sort of the sum of all of those things.
Luca Maestri:
And Jim, if I may add on the gross margin level as we look at pricing actions, of course, anytime you do a pricing action it is gross margin percentage diluted. But what really matters to us and what we look at -- when we look at the elasticity of these programs is to see the impact on our gross margin dollars. And what -- the experience that we've had in a few of these emerging markets has been positive in that respect and so that's what we think matters the most really.
Jim Suva:
Thank you so much, gentlemen.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Jim. We have the next question, please.
Operator:
The next question will come from Wamsi Mohan with Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
Wamsi Mohan:
Hi. Yes. Thank you. Tim, you shared a lot of color around trade-ins, but I was also hoping maybe you can characterize what sort of dynamics you're seeing across your installed base on these trade-ins. What type of devices are being traded in? Is the profile of someone who has a really old iPhone? Or are you seeing folks that have newer iPhones trading in? And what sort of incentives are you providing beyond sort of the financing to drive that? And do you see this as something that can accelerate replacement cycles here over the next year or so? And I have a follow-up.
Tim Cook:
We're -- actually the product that's being traded in is all over the place, to be honest. It's 6, 6 Plus, 6S, 6S Plus, 7, 7 Plus and then fewer 8 and 8 Plus. But there's some of each of those and so you get customers that are on the two-year cycle and customers -- some customers on the one-year cycle and then customers as well on the three and four-year cycles. And so it's really all over the place. In terms of the incentives we're offering currently in our retail stores a trade-in value that has -- that is more than the sort of the blue book of the device if you will for lack of a better description. And so we have topped those up to provide an extra benefit to the user. The installments are different in each geography. I would say that at the moment the geography that is doing the best in installments would be China. And we have a bit of a unique offering there I think versus the -- versus what you can get in the regular market and so that probably further helps there. And so you can bet that we're learning on each of these finding the parts that the user likes the most. I think the key is we're trying to build a -- build something into the consumer mindset that it's good for the environment and good for them to trade in their current device on a new device. And we do our best of getting the current device to someone else that can use that or in some cases if the product is at an end of life we are recycling the parts on it to make sure that it can carry on in another form.
Wamsi Mohan:
Thanks for the color Tim. And as my follow-up Luca can you just clarify if the settlement with Qualcomm is creating either a headwind or a tailwind to your gross margins in the near-term? And does your guidance contemplate incremental pricing actions that could be creating some gross margin headwinds? Thank you.
Luca Maestri:
As Tim has explained we've reach this comprehensive agreement with Qualcomm. As part of this we have agreed that we're not going to share the financial terms of the agreement, so we plan to honor that. What you see in our gross margin guidance for the June quarter we guided 37% to 38% fully comprehends the outcome of the agreement with Qualcomm.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Wamsi. Could we have the next question please?
Operator:
Mike Olson from Piper Jaffray has our next question.
Mike Olson:
Thanks for taking my question. So, you have more than 1.4 billion active devices and at your event you announced services that leverage that installed base. And you have obviously a remarkable position with kind of this Trojan horse of devices out in so many households. So, I guess, the question is and I know some of these services aren't even live yet but should we expect a continuation of the building out of new services categories like what we saw at the March event? Is there a pipeline of new services in the works? Or have we kind of seen what we're likely to see on that front for the near to intermediate term? And then I have a follow-up.
Tim Cook:
Yes, I wouldn't want to get into announcing things on the call, but obviously, we're always working on new things. And -- but we're right now we're really focused on getting these four out there. We have the News+ in the market today. We'll have the Apple Arcade and the Apple TV+ products in the market in the fall and Apple Card will go out in the summer timeframe. And so we've got lots in front of us and we're very excited about getting these out there.
Mike Olson:
Right. And then you mentioned the App Store search ad business a couple of times in the prepared remarks. Is that reaching a point where it's become material and maybe moving the needle for overall services revenue? Or is there anything you can quantify related to that? I also imagine that this is a high-margin business at least maybe higher than the overall Services margin but wondering if you can confirm if that's the case or not. Thanks.
Tim Cook:
It's growing very, very fast Mike. I think it was up around 70% over the previous year. We're expanding into new geographies as well and we still have more geographies out there that we think can move the dial further. So, it is a -- it's definitely a business that is big and getting bigger.
A – Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Mike. Can we have the next question, please?
Operator:
Our next question comes from Louis Miscioscia with Daiwa Capital Markets.
Q – Louis Miscioscia:
Okay and thank you for taking my question. Tim, when you look at the four things that you have announced. And I realize they have different dates when they're coming out but, which ones would you say over the next 12 months has the most potential to help your Services line? And then maybe, which one has the best long-term potential? And then, I have a quick follow-up.
A – Tim Cook:
We're going to wait until we get these things out. And what I can tell you right now is that the -- we're taking sort of consumer interest on the Apple Card and there's been a significant level of interest on that and we're excited. As you know the -- gaming is the top category on the App Store. And so the Apple Arcade will serve some of that market. And it serves it with a different kind of game, which we think will be great for developers and great for users. The TV+ product plays in a market where it's -- there's a huge move from the cable bundle to over the top. We think that most users are going to get multiple over-the-top products. And we're going to do our best to convince them that the Apple TV+ product should be one of them. And then, we're working very hard to get everyone to give Apple News+ a look. Because we think it's a very unique product. And I love magazines. And we have really wanted to support the publishers. And so, we're working very hard to -- at the -- but at the very beginning of the ramp there. We wouldn't do a service…
Q – Louis Miscioscia:
Okay, great.
A – Tim Cook:
…that we didn't think could be meaningful. So that's sort of the way I look at it.
Q – Louis Miscioscia:
Great.
A – Tim Cook:
Yeah, these aren't hobbies.
Q – Louis Miscioscia:
Okay. A quick follow-up on India, obviously market share there is well below China. I believe you're looking to start manufacturing there. But what's the -- obviously the potential could be huge but the market already seems to be pretty dominated on the Android side, so maybe if you could just talk about trying to really aggressively ramp up share there. Thank you.
A – Tim Cook:
I think India is a very important market in the long-term. It's a challenging market in the short-term. But we're learning a lot. We have started manufacturing there which is very important to be able to serve the market in a reasonable way. And we're growing that capability there. And we would like to place retail stores there. And we're working with the government to seek approval to do that. And so, we plan on going in there with sort of all of our might. We've opened a developer, accelerator there, which we're very happy with some of the things coming out of there. It's a long-term play. It's not something that's going to be on overnight huge business. But I think the growth potential is phenomenal. It doesn't bother me that it's primarily Android business at the moment because that just means there's a lot of opportunity there.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Lou. A replay of today's call will be available for two weeks on Apple Podcasts as a webcast on Apple.com/investor and via telephone. And the numbers to the telephone replay are 888-203-1112 or 719-457-0820. Please enter confirmation code 7060604. And these replays will be available by approximately 5:00 PM Pacific Time today. Members of the press with additional questions can contact Kristin Huguet at 408-974-2414. And financial analysts can contact Matt Blake or me with additional questions. Matt is at 408-974-7406, and I'm at 408-974-5420. And thanks again for joining us.
Operator:
That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for your participation.
Operator:
Good day and welcome to the Apple Incorporated First Quarter Fiscal Year 2019 Earnings Conference Call. Today's call is being recorded. At this time for opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn the call over to Nancy Paxton, Senior Director of Investor Relations. Please, go ahead.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you. Good afternoon and thanks to everyone for joining us. Speaking first today is Apple CEO, Tim Cook, and he'll be followed by CFO, Luca Maestri. After that, we'll open the call to questions from analysts. Please note that some of the information you'll hear during our discussion today will consist of forward-looking statements, including without limitation those regarding revenue, gross margin, operating expenses, other income and expense, taxes, capital allocation, and future business outlook. Actual results or trends could differ materially from our forecast. For more information, please refer to the Risk Factors discussed in Apple's most recently filed periodic reports on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q, and the Form 8-K filed with the SEC today, along with the Associated Press release. Apple assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements or information, which speak as of their respective dates. I'd now like to turn the call over to Tim for introductory remarks.
Tim Cook:
Thank you, Nancy and thanks to everyone for joining us today. This isn't the first time you've heard from us regarding the December quarter, so the first thing I want to do is provide some final results and connect those back to the letter we shared at the beginning of the month. As you know, our December quarter revenue was below our original expectations, coming in at $84.3 billion. That's down 5% from a year ago, or down 3% adjusting for foreign exchange. We noted four factors that would impact our results when we provided guidance in November
Luca Maestri:
Thank you, Tim. Good afternoon, everyone. As Tim said, revenue for the December quarter was $84.3 billion. This result was below our expectations, but we were able to set new all-time revenue records in the U.S., Canada, Latin America, Western Europe, Central and Eastern Europe and Korea. Our results were especially strong in the U.S. where revenue was up by more than $1.5 billion compared to a year ago and in several markets where revenue grew by double digits including among others Germany, Spain, Poland, Mexico, Malaysia and Vietnam. Looking at product categories. iPhone revenue declined 15% from a year ago while revenue from the rest of our business grew 19% to an all-time record, including our best results ever for Services, for Wearables and for Mac. Company gross margin was 38%. This quarter for the first time, we're making an important new disclosure to our investors as we believe it will foster a better understanding of our business. We are now reporting on a quarterly basis, gross margin for products in aggregate and for Services in aggregate. Products gross margin was 34.3% and Services gross margin was 62.8%. On a sequential basis, products gross margin increased 60 basis points due to positive leverage from the holiday quarter, partially offset by higher cost structures as we launched several new products and by headwinds from foreign exchange. Services gross margin also increased 170 basis points sequentially due to favorable mix and leverage, partially offset by foreign exchange. While both products and services gross margins improved sequentially, total company gross margin was down 30 basis points due to a different mix between products and services. Net income was $20 billion about flat to last year and diluted earnings per share were an all-time record at $4.18, an increase of 7.5% over last year. Operating cash flow was also very strong at $26.7 billion. Let me provide more color for the various products categories. iPhone revenue was $52 billion. On a geographic basis, most of the decline from last year came from Greater China and other emerging markets with difficult macro and foreign exchange conditions affected our results. We also believe that the reduction of carrier subsidies and our battery replacement program had an impact in a number of countries around the world. And as Tim mentioned we had a lower number of upgrades than we had anticipated at the beginning of the quarter. However, our global active installed base of iPhones continues to grow and has reached an all-time high at the end of December. We are disclosing that number now for the first time. And it has surpassed 900 million devices, up year-over-year in each of our five geographic segments and growing almost 75 million in the last 12 months alone. We plan to provide information on the iPhone installed base as well as total installed base on a periodic basis. Customer satisfaction and loyalty for iPhone continue to be outstanding and are the highest in the industry. The latest survey of U.S. consumers from 451 Research indicates customer satisfaction of 99% for iPhone XR, XS and XS Max combined. And among business buyers who plan to purchase smartphones in the March quarter 81% plan to purchase iPhones. Based on the latest information from Kantar, iPhone experienced a 90% customer loyalty rating for iPhone customers in the U.S. 23 points above the next highest brand measured. Turning to Services. It was our best quarter ever with revenue of $10.9 billion, up 19% year-over-year with new December quarter records in all five of our geographic segments. Many Services categories set new all-time revenue records and we are on track to achieve our goal of doubling our fiscal 2016 Services revenue by 2020. To be clear and as we've already explained 90 days ago, our 2020 goal remains unchanged and it excludes the impact of the revenue reclassification between products and services we recorded in connection with ASC 606, the new revenue recognition accounting standard that we adopted at the beginning of fiscal 2019. The level of engagement of our customers in our ecosystem continues to grow. The number of transacting accounts on our digital stores reached a new all-time high during the quarter with the number of paid accounts growing by strong double digits over last year. And we now have over 360 million paid subscriptions across our Services portfolio, an increase of 120 million versus a year ago. Given the continued strength and momentum in this part of the business, we now expect the number of paid subscriptions to surpass 0.5 billion during 2020. Our subscription business has become very large and diversified covering many different categories from entertainment to health and fitness to lifestyle. In fact, more than 30,000 third-party subscription apps are available today on the App Store and the largest of them accounts for only 0.3% of our total Services revenue. Next, I'd like to talk about the Mac. We saw great response to the new MacBook Air and Mac mini that we introduced in October, which helped drive a 9% increase in Mac revenue over last year to a new all-time record. Mac revenue was up in the vast majority of countries we track with double-digit growth in many large markets such as the U.S., Western Europe, Central and Eastern Europe, Japan, Korea and South Asia. Our active installed base of Macs reached a new all-time high and half of all the customers purchasing Macs in the December quarter were new to Mac. We also had great results for iPad with revenue up 17% from a year ago. A strong performance of both iPad and iPad Pro and generated double-digit growth in four of our five geographic segments. Similar to the Mac, our installed base of iPads reached a new all-time high and among customers purchasing iPad during the quarter half were new to iPad. The most recent consumer survey from 451 Research measured a 94% customer satisfaction rating for iPad overall, with iPad Pro models scoring as high as 100%. Among business customers who plan to purchase tablets in the March quarter, 68% plan to purchase iPads. Wearables, home and accessories revenue grew 33% to a new all-time record in each of our geographic segments. Revenue from this category was up over $1.8 billion compared to a year ago, thanks to the amazing popularity of Apple Watch and AirPods both of which were supply constrained as we exited the quarter. Based on revenue over the past four quarters, our Wearables business is approaching the size of a Fortune 200 company. Our retail and online stores generated strong results for Mac and iPad and all-time record performance from Services and from Wearables. Following the launch of the new iPhone trade-in campaign, our stores more than doubled the volume of iPhones traded in compared to last year, reaching an all-time high in Q1. We added Thailand to our footprint with a beautiful store in Bangkok and we opened a stunning new store on Champs-Elysees in Paris exiting the quarter with 506 physical stores in 22 countries. In enterprise, across multiple industries our technology continues to enable businesses to do their best work. In healthcare, iPhones and iOS apps continue to streamline and support clinical workflows, communications and care delivery across leading health systems including Johns Hopkins Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, Stanford Health Care and Saint Jude Children's Research Hospital. In manufacturing, SKF the world’s largest producers of bearings and seals, has transformed their manufacturing processes on iOS and iPhone with incredible success. With custom iOS apps available to production operators across their worldwide locations, SKF has reduced production errors from 20 percent to zero while saving 70% in system-related time. Apple technology has made possible a simplified user experience integrating the SAP cloud platform, yielding better accuracy, efficiency, and employee experiences across the board. We’re also seeing great innovation in the construction industry, with iPad and new third-party apps made for iOS. For instance, Procore Technologies has introduced an app to help decrease building errors on the job site. By using Metal in Split View with the iPad camera, construction workers can compare building plants and 3D models to what is actually being built in real time. This new iOS app reduces wasted raw materials and helps keep building projects on time and on budget. Let me now turn to our cash position. We ended the quarter with $245 billion in cash plus marketable securities. We also had $102.8 billion in term debt and $12 billion in commercial paper outstanding, for a net cash position of $130 billion. As we explained in the past, it is our plan to reach a net cash neutral position over time. As part of this plan, we returned over $13 billion to our investors during the December quarter. We repurchased 38 million Apple shares for $8.2 billion through open market transactions and we paid $3.6 billion in dividends and equivalents. Consistent with our historical cadence, we plan to provide an update on our overall capital return program when we report our March quarter results. As we move ahead into the March quarter, I’d like to review our outlook, which includes the types of forward looking information that Nancy referred to at the beginning of the call. We expect revenue to be between $55 billion and $59 billion. This range reflects a negative year-over-year impact of $1.3 billion from foreign exchange, which represents about 210 basis points of last year's revenue and a more uncertain macroeconomic environment than a year ago, especially in emerging markets. We expect gross margin to be between 37% and 38%. On a sequential basis, this range reflects seasonal loss of leverage and a 60 basis point unfavorable impact from foreign exchange, partially offset by commodity cost savings. We expect OpEx to be between $8.5 billion and $8.6 billion. We expect OI&E to be about $300 million and we expect the tax rate to be about 17%. Also today, our Board of Directors has declared a cash dividend of $0.73 per share of common stock, payable on February 14, 2019 to shareholders of record as of February 11, 2019. With that, I'd like to open the call to questions.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Luca. And we ask that you limit yourselves to two questions. And may we have the first question please?
Operator:
Certainly. Our first question will come from Katy Huberty with Morgan Stanley.
Katy Huberty:
Thank you. Good afternoon. Services growth did decelerate from the growth rates in recent quarters, so can you talk about the factors that played into that slower growth? And then, appreciate the new disclosure around paid subscribers. But if you compare what you added in 2018 versus what you expect to add over the next two years, that implies a slowdown in annual net new subscribers. So should we be thinking about services as a lower growth segment than what you experienced in 2018? And then I have a follow-up.
Luca Maestri:
Yes, Katy, let me take that one. First of all, when we talk about the services business, it's very important to start from the momentum that we have. As you know, we have set an ambitious target for ourselves to double the size of our business from fiscal 2016 to 2020, which implied at the time a 19% CAGR. So far, we've been able to grow about 20%. In fiscal 2018, we grew 22%. So we are on track to achieve our objective. And it's important to understand what is driving the growth of the business. First of all, it's our installed base. As we just told you, the installed base continues to grow very nicely. It has reached 1.4 billion active devices at the end of December and really very little of our services revenue is driven by what we sell in the last 90 days. The second factor for the growth of the services business is that within this installed base the percentage of users who are paying for at least one service is growing very strongly. This is due to several factors. First of all, we're offering more and more services. During the last few years, as you know, we launched Apple Music, Apple Pay and advertising service for our developers on the App Store. All these businesses are growing very strongly. Second, we are making it easier for our customers to transact on our digital stores. We accept many more payment methods today which are very common in certain countries around the world. We've also increased the distribution coverage for many of these services. We're bringing AppleCare to more points of sale around the world. We are launching Apple Pay in more and more markets and so on. Thirdly, as you mentioned, our subscriptions are becoming a very large portion of our business and they're growing very well above services average. And the fact that we are saying that we will surpass 0.5 billion during 2020, we're not putting a specific date during 2020, but I think you've seen over recent quarters that we've been adding about 120 million on a year-over-year basis for a number of quarters now. And this is an incredible staggering number, right, when you think about it. We are also broadening the scope of many of these services. If you take Apple Pay as an example, it started off as the most convenient, most private and most secure way to make a payment in a store or in an app. Then we took Apple Pay to Safari, then we started a peer-to-peer service and we're launching it in new markets across the world every quarter, so we are broadening that scope. And of course, similar to what we've done in the past in the last three years, we launched several new services, we're also looking to launch new services going forward that we believe will provide great value to our users and we're really very excited about the opportunities that we see in front of us. I think you're referring to the deceleration in the growth rate that we've seen in the December quarter. And I think you're referring back to the growth that we reported in September. I think an important point I need to make, and I think it's helpful that you asked the question, is that a portion of this deceleration is truly just a reclassification of the amortization of free services that we've made in connection with the adoption of the new revenue recognition standard. And as we explained 90 days ago, this amortization of free services in the past was reported under Products and now gets reported under Services. The reclassification is actually dilutive to our growth rate because the amortization of free services is a relatively stable number, which gets applied to a growing base. So this reclassification reduces our growth rate versus the previous classification. This factor by itself represents roughly one-third of the deceleration that you're seeing. We talked about 27% growth in the September quarter. With the reclassification that growth rate was about 24.5%. So that explains about a third of that deceleration. There are, I would say three factors that explain this difference between the 24.5% to the 19%. The first one is that foreign exchange plays a role. Roughly 60% of our Services business is outside the United States. And as you know the U.S. dollar has appreciated in recent months. And in general, we tend not to reprice our services for foreign exchange on a very frequent basis. The second factor is a well-known issue around the App Store in China. The App Store in China is a large business for us. We believe this issue around the approval of new game titles is temporary in nature, but clearly is affecting our business right now. And then thirdly, we are seeing some level of deceleration in AppleCare, which has had very, very strong growth during fiscal 2018, where we're starting to lap some of the increase in distribution coverage that we put in place recently and the channel fill of Apple components that happened when we increase the distribution coverage. But in general, we are very, very pleased with 19% growth and we think that the business will continue to grow nicely going forward.
Katy Huberty:
Thank you for that color. Just a quick follow-up, Luca. Share repurchases in the December quarter were well below the run rate from the June and September quarters. How much did the weaker quarter play into your ability to carry out the buyback at the same level? And what should we think about is the right run rate going forward?
Luca Maestri:
Well, we've always said that we're very committed to executing our program. We have done almost $250 billion of repurchases from the beginning of the program. But we've also said that we want to execute the program in an efficient, effective, I will say, disciplined manner. And that takes into account also overall market conditions. So, that's what we did during the course of the December quarter. We -- our fundamental view remains the same. We are optimistic about our future and we think there is great value in our stock. And so we will continue to execute the program. We will continue to report at the end of every quarter. And by the way, when we report our March quarter results, we will also talk about the next step in our capital return program which is something that we do traditionally in the spring.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Katy. Can we have the next question, please?
Operator:
The next question will come from Steve Milunovich with Wolfe Research.
Steve Milunovich:
Great. Thank you very much. Some have the perception that you priced the new products, the new iPhones too high, what have you learned about price elasticity? And do you feel that perhaps you pushed the envelope a little bit too far and might have to bring that down in the future?
Tim Cook:
Steve, it's Tim. If you look at what we did this past year, we priced the iPhone Xs in the U.S. the same as we priced the iPhone X a year ago. The iPhone Xs Max which was new was $100 more than the Xs. And then we priced the XR right in the middle of where the entry iPhone 8 and entry iPhone 8 Plus have been priced. So, it's actually a pretty small difference in the United States compared to last year. However, the foreign exchange issue that Luca spoke of in the call and -- made that difference or amplified that difference in international markets, in particular the emerging markets which tended to move much more significantly versus the dollar. And so what we have done in January and in some locations and some products is essentially absorbed part or all of the foreign currency move as compared to last year and therefore get close or perhaps right on the local price from a year ago. So, yes, I do think that price is a factor. I think part of it is that, the FX piece. And then secondly in some markets as I had talked about in my prepared remarks, the subsidy is probably the bigger of the issues in the developed markets. I had mentioned Japan, but also even in this country even though the subsidy has gone away for a period of time. If you're a customer that your last purchase was a 6s or 6 or in some cases even a 7, you may have paid $199 for – and now in an unbundled world it's obviously much more than that. And so we are working through those and we've got a number of actions to address that including the trade-in and the installment payments which I had mentioned as well.
Steve Milunovich:
I know that you're not giving units going forward, but you said you might make qualitative comments. I was wondering, if you have a comment particularly on the ASP on a year-over-year basis?
Luca Maestri:
Well Steve, we did mention on the call last quarter that the different timing of our phone launches would affect the year-over-year compares. If you remember, our top models the Xs and Xs Max shipped during the September quarter, which plays the channel fill and the initial sales in that quarter. While last year the iPhone X shipped in Q1 in the December quarter, plays in the channel fill and initial sales in the December quarter. So we knew that this would create a difficult compare for Q1 of 2019 and this is essentially what happened. It was pretty much in line with our expectations. To give you more color I would say that, the XR is our most popular model and it's followed by Xs Max and then the Xs.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Steve. Could we have the next question, please?
Operator:
The next question will come from Toni Sacconaghi with Bernstein.
Toni Sacconaghi:
Yes. Thank you. I have one for Luca and one for Tim. Luca, looks like the midpoint of your Q2 revenue guidance implies the steepest Q1 to Q2 sequential decline in iPhone revenues in history. It also implies a year-over-year deceleration in iPhone revenues. And I'm wondering, if you can comment about whether that's conservatism, whether you're entering the quarter with a high level of channel inventory and maybe you can comment explicitly on that, or whether you actually think the macroeconomic conditions are getting worse?
Luca Maestri:
Yeah. I mean three questions there. The first one is a question around conservatism. As we always do when we provide a range, it's a range that we believe we're going to fall within. We've done pretty well with that up until the December quarter, right? I mean, we've been – we didn't miss in years and years. So that's the idea. There isn't a specific level of conservatism. We believe that this is the range where we're going to fall within. On channel inventory, as you know our historical pattern for iPhone channel inventory is that typically we increase inventory in Q1 and we decrease in Q2. And we think this year will be similar and we've exited the December quarter with levels of inventory that we are comfortable with. So that leaves us with the reality that our iPhone performance in Q1 from a revenue standpoint was minus 15%. And we expect that the key factors that Tim mentioned during the call affecting iPhone performance in Q1 will also have an effect on Q2 starting with the strong U.S. dollar environment. On a year-over-year basis, the negative impact from currency is going to be about $1.3 billion, so that's about a bit more than two points versus last year's revenue and so that obviously plays a role. And the macroeconomic environment particularly in emerging markets will continue to be there. On the positive side, we expect that we will continue to grow revenue nicely from the rest of the business which is not iPhone.
Toni Sacconaghi:
Okay. Tim, at your September event Lisa Jackson, an Apple VP, stated the company needed to quote design products to last as long as possible. And Apple's clearly doing that by helping with the battery replacement program, iOS working on an older range of products et cetera. But I guess the question is why doesn't that mean that replacement or upgrade cycles for iPhones should continue to extend going forward in part because that's almost one of your objectives? And maybe to that end, maybe you can help us understand what iPhones' average replacement cycle might be today, and how that may have changed over the last three to five years. And again, why wouldn't you expect it to elongate over time given some of the aforementioned things? Thank you.
Tim Cook:
We do design our products to last as long as possible. Some people hold onto those for the life of the product and some people trade them in. And then that phone is then redistributed to someone else. And so it doesn't necessarily follow that one leads to the other. The cycles -- the average cycle has extended. There's no doubt about that. We've said several times I think on this call and before, that the upgrades for the quarter were less than we anticipated due to the -- all the reasons that we had mentioned. So, where it goes in the future, I don't know, but I'm convinced that making a great product that is high quality, that is the best thing for the customer and we work for the user. And so that's the way that we look at it.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Toni. Could we have the next question, please?
Operator:
Next question will come from Shannon Cross with Cross Research.
Shannon Cross:
Thank you very much. I wanted to ask about the trajectory of Services gross margin, up about 500 basis points it appears year-over-year. You talked a little bit about sequential. But what's driving the improvement or will it be volatile as we go through the year depending on quarters and mix? Just whatever color you can give us as we start to forecast this? Thank you.
Luca Maestri:
Yes, Shannon. I think you've seen that Services gross margins increased on a year-over-year basis by a significant amount. Let me start with sequential because I think it's probably most relevant for us. Sequentially, we increased 170 basis points. It's a business that is growing nicely, so we get good support from our scale. Some of these services are scaling quickly and so we tend to expand gross margins there. And also, we had favorable mix. As you probably know, we have a very broad portfolio of Services. Some of them tend to be accretive to the average gross margin for services, also because of the way we account for them. For example, you know that on the App Store, we book revenue on a net basis and therefore the gross margins tend to be accretive. But we also have services that are very successful, that are below the average for the services business. And so depending on how these separate businesses do in the marketplace, we're going to be seeing some level of movement going forward on services margins. But you've seen that for the last 12 months they've gone up nicely 450 basis points and sequentially they've gone up 170 basis points. But I wouldn't draw necessarily a conclusion on how this services gross margin is going to move over time. We will report of course at the end of every quarter. But important to keep in mind, it's a broad portfolio with very different gross margin profiles within the portfolio. It is important for us to grow gross margin dollars. And if at times we grow services that are at a level of gross margins, which is below average, as long as this is good for the customer and as long as we generate gross margin dollars we're going to be very pleased.
Shannon Cross:
Okay, thank you. And then Tim, can you talk a bit about video? You've signed a myriad of deals. There was announcement about -- there are TV app directly on Samsung. So perhaps when this comes out you'll be multi-platform. I'm just curious how you view the opportunity in video. And I guess assuming, you can just leverage the costs that you've made already, it should be accretive to margin I would think?
Tim Cook:
Yeah, Shannon, we see huge changes in customer behavior taking place now. And we think that it will accelerate as the year goes by to sort of the breakdown of the cable bundle that's been talked about for years. And I think that it'll likely take place at a much faster pace this year. And so we're going to participate in that in a variety of ways. One of those is through Apple TV and you're well familiar with that product. The second way is AirPlay 2, which we have as just pointed out we have support on a number of different third-party TVs. And we're excited about that. It makes the experience in the living room with people using our products even better. We think that people are really going to like that. Another way is, of course, all the third-party video subscriptions that are on the store. We are participating in this today. And I would guess that that's going to accelerate into the future as the bundle breaks down and people begin to buy likely multiple services in place of their current cable bundle. And then finally, original content where we will participate in the original content world. We have signed a multiyear partnership with Oprah. But today I'm not really ready to extend that conversation beyond that point. We've hired some great people that I have a super amount of confidence in and they're working really hard and we'll have something to say more on that later.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Shannon. Could we have the next question, please?
Operator:
The next question will come from Walter Piecyk with BTIG.
Walter Piecyk:
Great, thanks. I just have a question on the free services. Can you just describe how the math works on that? Is it that the free services are non cash revenue that's getting booked in the Services revenue with no cost and then the costs come out of products? Can you just run us through what the current status versus how you were accounting for that before?
Luca Maestri:
Yes in essence when we sell a product at a certain price, we make an assumption. We estimate the value that can be associated to providing free services. In our case, it's providing Maps services, providing Siri and providing free iCloud to all the customers that purchase our product. And so we calculate an estimated value. That value gets deferred and gets amortized over the estimated period of time that we deliver the free services. In the past that deferral and the subsequent amortization was reported under products. Now in connection with the new revenue recognition standard, we are reclassifying essentially that amortization from products revenue to services revenue. So total revenue has not changed, we just report that estimated value under the Services category. We also reclassify the cost that we need to incur to provide those services. So the gross margin rate of these services is clearly significantly dilutive to the overall Services margin. I hope I've...
Walter Piecyk:
So it did make services gross margin, got it. And then my other -- my second question is just, when you think about growth in Services, you have selling more to existing paid subscription customers or it's the 300 million going to 0.5 billion. If you can just talk at a high level as far as when you look at growth going forward, is it about -- what is the mix in terms of selling more to existing users, getting new users or -- and maybe some of the individual services that you see the biggest growth opportunity? Thank you.
Luca Maestri:
Yes. I mean as I said I mean essentially what -- services -- I said services too is our installed base. So the first driver is growing the installed base. Installed base has grown nicely over the last several years. We've added 100 million in the last 12 months alone. So that's the first step. Then within that installed base, of course we want to make sure that there are more people that are so interested in our services that in addition to transacting on those services on a free basis, they also are interested in paying for those services. And I mentioned that the percentage of paid accounts has increased strong double-digits. So we want to continue to do that. We want to make it easier for our customers to actually use our services and so we are accepting more and more payment methods around the world. And clearly, as you said the idea of adding new services is very important to us. During the last three years, we've added Apple Pay, which has been incredibly successful and is a wonderful customer experience. We've added Apple Music, where we now have more than 50 million paid subscribers and continues to grow very nicely. And we've added a very useful service to our developers. We provide an advertising service for developers in the App Store. The way we've added these services in the past, obviously, we're also very interested in adding new services that can provide great value to our customers in the future. Now we don't want to get into product announcements here, but obviously that is part of our strategy.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you all. A replay of today's call will be available for two weeks on Apple Podcast, as a webcast on apple.com/investor and via telephone. And the numbers for the telephone replay are 888-203-1112 or 719-457-0820. Please enter confirmation code 2358120. These replays will be available by approximately 5:00 PM Pacific Time today. Members of the press with additional questions can contact Kristin Huguet at 408-974-2414. Financial analysts can contact Matt Blake or me with additional questions. Matt is at 408-974-7406, and I'm at 408-974-5420. And thanks again for joining us.
Operator:
That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for your participation.
Executives:
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc. Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc. Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.
Analysts:
Wamsi Mohan - Bank of America Merrill Lynch Shannon S. Cross - Cross Research LLC Mike J. Olson - Piper Jaffray & Co. Kathryn Lynn Huberty - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC Jim Suva - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.
Operator:
Good day and welcome to the Apple Incorporated fourth quarter fiscal year 2018 earnings conference call. Today's call is being recorded. At this time for opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn the call over to Nancy Paxton, Senior Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you. Good afternoon and thanks to everyone for joining us. Speaking first today is Apple CEO Tim Cook and he'll be followed by CFO Luca Maestri. After that, we'll open the call to questions from analysts. Please note that some of the information you'll hear during our discussion today will consistent of forward-looking statements, including without limitation those regarding revenue, gross margin, operating expenses, other income and expense, taxes, capital allocation, and future business outlook. Actual results or trends could differ materially from our forecast. For more information, please refer to the Risk Factors discussed in Apple's most recently filed periodic reports on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q, and the form 8-K filed with the SEC today, along with the Associated Press release. Apple assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements or information, which speak as of their respective dates. I'd now like to turn the call over to Tim for introductory remarks.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Nancy. Good afternoon everyone, and thanks for joining us. I just got back from Brooklyn, where we marked our fourth major launch event of the year. In addition to being a great time, it put an exclamation point at the end of a remarkable fiscal 2018. This year, we shipped our 2 billionth iOS device, celebrated the 10th anniversary of the App Store, and achieved the strongest revenue and earnings in Apple's history. In fiscal year 2018, our revenue grew by $36.4 billion. That's the equivalent of a Fortune 100 company in a single year, and we're capping all that off with our best September quarter ever. Revenue was $62.9 billion, ahead of our expectations. That's an increase of 20% over last year and our highest growth rate in three years. We also generated record Q4 earnings with 41% year-over-year growth in EPS. Record results from iPhone, services, and wearables drove our momentum and we produced strong double-digit revenue growth in all of our geographic segments. It was a big year and a big quarter for iPhone. Q4 revenue was up 29% over last year, an increase of over $8 billion to a new September quarter record fueled by continued momentum for iPhone 8, 8 Plus and X, and the very successful launch of iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max. These latest devices are our most advanced iPhones ever with the industry's first 7-nanometer A12 Bionic chip with an Apple designed 8-core Neural Engine capable of executing an astounding 5 trillion operations per second. The A12 Bionic is many years in the making and a huge technological leap forward. It sets the iPhone experience far apart from the competition, using real-time machine learning to transform the way we experience photos, gaming, augmented reality and more. It makes full use of the dual camera system that shoots portrait mode photos with Smart HDR and dynamic depth of field and Face ID is even faster. The response has been powerful. As one reviewer put it, iPhone XS and XS Max are the perfect blend of design and craftsmanship, as well as seamlessly intuitive user experience. We're not done yet. Just last week, we began shipping iPhone XR, bringing the latest iPhone breakthroughs to even more users. With an all-screen glass and aluminum design and the most advanced LCD in a smartphone, the product reviews have been overwhelmingly positive. iOS 12 has gotten off to an incredible start. It's been installed on more systems in its first month than any version of iOS ever. iOS 12 is delivering system-wide performance enhancements, Siri Shortcuts, and new tools to help people reduce interruptions and manage screen time for themselves and their kids. Siri Shortcuts in particular is already deeply integrated with some of the most popular apps out there. Whether you're tracking your workouts or rushing to catch a flight, you can be sure all of your most relevant apps are working together with Siri in the driver seat. iOS 12 also features ARKit 2, a major upgrade to our augmented reality engine. ARKit 2 makes possible simultaneous multi-user experiences and real-world object incorporation. Our developer community is really running with this technology. From gaming to shopping, we're seeing great new use cases emerge. iOS devices deliver the best AR experiences of any products in the market today and with the announcement of our new iPad Pro this week, we've made that gap even wider. More powerful than the vast majority of PC laptops, the new iPad Pro is unrivalled in its versatility and performance. When paired with the beautifully refined Apple Pencil and a new streamlined full-size Smart Keyboard, iPad Pro will extend its lead as the ultimate creativity and productivity device. And finally, just this week, we delivered the highly anticipated Group FaceTime functionality to all FaceTime-enabled devices. For services, it was our best quarter ever with revenue at $10 billion. Excluding the impact of a favorable one-time accounting adjustment of $640 million a year ago, our services growth was 27%. We set new Q4 records in all of our geographic segments and new all-time revenue records for the App Store, cloud services, AppleCare, Apple Music and Apple Pay. We also continued to see strong growth in paid subscriptions reaching over 330 million in our ecosystem. I want to spotlight the exceptional performance at Apple Pay, which is by far the number one mobile contactless payment service worldwide. Transaction volume tripled year-over-year. And to put that into perspective, Apple Pay generated significantly more transactions than even PayPal Mobile with over 4 times the growth rate. As a testament to accelerating U.S. growth, Costco completed the rollout of Apple Pay to over 500 U.S. warehouses last quarter, while Neiman Marcus is now accepting Apple Pay at over 40 stores across the country. With these additions, 71 of the top 100 merchants and 60% of all U.S. retail locations support Apple Pay. We continue to invest in our strategy to replace the wallet with the recent launch of student ID passes at several major U.S. universities. And 10 months following its launch, Apple Pay Cash is the highest-rated mobile peer-to-peer service by Consumer Reports, based on exceptional payment authentication and data privacy. We set an all-time quarterly record for Mac revenue, thanks to strong performance in MacBook Pro and the impact of the back-to-school season. In September, we delivered macOS Mojave, bringing powerful new features to Mac like Dark Mode, Stacks and a completely redesigned Mac App Store. Consider alongside the release of iOS 12, WatchOS 5 and a new tvOS, macOS Mojave tells a powerful story of the seamless integration of world-class hardware, software and services that define the Apple ecosystem. As I mentioned at the beginning of the call, earlier this week we announced exciting updates to the Mac lineup. The all-new MacBook Air brings a stunning Retina display, Touch ID, the latest processors and an even more portable design to the world's most beloved notebook. We also unveiled the biggest update ever to Mac mini, the small yet muscular desktop that powers everything from the music and sound effects at Broadway shows to the developers who build some of the most popular apps in the App Store. The new Mac mini boasts an amazing 5 times faster performance than before. With revenue growth over 50%, it was another record quarter for wearables, which includes Apple Watch, AirPods and Beats products. With the highest customer satisfaction in the industry, Apple Watch has become an essential part of people's lives. The customer response to the Apple Watch Series 4 has been overwhelmingly positive, driven by its all-new design, larger display, faster performance, fall detection, enhanced cellular reception and electrical heart sensor. Later this year, the ECG App will be available to Apple Watch Series 4 customers in the U.S., giving them the ability to take an electrocardiogram any time, right from their wrist. And for U.S. customers with Apple Watch Series 1 and later, WatchOS will soon enable periodic checks for irregular heart rhythms that may be suggestive of AFib. These are unprecedented and potentially life-changing features, showing how Apple Watch is not only an indispensable communication and fitness companion but also an intelligent guardian for your health. More broadly, we see this as just one further example of the kind of contribution we can make in the health space and we look forward to making more in the future. We are proud to bring HomePod to new customers. I was in Spain last week as HomePod became available there and in Mexico. HomePod delivers the highest fidelity audio quality, working together with an Apple Music subscription to stream over 50 million songs into any room of your home. Our retail team posted record Q4 results to conclude their biggest year ever. They are transforming our stores into places where customers come to connect, learn, and be inspired together with people from their community. Our Today at Apple sessions are a terrific example of what that looks like in practice. We hosted over 250,000 Today at Apple sessions this quarter, connecting aspiring creators with local photographers, illustrators, and other experts who can help them get the most out of their devices. Apple Stores also hosted 74,000 kids at Apple Camp. The relationship Apple has with our customers is about more than just making a purchase. With the recent addition of beautiful new stores in Italy, Japan, China, and in just a few weeks, Thailand, we will have 506 stores where we can further those relationships, almost half of which are outside the United States. Before I turn the call over to Luca, I'd like to touch on two items that may not show up in our financial statement but are just as integral to Apple's mission and our commitment to making the world a better place. First education, more than 5,000 schools, community colleges, and technical colleges worldwide are now using Everyone Can Code, our free coding curriculum. Ideas, creativity, and passion for technology's potential aren't limited by zip code or country, and we don't think opportunity should be either. We're also excited that educators in more than 350 schools around the world have started working with Everyone Can Create, the free collection of tools and project guides we introduced this spring, designed to help unleash kids' creativity throughout their school day with the help of iPad. Next is the environment. This was a milestone year for Apple's commitment to our planet. In April, we announced that 100% of our global operations are powered by renewable energy. We also made progress in doing the same in our supply chain. And just this week, we announced that the enclosures of new products like MacBook Air and iPad Pro will be made from 100% recycled aluminum, a strong, durable, and beautiful new alloy designed by Apple. This is a great example of how a commitment to do right on the issues that matter can drive once unimaginable innovation, new ways of approaching old problems, and beautiful solutions that set us apart. I'd like to thank all of our employees, customers, developers, and business partners for helping us deliver outstanding results across our fiscal 2018. We are headed into the holidays with our strongest product lineup ever, and we could not be more bullish about Apple's future. And now, Luca has more details to share with you on the September quarter. Luca?
Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Tim. Good afternoon everyone. We are extremely pleased to report record results for our September quarter, which capped a tremendously successful fiscal 2018, a year in which we saw double-digit revenue growth in every geographic segment and established new revenue and earnings records in every single quarter. Revenue in the fourth quarter was $62.9 billion, up 20% and more than $10 billion over last year, with strong double-digit growth in each of our geographic segments and record Q4 revenue in the Americas, in Europe, Japan, and the rest of Asia-Pacific. In fact, we set new revenue records in almost every market we track, with especially strong growth in Germany, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, Japan, and Korea, all major markets where revenue growth was 25% or higher. We also set new fourth quarter revenue records for iPhone and wearables and new all-time records for services and Mac. Gross margin was 38.3%, flat sequentially, in line with our expectations, as leverage from higher revenue offset seasonal transition costs. We set new September quarter records for net income, EPS, and cash flow from operations. Net income was $14.1 billion, up $3.4 billion or 32% over last year. Diluted earnings per share were $2.91, up 41%. Cash flow from operations was $19.5 billion, up $3.8 billion from a year ago. iPhone revenue grew 29% with growth of more than 20% in every geographic segment. iPhone ASP was $793 compared to $618 a year ago, driven by strong performance of iPhone X, 8 and 8 Plus, as well as the successful launch of iPhone XS and XS Max in the September quarter this year, while we launched iPhone X in the December quarter last year. We sold 46.9 million iPhones during the quarter, with growth of 20% or more in several markets, including Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, Norway, Chile, and Vietnam. Customer satisfaction with iPhone continues to be outstanding and is the highest in the industry. The latest survey of U.S. consumers from 451 Research indicates customer satisfaction of 98% for iPhone X, 8, and 8 Plus combined. And among business buyers who plan to purchase smartphones in the December quarter, 80% plan to purchase iPhones. Turning to services, it was our best quarter ever in total and virtually in every market around the world, with revenue of $10 billion. A year ago, we had a one-time $640 million favorable impact to services revenue due to an accounting adjustment. And taking that into account, our services growth in Q4 this year was 27%. As Tim mentioned, we reached new all-time quarterly revenue records for many services categories, and we are well on our way to achieve our goal to double our fiscal 2016 services revenue by 2020. We now have over 330 million paid subscriptions on our platform, an increase of over 50% versus a year ago. We are very pleased not only with the growth but also with the breadth of our subscription business. In fact, 30,000 third-party subscription apps are available on the App Store today, and the largest of them all represents less than 0.3% of our total services revenue. Next, I'd like to talk about the Mac. We saw great response to our new MacBook Pro models that we launched in July, with strong double-digit revenue growth driving an all time quarterly record for Mac revenue. We were especially pleased with Mac momentum in emerging markets, with strong growth in Latin America, in India, the Middle East and Africa, and Central and Eastern Europe. At over 100 million units, our active installed base of Macs is at an all-time high, and the majority of customers purchasing Macs in the September quarter were new to Mac. We sold 9.7 million iPads during the quarter, gaining share in nearly every market we track, based on the latest estimates from IDC. We generated iPad growth in a number of key regions around the world, including Latin America, Europe, Japan, India, and South Asia. Among customers around the world purchasing iPads during the quarter, nearly half were new to iPad, and our active installed base of iPads reached a new all-time high. NPD indicates that iPad had 58% share of the U.S. tablet market in the September quarter, up from 54% share a year ago. And the most recent consumer survey from 451 Research measured iPad customer satisfaction ratings of 96% for both iPad and iPad Pro. And among business customers who plan to purchase tablets in the December quarter, 74% plan to purchase iPads. Other products revenue grew 31% to a new September quarter record with an increase of over $1 billion compared to a year ago thanks to wearables growth of over 50% and the strong performance of Apple TV, in addition to the introduction of HomePod earlier this year. As we look back across fiscal 2018, we've made great progress in the enterprise market, where iOS is transforming how business gets done across multiple industries. In fact, over 450 airlines and 47 of the top 50 around the world have adopted iOS to help pilots fly saver, more efficient flights and many airlines are also using iOS to support better customer experiences and improve maintenance operations. We're also making great strides in the retail sector, where 9 of the top 10 global retailers use iOS devices to transform their customer and employee experiences. We're seeing industry-wide adoption of iOS at thousands of retailers from neighborhood boutiques to many of the best-known retailers in the world. Deployment of iOS devices is growing steadily as retailers replace their traditional point-of-sale systems and use custom iOS apps on iPhones and iPads to provide highly personalized shopping experiences. Our success in enterprise is supported by our key partnerships. Since launching our first strategic partnership with IBM, 240 large customers have signed MobileFirst for iOS deals. Additionally, earlier in the year we introduced two new technology offerings. IBM Watson services for Core ML, and the IBM Cloud Developer Console for Apple that are enabling businesses to combine machine learning and cloud for a new generation of dynamic smart apps made for iOS. Over 60 new signings across numerous industries have been added since launching these new tools. In our new partnership with Salesforce, we're excited to bring together the number one customer relationship management platform and iOS. Together with Apple, Salesforce is redesigning its apps to embrace a native mobile platform with exclusive new features on iOS. The companies will also provide tools and resources for millions of Salesforce developers to build their own native apps with a new Salesforce mobile SDK for iOS. And finally, we recently announced Apple Business Manager, a new way for IT teams to deploy Apple devices at scale. The response from companies around the world has been tremendous with over 40,000 companies currently enrolled. Let me now turn to our cash position. We ended the quarter with $237.1 billion in cash plus marketable securities. We also had $102.5 billion in term debt and $12 billion in commercial paper outstanding for a net cash position of $122.6 billion. As explained earlier this year, it is our plan to reach a net cash neutral position over time. As part of this plan, we returned over $23 billion to investors during quarter. We repurchased 92.5 million Apple shares for $19.4 billion through open market transactions and we paid $3.5 billion in dividends and equivalents. For our fiscal year 2018, revenue grew over $36 billion to $265.6 billion, an all-time record. Every geographic segment grew double digits with new records in the Americas, Europe, Japan and rest of Asia-Pacific. We also set new all-time records for net income, up 23% versus last year, and EPS up 29%. And we returned a total of almost $90 billion to our investors during the year, including almost $14 billion in dividends and equivalents and over $73 billion in share repurchases. Before we discuss our December quarter outlook, I'd like to describe a number of changes in our financial reporting that we're implementing as we enter our new fiscal year. First, given the increasing importance of our services business and in order to provide additional transparency to our financial results, we will start reporting revenue as well as cost of sales for both total products and total services beginning this December quarter. Second, also beginning in this December quarter, we're adopting the FASB's new standard for revenue recognition. This will not result in any change to our total revenue, but it will impact the way we report the classification of revenue between products and services. In particular, the revenue corresponding to the amortization of the deferred value of bundled services such as Maps, Siri, and free iCloud services was previously reported in product revenue. After adopting the new standard, this revenue will now be reported in services revenue. The change in classification between products and services will also apply to the costs that are associated with the delivery of such bundled services. After we file our 10-K, we will post a schedule to our Investor Relations website showing the reclassification of fiscal 2018 revenue from products to services in connection with the adoption of the new standard. The size of this reclassification amounts to less than 1% of total company revenue. And for clarity, this reclassification was not contemplated in our previously stated goal of doubling our fiscal 2016 services revenue by 2020. That goal remains unchanged and excludes the revenue that is now shifting from products to services over that timeframe. Third, starting with the December quarter, we will no longer be providing unit sales data for iPhone, iPad and Mac. As we have stated many times, our objective is to make great products and services that enrich people's lives, and to provide an unparalleled customer experience so that our users are highly satisfied, loyal and engaged. As we accomplish these objectives, strong financial results follow. As demonstrated by our financial performance in recent years, the number of units sold in any 90-day period is not necessarily representative of the underlying strength of our business. Furthermore, a unit of sale is less relevant for us today than it was in the past, given the breadth of our portfolio and the wider sales price dispersion within any given product line. Fourth, starting with the December quarter, we will be renaming the other products category to wearables, home, and accessories to provide a more accurate description of the items that are included in this product category. As we move ahead into the December quarter, I'd like to review our outlook, which includes the types of forward-looking information that Nancy referred to at the beginning of the call. We have the strongest lineup ever as we enter the holiday season and we expect revenue to be between $89 billion and $93 billion, a new all-time record. This range reflects a number of factors to be considered. First, we considered the effect on Q4 and Q1 of the launch timing of our new iPhones this year versus last year. Second, we expect almost $2 billion of foreign exchange headwinds. Third, we have an unprecedented number of products ramping, and while our ramps are going fairly well, we have uncertainty around supply and demand balance. And fourth, we also face some macroeconomic uncertainty, particularly in emerging markets. We expect gross margin to be between 38% and 38.5%. We expect OpEx to be between $8.7 billion and $8.8 billion. We expect OI&E to be about $300 million, and we expect the tax rate to be about 16.5% before discrete items. Also today, our board of directors has declared a cash dividend of $0.73 per share of common stock payable on November 15, 2018 to shareholders of record as of November 12, 2018. With that, I'd like to open the call to questions.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Luca, and we'd like to ask that you limit yourself to two questions. Operator, may we have the first question please?
Operator:
Certainly. Our first question will come from Wamsi Mohan with Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
Wamsi Mohan - Bank of America Merrill Lynch:
Yes. Thank you. Tim, there has been some real deceleration in some of these emerging markets, partly driven by some concerns around some of the rules the administration is contemplating and partly driven by things that are more specific to China, for instance, like some of the regulations around gaming. So can you talk about how you see the trajectory there for the business and what you think of the initiatives of some companies like Netflix and Fortnite trying to bypass the App Store around subscriptions and I have a follow-up.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Sure. Great question. Starting with emerging markets. The emerging markets that we're seeing pressure in are markets like Turkey, India, Brazil, Russia. These are markets where currencies have weakened over the recent period. In some cases, that resulted in us raising prices and those markets are not growing the way we would like to see. To give you a perspective in of some detail, our business in India in Q4 was flat. Obviously, we would like to see that be a huge growth. Brazil was down somewhat compared to the previous year. And so I think, or at least the way that I see these, is each one of the emerging markets has a bit of a different story, and I don't see it as some sort of issue that is common between those for the most part. In relation to China specifically, I would not put China in that category. Our business in China was very strong last quarter. We grew 16%, which we're very happy with. iPhone in particular was very strong, very strong double-digit growth there. Our other products category was also stronger, in fact, a bit stronger than even the overall company number. The App Store in China, we have seen a slowdown or a moratorium, to be more accurate, on new game approvals. There is a new regulatory setup in China, and there things are not moving the way they were moving previously. We did see a few games approved recently, but it's very far below the historic pace. And as you've probably seen, some of the larger companies there that are public have talked about this as they've announced their earnings as well. We don't know exactly when this will – the approvals will return to a normal pace, so I would not want to predict that. I do not view – just for avoidance of doubt here, I don't view that that issue has anything to do with the trade-related discussions between the countries. I think that is strictly a domestic issue in China. In terms of larger developers, if you step back and look at the value proposition for people from the App Store, there are two key constituencies in that equation. There's the user and there's the developer. If you start with the user, what the App Store provides people is the best and safest place for users to get apps. And we have a tremendous process and infrastructure around achieving that. And where it is not perfect, we wind up reviewing over 100,000 apps per week between new apps and updates for existing apps, and then work with developers quickly to fix the issues. And we also provide the user a one-payment model for purchasing apps and subscriptions and in-app purchases, et cetera, so that they are not in a position that they have to share their private information across many companies. And so that's the proposition for the user. For the developer, we obviously provide the developers a tremendous amount of developer tools, programs, compilers, languages, of course the operating system, APIs, SDKs, and have a huge developer relations team. And we do a tremendous amount of marketing for developers, including the new Today Editorial that we just started in the past few months, personal recommendations, search tools, and so on and so forth. And so there will be – there's no doubt in my mind there have already been some large developers that concluded that they could do something on their own. We're fine with that. I think Luca mentioned in his comments that the largest – if I look at the largest developer, they make up less than 0.3% of the services revenue, so it's probably good to think about that in that context, and there are millions of apps on the store obviously, and 30,000 or so subscription apps. And so the subscription business itself is nearly as broad as the App Store itself is, and so that's the value proposition. I think that the vast majority of people are very happy with it, including the most important people at all, which is the user.
Wamsi Mohan - Bank of America Merrill Lynch:
Thank you, Tim. I appreciate the response.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Yeah.
Wamsi Mohan - Bank of America Merrill Lynch:
If I could just ask you really quick on Apple's role in healthcare, it's been growing significantly since the early introduction in the Watch and then the various kits for developers, including HealthKit, CareKit, et cetera. And when you combine that with your very staunch advocacy for privacy, I see Apple could become a really large disintermediating force in all the friction in the healthcare industry today in the way medical information is shared and distributed. Is this the way that you see the future for Apple in healthcare? And do you see a means to also grow your services business through the healthcare offerings that could become subscriptions to your customers? Thank you.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
I think Apple has a huge opportunity in health. And you can see from our past several years that we have an intense interest in the space and are adding products and services, non-monetized services, so far to that. And I don't want to talk about the future because I don't want to give away what we're doing, but this is an area of major interest to us. Thank you.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Wamsi. Could we have the next question, please?
Operator:
Shannon Cross from Cross Research has the next question.
Shannon S. Cross - Cross Research LLC:
Thank you very much for taking the question. Given the $4 billion range in revenue that you're giving for the quarter and all the things that are going on in the world right now, can you maybe give a little detail about the variables that you took into account when you were coming up with this? Geopolitical trade, macro, component costs, I don't know if you can just give us some ideas of what the puts and takes were. Thank you.
Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.:
Yes, Shannon, I'll take this one. At the revenue level, we started from the fact that we are very, very excited about the lineup of products and services that we have getting into the holiday season. It's the strongest lineup that we've ever had. And our guidance range, by the way, represents a new all-time quarterly revenue record. As I explained in my prepared remarks, there are a number of things that need to be considered as part of this guidance range. The first one is the fact that the launch timing of the new iPhones this year is essentially in reverse order versus last year, and that has had an effect on Q4 and will have an effect on Q1. Last year, we launched the top end of our iPhone lineup, which was iPhone X, during Q1 and placed the entirety of the channel fill for iPhone X in Q1. This year, we launched the top end of the lineup, which is the XS and the XS Max during Q4. Obviously, this resulted in more pronounced ASP growth in Q4 of 2018 and obviously a tougher compare for Q1. So I think it's important to keep that in mind as you look at the revenue guidance that we provided. The second point that needs to be kept in mind, it is a fact of life and we dealt with it for a number of years now, is the fact that when I look at currencies around the world, virtually every foreign currency has depreciated against the U.S. dollar in the last 12 months. And when we look at the impact of foreign exchange on our revenue for the December quarter, we're looking at 200 basis points of headwinds which translates, given our the size of our business, to almost $2 billion of headwind to our revenue. The third point that I think it's important to keep in mind, and Tim has talked about this, we are launching, in the last six weeks, we've launched an unprecedented number of new products. They're all ramping right now. The ramps are going fairly well, but obviously we have some uncertainty around supply/demand balance for some of these products. And then finally, the last point that we've taken into account is what Tim's talked about in terms of some level of uncertainty at the macroeconomic level in some emerging markets where clearly consumer confidence is not as high as it was 12 months ago. So take that into account and that's how we got to the range.
Shannon S. Cross - Cross Research LLC:
Okay. Thank you. And then, I just want to talk a little bit about the pullback in terms of guidance from a unit perspective. I understand you don't want to give guidance because of 90 days is a short period of time and it can fluctuate, but what kind of qualitative commentary do you think you'll be able to provide? Because it's obviously investors have spent the last however many years going P times Q. So, how should we think about what we can expect and sort of how are you going to manage this process as we go through? I know it's all our job to forecast, but.
Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.:
Yes. Let me walk you through the rationale that we've used and then I'll talk about this qualitative commentary that you were mentioning. As I said, right, our objective is to make great products, provide the best customer experience, and get our customer satisfied, engaged and loyal to our ecosystem. When you look at our financial performance in recent years, take the last three years, for example, the number of units sold during any quarter has not been necessarily representative of the underlying strength of our business. If you look at our revenue, given the last three years, if you look at our net income during the last three years, if you look at our stock price here in the last three years, there's no correlation to the units sold in any given period. As you know very well, in addition, our product ranges for all the major product categories have become wider over time and therefore, a unit of sale is less relevant for us at this point compared to the past, because we got this much wider sales price dispersion, so unit of sale per se becomes less relevant. As I know you're aware, by the way, our top competitors in smartphones, in tablets, in computers, do not provide quarterly unit sales information either. But of course we understand that this is something of interest and when we believe that providing qualitative commentary on unit sales offers additional relevant information to investors, we will do so.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Looking at one additional point there just for clarity is, Shannon, our intention is to continue to give revenue guidance at the company level and gross margin guidance in the other categories that we've been providing and so that our guidance isn't changing. It's the actual report that changes.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Shannon. Could we have the next question please?
Operator:
Our next question comes from Mike Olson with Piper Jaffray.
Mike J. Olson - Piper Jaffray & Co.:
Thanks very much and good afternoon. With the staggered iPhone launch, were you able to discern any impact on the XS and XS Max from buyers potentially waiting for the XR, and what if anything can we take away from the December quarter guidance related to what you're seeing for early demand of the XR? And then I have a follow-up, thanks.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Mike, it's Tim. The XS and XS Max got off to a really great start and we've only been selling for a few weeks. The XR, we've only had out there for I guess five days or so at this point, and so we have very, very little data there. Usually there is some amount of wait until another product shows up and look, but in looking at the data, on the sales data for XS and XS Max, there's not obvious evidence of that in the data, as I see it.
Mike J. Olson - Piper Jaffray & Co.:
Got it, and you mentioned record levels for various components of the services business. As we look forward, if growth of services is to maintain something close to the recent pace, what are the components of services that you're particularly excited about that could drive that and be the strongest drivers? And maybe an offshoot to that, it seems like the news flow around augmented reality has slowed a little bit in recent months. Is that potentially a materially contributor to services in the near future? Thanks.
Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.:
Mike, as we said, during the September quarter, we set new records for many, many services categories, right, from Apple Music to cloud services to the App Store to AppleCare and Apple Pay really has an exponential trajectory right now. When we look at our services business, we think about the fact that we have a very large and growing installed base. The installed base of all our major product categories is at an all-time high and has been growing over the last several quarters, so the opportunity for us to monetize our services business continues to grow over time. Of course, we're also improving the quality of the services that we provide and if you look back during the last three years, we've added new services to our portfolio. We added Apple Pay, we added Apple Music. We added this advertising business on our App Store. And clearly, we will want to continue to offer new services over time, so there are a number of vectors that allow us to continue to grow the business over time. We have stated that we want to double the size of the services business from the level that we had in fiscal 2016 by 2020. We are well on pace to achieve that, and we feel very, very confident about the future and the opportunities that we have in the services space.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Mike, in terms of your question on AR, I have a different view than you do on this one. Just a year ago, practically a year ago, we came out with ARKit 1. Six months or so after that we came out with 1.5. We then recently came out with ARKit 2. The number of things that you can do are growing significantly. The number of developers that either have done something, or even more the case, that are working on things that I've seen are growing tremendously. There's a lot of interest out there and the number of categories that I'm seeing from gaming to shopping, to I was in China a few weeks ago and saw AR in an art sense, in an art exhibit. I was in Berlin last week and saw it being used in a historical educational kind of sense. I'm seeing it sort of everywhere I go now, and so I think we are in the early days, and it'll keep getting better and better, but I'm really happy with where things are at the moment.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Mike. Can we have the next question please?
Operator:
Next we'll go to Katy Huberty with Morgan Stanley.
Kathryn Lynn Huberty - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC:
Thank you. Tim, given the current trade negotiations and broader geopolitical risk, do you have any plans to consider diversifying the supply chain? And if you were to do that, either on your own or sort of forced, do you think it would have significant impact on the business or profitability?
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Katy, if you look at the products that we have created and are manufacturing, they're really manufactured everywhere. We have significant content from the U.S. market. We have content from Japan to Korea to many countries, and we have great content from China as well, and so there are many hands in the products. The vast majority or almost all of the R&D is in the United States, as well as a lot of the support organizations. And so, I think that that basic model where you look around the world and find the best in different areas, I don't expect that model to go out of style, so to speak. I think there's a reason why things have developed in that way and I think it's great for all countries and citizens of countries that are involved in that. And I'm still of the mindset that I feel very optimistic and positive that the discussions that are going will be fruitful. These relationships, these trade relationships are big and complex, and they clearly do need a level of focus and a level of updating and modernization. And so I'm optimistic that the countries, the U.S. and China and the U.S. and Europe and so forth, can work these things out and work for the benefit of everyone.
Kathryn Lynn Huberty - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC:
That's helpful color. And, Luca, as a follow-up, NAND prices fell significantly during the September quarter. Why aren't we seeing that flow through to margin expansion for the overall company?
Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.:
You're referring to the guidance that we provided for Q1, I imagine.
Kathryn Lynn Huberty - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC:
Yes.
Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.:
Let me give you the puts and takes, Katy. You're correct. We are going to be getting some benefits from commodities in general and memory in particular. Memory on a sequential basis is about 30 basis points favorable for us going into the December quarter. And obviously, we're going to be benefiting from the leverage, which is typical of our seasonality in the December quarter. On the other hand, as I mentioned before, currencies have weakened against the U.S. dollar, and the impact that we expect at the gross margin level from foreign exchange is a 90 basis points headwind sequentially. And of course, at this point in the cycle, we also have higher cost structures because, as I said, we've launched so many new products in the last six weeks. So those are the puts and takes, leverage and commodity savings on one side and FX and the new products on the other side.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Katy. Could we have the next question, please?
Operator:
Next, we'll go to Jim Suva with Citigroup.
Jim Suva - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.:
Thank you very much, a question for Tim and a question for Luca, and I'll ask them at the same time, so you can decide who wants to go first or second. But operationally, Tim, I think your company is at a disadvantage relative to others in India, giving where items are produced versus shipped versus taxed versus installed as well as ability to own stores. So can you help us address that? Is India going to potentially be a big area, as I think you got about only about 1% market share, but it sounded like things may be softer there? And then for Luca, there will probably be a lot of pushback about not giving iPhone unit data. It sounds like you're still going to give revenue data, if I heard that correctly, but some people may fear that this now means that the iPhone units are going to start going negative year over year because it's easier to talk about great things and not show the details of things that aren't so great. So thank you very much, gentlemen.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Okay, I'll start with India. We've had really great productive discussions with the Indian government, and I fully expect that at some point, they will agree to allow us to bring our stores into the country. We've been in discussions with them, and the discussions are going quite well. As you point out, there are import duties in some or most of the product categories that we're in. In some cases, they compound, and this is an area that we're giving lots of feedback on. We do manufacture some of the entry iPhones in India, and that project has gone well. I am a big believer in India. I am very bullish on the country and the people and our ability to do well there. The currency weakness has been part of our challenge there, as you can tell from just looking at the currency trends, but I view these as speed bumps along a very long journey, though. And the long term I think is very, very strong there. There's a huge number of people that will move into the middle class. The government has really focused on reform in a major way and made some very bold moves. And I applaud them for doing that and I can't wait for the future there.
Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.:
And, Jim, let me take the question on units. First of all, as Tim said, our approach to guidance, providing guidance doesn't change at all. We continue to provide the same metrics that we were providing before. In terms of reporting results, one of the things that we are doing, and it's new and it's in addition to the information that we provide to investors because we've heard some significant level of interest around this, is starting with the December quarter, for the first time we're going to be providing information on revenue and cost of sales, and therefore gross margins for both products and services. And this will be the first time that we're going to provide gross margin information for our services business, which we believe is an important metric for our investors to follow. Given the rationale on why we do not believe that providing unit sales is particularly relevant for our company at this point, I can reassure you that it is our objective to grow unit sales for every product category that we have. But as I said earlier, a unit of sale is less relevant today than it was in the past. To give you an example, the unit sales of iPhone at the top end of the line have been very strong during the September quarter, and that's very important because we're attracting customers to the most recent technologies and features and innovation that we bring into the lineup, but you don't necessarily see that in the number that is reported. And so therefore, we will, as I said, we'll provide qualitative commentary when it is important and relevant. But at the end of the day, we make our decisions from a financial standpoint to try and optimize our revenue and our gross margin dollars, and that we think is the focus that is in the best interest of our investors.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Jim, let me just add a couple things to that for color. Our installed base is growing at double digit, and that's probably a much more significant metric for us from an ecosystem point of view and the customer loyalty, et cetera. The second thing is this is a little bit like if you go to the market and you push your cart up to the cashier and she says, or he says how many units you have in there? It doesn't matter a lot how many units there are in there in terms of the overall value of what's in the cart.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Jim. A replay of today's call will be available for two weeks on Apple Podcast, as a webcast on apple.com/investor and via telephone and the numbers for the telephone replay are 888-203-1112 or 719-457-0820 and please enter confirmation code 3699080. These replays will be available by approximately 5:00 PM Pacific Time today. Members of the press with additional questions can contact Kristin Huguet at 408-974-2414 and financial analysts can contact Matt Blake or me with additional questions. Matt is at 408-974-7406 and I'm at 408-974-5420. Thanks again for joining us.
Operator:
That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for your participation.
Executives:
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc. Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc. Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.
Analysts:
Kathryn Lynn Huberty - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC Shannon S. Cross - Cross Research LLC Brian White - Monness, Crespi, Hardt & Co., Inc. Antonio M. Sacconaghi - Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. LLC Laura Martin - Needham & Co. LLC
Operator:
Good day and welcome to the Apple Incorporated Third Quarter Fiscal Year 2018 Earnings Conference Call. Today's call is being recorded. At this time for opening remarks and introductions I'd like to turn the call over to Nancy Paxton, Senior Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you. Good afternoon and thanks to everyone for joining us. Speaking first today is Apple CEO Tim Cook and he'll be followed by CFO Luca Maestri. After that we'll open the call to questions from analysts. Please note that some of the information you'll hear during our discussion today will consist of forward-looking statements including without limitation those regarding revenue, gross margin, operating expenses, other income and expense, taxes, capital allocation, share repurchases, dividends and future business outlook. Actual results or trends could differ materially from our forecast. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in Apple's most recently-filed periodic reports on form 10-K and form 10-Q and the form 8-K filed with the SEC today, along with the associated press release. Apple assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements or information which speak as of their respective date. I'd now like to turn the call over to Tim for introductory remarks.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Nancy, and thanks to everyone for joining us. Today we're proud to report our best June quarter revenue and earnings ever thanks to the strong performance of iPhone, services and wearables. We generated $53.3 billion in revenue, a new Q3 record. That's an increase of 17% over last year's result, making it our seventh consecutive quarter of accelerating growth, our fourth consecutive quarter of double-digit growth and our strongest rate of growth in the past 11 quarters. Our team generated record Q3 earnings per share of $2.34, an increase of 40% over last year. We're extremely proud of these results and I'd like to share some highlights with you. First, iPhone had a very strong quarter. Revenue was up 20% year-over-year and our active installed base grew by double-digits, driven by switchers, first time smartphone buyers and our existing customers whose loyalty we greatly appreciate. iPhone X was the most popular iPhone in the quarter once again, with a customer satisfaction score of 98% according to 451 Research. Based on the latest data from IDC, iPhone grew faster than the global smartphone market, gaining share in many markets including the U.S., Greater China, Canada, Germany, Australia, Russia, Mexico and the Middle East and Africa. Second, we had a stellar quarter in services which generated all-time record revenue of $9.5 billion fueled in part by double-digit growth in our overall active installed base. We feel great about the momentum of our services business and we're on target to reach our goal of doubling our fiscal 2016 services revenue by 2020. Our record services results were driven by strong performance in a number of areas and I'd like to briefly mention just some of these. Paid subscriptions from Apple and third parties have now surpassed $300 million, an increase of more than 60% in the past year alone. Revenue from subscriptions accounts for a significant and increasing percentage of our overall services business. What's more, the number of apps offering subscriptions also continue to grow. There are almost 30,000 available in the App Store today. The App Store turned 10 years old this month and we set a new June quarter revenue record. The App Store has exceeded our wildest expectations, igniting a cultural and economic phenomenon that has changed how people work, learn and play. Customers around the world are visiting the App Store more often and downloading more apps than ever before. And based on third party research estimates, the App Store generated nearly twice the revenue of Google Play so far in 2018. The app economy is thriving and thanks to the App Store, it's generating jobs for tens of millions of people around the world. Our developers have earned over $100 billion from the App Store since its launch and we couldn't be more proud of them and what they've accomplished. We're hearing lots of developer excitement around our upcoming OS releases, which I'll talk about more in a moment, and can't wait to see what they can come up with next. We've experienced rapid growth in our App Store search ad service and as we announced earlier this month, we are expanding our geographic coverage to Japan, South Korea, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. We're also seeing strong growth in many of the other services as well. Just a few examples, Apple Music grew by over 50% on a year-over-year basis. AppleCare revenue grew at its highest rate in 18 quarters, partly due to our expanded distribution initiative. Cloud services revenue was also up over 50% year-over-year. Our communications services are experiencing record usage. We've hit all-time highs for both the number of monthly active users of Messages and the number of FaceTime calls made with growth accelerating from the March to June quarters. Siri requests have already exceeded 100 billion so far this fiscal year, and the number of articles read on Apple News more than doubled year-over-year. Apple Pay continues to expand with well over 1 billion transactions last quarter, triple the amount from just a year ago, with growth accelerating from the March quarter. To put that tremendous growth into perspective, this past quarter, we completed more total transactions than great companies like Square and more mobile transactions than PayPal. Apple Pay is now live in 24 markets worldwide with over 4,900 bank partners and we look forward to adding Germany later this year. We're excited to share that in the U.S., eBay is beginning to enable its sellers to accept Apple Pay and CVS Pharmacy and 7-Eleven will roll out Apple Pay acceptance in locations nationwide this fall. Transit is another important area of growth and Apple Pay can be used with iPhone and Apple Watch to quickly and conveniently ride public transit in 12 metropolitan areas. Apple Pay Cash, our peer-to-peer payment service, is already serving millions of customers across the U.S. less than eight months following its launch. Our third highlight of the quarter is the outstanding results in wearables which comprises Apple Watch, AirPods and Beats and was up over 60% year-over-year with growth accelerating from the March quarter. Our wearables revenue exceeded $10 billion over the last four quarters, a truly remarkable accomplishment for a set of products that has only been in the market for a few years. Apple Watch delivered record June quarter performance with growth in the mid 40% range, and we're thrilled to see so many customers enjoying AirPods. It reminds me of the early days of iPod when I started noticing white earbuds everywhere I went. A number of other notable events in the quarter, we expanded distribution of HomePod to three additional markets and we added new immersive listening features with support for HomePod stereo pairs and a new multi-room audio system. In June, we hosted an extremely successful developers' conference that previewed many major advances coming this fall to our four operating systems, iOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS. Developer and customer reaction has been very positive and we have over 4 million users participating in our new OS beta programs. Starting with iOS 12, Siri will take a major step forward with Siri Shortcuts, which deliver a new, much faster way to get things done and allow any app to work with Siri. We believe this will make Siri even more useful and significantly expand its adoption. We've also designed performance improvements across iOS 12 to make everyday tasks faster and more responsive. Camera launches up to 70% faster. The keyboard appears up to 50% faster and apps can launch up to twice as fast. We've always been about empowering users to get the most from our product, but not about spending all of their time using them and so we're adding tools to iOS 12 to help our customers understand and take control of the time both they and their families spend interacting with their iOS devices. Activity reports will provide information on the amount and nature of time spent on iPhones and iPads and screen time will enable parents to monitor and limit their children's activity from their own iOS devices using Family Sharing in iCloud. Developers will be able to build even more intelligent apps with just a few lines of code using the power of machine learning with Core ML 2 and Create ML. We've also included our third release of ARKit in only one year. With ARKit 2, iOS 12 will provide an even more powerful platform to make dynamic AR apps, integrating shared and persistent AR experiences, object detection and image tracking. We believe AR can enable profound experiences and Apple is uniquely positioned to provide the best AR experience because of the seamless integration of our hardware and software. The new capabilities of ARKit 2 will build on the potential of the thousands of AR apps already available in the App Store that are changing the way iPhone and iPad users see and experience the world. Turning to Mac, we want to empower our developers to bring their innovative apps from the iOS ecosystem to the Mac with minimal effort. Though iOS and macOS are different, they've shared common foundations from the very beginning, so we've taken key frameworks from iOS and adapted them to specific Mac behaviors like using a mouse or track pad, resizing windows, copy and paste and drag and drop. We've started with some of our own apps, so this fall, News, Stocks, Voice Memos and Home will be available on the Mac for the first time with macOS Mojave and we'll be bringing these great new tools to our developers next year. We believe this will dramatically broaden the ecosystem to benefit all Mac users, creating even more great reasons to choose Mac. Also this fall, the Mac App Store is getting a full redesign with rich editorial content to help customers discover great Mac apps from our developers. We believe privacy is one of the most important issues of the 21st century and we're always working to make our products more private and more secure for our users. As we announced at WWDC, beginning this fall, Safari will prevent share buttons and comment widgets on webpages from tracking users without their permission. Safari already protects personal data as users browse the web so they won't be re-targeted by ads. For Apple Watch, users will see a significant expansion of features and functionality in watchOS 5. Apple Watch will become an even stronger companion for fitness, communication and quick access to information with features including new workouts, activity sharing competitions, auto workout detection, advanced running features, walkie-talkie, podcast and third party apps on the Siri watch face. For Apple TV, we've seen major growth in sales since the introduction of Apple TV 4K last fall as video providers around the world choose Apple TV 4K to deliver their subscription services. Later this year, Charter Communications will begin offering Apple TV 4K to its customers in nearly 50 million U.S. households, providing access to live channels and tens of thousands of on-demand programs via the Spectrum TV app on Apple TV 4K, iPhone and iPad. And tvOS will take the cinematic experience of Apple TV 4K to the next level this fall with support for Dolby Atmos audio and new features to easily find popular shows and movies. Apple TV 4K already offers customers the largest collection of 4K HDR movies and this fall, iTunes will be the home to the largest collection of Dolby Atmos-supported movies anywhere. I'm proud that our team's hard work has an impact even beyond these innovative industry-leading products and services. We're always working to leave the world better than we found it and as part of our commitment to address climate change and increase the use of renewable energy in our supply chain, we recently announced a first of its kind investment fund in China. Initially, 10 suppliers will join us in investing nearly $300 million over the next four years into the China Clean Energy Fund. The fund will invest in and develop clean energy projects totaling more than 1 gigawatt of renewable energy in China, the equivalent of powering nearly 1 million homes. We're seeing great momentum in our Everyone Can Code and Everyone Can Create initiatives. More than 5,000 schools and community colleges are now teaching Everyone Can Code and more than 350 schools have committed to incorporating Everyone Can Create into their curricula for the upcoming school year. Coding skills are opening doors for students and job seekers around the world as tremendous growth in the app economy creates opportunity everywhere we look. We're also teaming up with leading educators for blind and deaf communities across the United States who will start teaching Everyone Can Code this Fall. Looking ahead, we couldn't be more excited about the products and services in our pipeline as well as limitless applications for augmented reality and machine learning technology. We're working with key partners in the enterprise to change the way work gets done with iOS and Mac. We're welcoming communities and offering learning opportunities at our retail locations through hundreds of thousands of Today at Apple sessions each quarter. We're expanding our reach into emerging markets and seeing strong double-digit growth in revenue and we're making great progress toward our goal of significantly expanding our services business. And now, for more details on the record June quarter results, I'd like to turn the call over to Luca.
Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Tim. Good afternoon everyone. We're very pleased to report the financial results of our best June quarter ever. As we have done in every quarter this fiscal year, we set new quarterly records for both revenue and earnings per share, with revenue up 17% year-over-year and EPS up 40%. We generated $53.3 billion of revenue with year-over-year growth in all of our geographic segments and new June quarter records in the Americas, Europe, Japan and rest of Asia Pacific. We grew in each of our top 15 markets, with especially strong performance in the U.S., Hong Kong, Russia, Mexico, the Middle East and Africa, all places where revenue was up by more than 20%. Gross margin was 38.3%, flat sequentially, as cost improvements and foreign exchange offset the seasonal loss of leverage. Net income was $11.5 billion, up $2.8 billion or 32% over last year and it was also a new June quarter record. Diluted earnings per share were $2.34, up 40% and also a new record for the June quarter and cash flow from operations was very strong at $14.5 billion. iPhone revenue grew 20% year-over-year with iPhone ASP increasing to $724 from $606 a year ago, driven by the strong performance of iPhone X, iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus across the world. During the quarter, we sold 41.3 million iPhones, with double-digit unit growth in several markets including the U.S., Canada, Germany, Switzerland, Mexico, Hong Kong, Russia, the Middle East and Africa. Our performance from a customer demand standpoint was stronger than our reported results as we reduced iPhone channel inventory by 3.5 million units during the quarter. We exited the June quarter towards the lower end of our target range of 5 to 7 weeks of iPhone channel inventory. Customer satisfaction with iPhone continues to be outstanding and is the highest in the industry. The latest survey of U.S. consumers from 451 Research indicates that across all iPhone models, customer satisfaction was 96% and combining iPhone 8, 8 Plus and iPhone X, it was even higher at 98%. And among business buyers who plan to purchase smartphones in the September quarter, 81% plan to purchase iPhones, up 3 points from the last survey. Turning to services, we had our best results ever with all-time record revenue of $9.5 billion. Services revenue included a favorable $236 million one-time item in connection with the final resolution of various lawsuits. Excluding this amount, services revenue was still an all-time record and the underlying growth rate of our services business was a terrific 28% over last year. We generated double-digit services growth in all our geographic segments and the App Store, AppleCare, Apple Music, cloud services and Apple Pay all set new June quarter records. Our other product category also set a new record for the June quarter with revenue of over $3.7 billion. That's up 37% from last year with great sales momentum for both Apple Watch and AirPods. Apple Watch continues to be the best selling smartwatch by a wide margin and units and revenue grew dramatically during the quarter. AirPods continue to be a runaway success and we've been selling them as fast as we can make them since their launch a year and a half ago. Next, I'd like to talk about the Mac. We were very happy to see double digit year-over-year growth in our active installed base of Macs to a new all-time high with nearly 60% of purchases during the quarter coming from customers who are new to Mac. Our year-over-year sales performance was impacted by the different timing of the MacBook Pro launch which did not occur until early Q4 this year as opposed to June last year, with the subsequent channel fill during the June quarter. Even with a difficult launch comparison, we saw great momentum in many emerging markets, with growth well into double digits and we established new June quarter records for Mac sales in India, Turkey, Chile and Central and Eastern Europe. iPad unit sales grew for the fifth consecutive quarter and we gained significant share of the global tablet market based on the latest estimates from IDC. We recorded double digit iPad unit growth in both our Greater China and rest of Asia Pacific segments with a new June quarter record for iPad sales in Mainland China. Almost half of iPad purchases in the quarter were by customers new to iPad and our active installed base of iPads reached a new all-time high. Our overall performance compared to last year was impacted by the introduction of new iPad Pro models in June of last year which resulted in both a different mix with higher ASPs and channel sale a year ago. NPD indicates that iPad has 60% share of the U.S. tablet market in the June quarter, up from 51% share a year ago. And the most recent consumer survey from 451 Research measured iPad customer satisfaction ratings of 94%, and among business customers who plan to purchase tablets in the September quarter, 75% plan to purchase iPads. We continue to make great strides with enterprise customers across multiple industries. For example, financial services institutions are increasingly using iPads to deploy digital signature solutions for customer consent, compliance requirements, new account openings and services transactions. In the railway industry, businesses around the world are using iPhone and iPad to support operations, training, passenger engagement and maintenance activities. And leading global automotive companies are deploying iPads in dealerships for sales enablement and end-to-end customer service management and are choosing iPhone as the standard mobile device for their employees around the world. More and more companies are giving their teams a choice when it comes to the devices they use at work and enterprises including Salesforce and Capital One are deploying Macs based on employee preference. In fact, at Salesforce, the majority of their 35,000 employees are using Macs and companies tell us that Mac has been instrumental in helping them attract and retain talent while providing strong security, streamlined deployment, workflow and significantly lower total cost of ownership. We're also seeing great interest in Business Chat, our powerful new way for organizations to connect with customers. Business Chat lets customers get answers to questions, resolve issues and complete transactions directly from within Messages by starting a conversation on their iPhone or iPad and even continue the conversation on their Mac or Apple Watch. DISH Network is making Business Chat available to customers across the U.S. to enhance the customer service experience for pay TV. Customers can instantly reach a live agent with their questions, make account changes, schedule an appointment, or order a pay-per-view movie or sporting event, all without leaving the Messages conversation. And Citizens Bank Park, home of the Philadelphia Phillies, is testing Business Chat with Aramark to handle beverage holders during games. Fans simply use their iPhone camera to scan a QR code on the back of their seats taking them directly to a Business Chat conversation in Messages. From there, they can order drinks, pay quickly and securely with Apple Pay and have them delivered directly to their seats without missing a moment of on-field play. Our retail and online stores had a great quarter thanks to very strong growth from iPhone, AirPods and Apple Watch and the expansion of HomePod to Canada, France and Germany. Our stores hosted more than 250,000 of our very successful Today at Apple sessions. We continue to add content across all Today at Apple topics including popular new sessions on music and photography. We opened our 50th retail store in Greater China during the quarter and we just opened a beautiful new store in Milan this month, bringing the number of stores located outside the U.S. to 46% of the total. Let me now turn to our cash position. We ended the quarter with $243.7 billion in cash plus marketable securities. We retired $6 billion of debt during the quarter, leaving us with $102.6 billion in term debt and $12 billion in commercial paper outstanding for a net cash position of $129.1 billion. As we explained in February, we plan to reach a net cash neutral position over time. We returned almost $25 billion to investors during the quarter, including $3.7 billion in dividends and equivalents. We repurchased $20 billion worth of Apple shares of which $10 billion related to the completion of our previous $210 billion buyback program and $10 billion to the beginning of the new $100 billion authorization we announced three months ago for a total of 112.8 million shares repurchased through open market transactions during the quarter. As we move ahead into the September quarter, I'd like to review our outlook which includes the types of forward-looking information that Nancy referred to at the beginning of the call. We expect revenue to be between $60 billion and $62 billion. As you will recall, our September quarter results last year included a one-time favorable adjustment of $640 million to our services revenue. Taking that adjustment into account, our revenue guidance implies year-over-year growth of about 16% to 19%. We expect gross margin to be between 38% and 38.5%. We expect OpEx to be between $7.95 billion and $8.05 billion. We expect OI&E to be about $300 million and we expect the tax rate to be about 15% before discrete items. Also today, our Board of Directors has declared a cash dividend of $0.73 per share of common stock payable on August 16, 2018 to shareholders of record as of August 13, 2018. With that, I'd like to open the call to questions.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Luca. And we ask that you limit yourself to one one-part question and one follow-up. Operator may we have the first question, please?
Operator:
Thank you. Our first question comes from Katy Huberty with Morgan Stanley.
Kathryn Lynn Huberty - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC:
Thank you and congrats on the quarter. I'll ask both my questions up front. First, for Tim. You're on track to hit your services revenue target even earlier than planned, so how are you thinking about the next legs of services growth as you move into the next three to five years? And then for you, Luca, NAND prices are falling this year. Services mix is rising. Those should both positively influence gross margins and yet we're seeing gross margin sort of hang out here at 38%. What are the offsetting headwinds and is it possible that we could see the tailwinds start to overpower those headwinds in the next couple of quarters and see gross margins drift higher? Thank you.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Yeah, Katy, thanks for your question. This is Tim. On the services side, we're thrilled with the results. They were very broad based. We had double digit services growth in all of the geographic segments and the App Store, AppleCare, Apple Music, cloud services, Apple Pay all set new June quarter records and of course subscriptions have now passed the 300 million, as I'd mentioned before, and so we couldn't be happier with how things are going. In terms of the next leg of this, given the momentum that we're seeing across the board, we feel great about our current services, but obviously we're also thrilled about our pipeline that have some new services in it as well. And so with the combination of these, we feel great about hitting our objectives and maybe even doing a little better.
Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.:
Katy, for margins, let me tell you about the puts and takes for the June quarter, then I'll talk about the guidance for Q4 and make some general observations for the future. Starting with the June quarter, typically we see a decline in gross margin going from the March quarter to the June quarter. Last year, we were down 40 bps. Two years ago we were down 140 bps. This year, we were able to keep GM flat sequentially. During the quarter, we always have some loss of leverage because of our typical seasonality. This year we were able to offset that with some cost improvements and also we had some favorability in foreign exchange on a sequential basis. Unfortunately, as you know, the U.S. dollar has already appreciated again recently, so we do not expect to see that favorability to repeat during the September quarter. So those are the puts and takes for June and we're very happy to see gross margin sequentially flat for June. For September, we're also guiding about flat sequentially at the midpoint. As you know, we typically have what we call product transition costs during the September quarter, and this year we also have about 30 bps of headwind from foreign exchange again because the dollar has appreciated recently. We expect those two factors to be offset by positive leverage, because you've seen the revenue guidance that we provided and the mix to services that you've actually mentioned during your question. So we feel pretty good about also the guidance for the fourth quarter. Looking forward, you know we don't provide guidance beyond the current quarter, but I think we have a pretty good record over the last several years to make good business decisions, balancing units, revenue and margins. As you know, foreign exchange has been a very significant headwind over the last three-plus years, but we've been able to manage that. On the memory front, it is true that prices have started to decline. It has been a significant headwind for the last 12, 18 months and still in the June quarter was a negative. We believe that we're going to start seeing some improvement from here on.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Katy.
Kathryn Lynn Huberty - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC:
Thank you for that color.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Can we have the next question please? Can we have the next question please?
Operator:
Certainly. Our next question will come from Shannon Cross with Cross Research.
Shannon S. Cross - Cross Research LLC:
Thank you very much for taking my question. Tim, can you talk a bit about trends within your iPhone sales? ASPs were above expectations and now that you've had – and that's clearly better than some of the comments from some of your competitors. Now that you've had about nine months of experience with a high-end fully featured phone, can you talk a bit about what you think customers want, what the elasticity of demand is and how you're sort of thinking about your competitive position? And then I have a follow-up.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Yeah, Shannon, we feel great about the results on iPhone, up 20%, and if you look for the cycle, by the cycle, I mean Q1, Q2 and Q3, we've had on an average weekly basis, growth in units of sort of mid single digit and ASP growth of double digit. And so if you, and look at iPhone X in particular, it's the most innovative smartphone on the market. We priced it at a level that represented the value of it and we could not be happier that it has been the top selling iPhone since the launch, and so we feel terrific about iPhone X. If you look at the sort of the top of our line together, and by that I mean the iPhone X, the 8 and the 8 Plus, they are growing very nicely, as you can probably tell from looking at the ASP and we couldn't be happier with how that's gone. And so I think in this cycle, we've learned that customers want innovative products and we sort of already knew that in other cycles and other points in times, but it just puts an exclamation point by that I believe with looking at the results. At the unit level, the iPhone SE had a difficult comp to the year-ago quarter and so, when we changed some of the configurations, memory configurations in the year-ago quarter. If you look at it on a geographic basis, the top three selling phones in urban China were iPhone, where iPhone X was number one and has been for a couple of quarters, and iPhones make up three of the top five smartphones in the U.S., UK and Japan. And so it's difficult sometimes to get a read over exactly what's happening in the market, but given the industry numbers that we've seen, it's clear that we picked up global market share and picked up market share in several countries, not only iPhone, but iPad as well.
Shannon S. Cross - Cross Research LLC:
Great. Thank you. And then can you talk a bit about China, Greater China up 19% year-over-year during the quarter, I believe? Obviously iPhone doing well, but some concern that maybe some of what's going on in the trade world might have impacted. Doesn't seem like that, so I'm just curious as to what you're seeing in China and how you're thinking about it as you look forward. Thank you.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Yeah, it's a good question. Thank you. This is the fourth consecutive quarter that we've had double digit growth in Greater China. I mentioned how iPhone X and the iPhones are selling. We did pick up share in iPhone and iPad, but if you look more holistically at our complete line, we had double digit growth from services to iPad to iPhone and to our other product category which the watch did extremely well, and so there are lots of good things happening there. In terms of the tariffs themselves, maybe I could sort of take a step back because I'm sure some people have questions on this. And our view on tariffs is that they show up as a tax on the consumer and wind up resulting in lower economic growth and sometimes can bring about significant risk of unintended consequences. That said, the trade relationships and agreements that the U.S. has between the U.S. and other major economies are very complex and it's clear that several are in need of modernizing, but we think that in the vast majority of situations that tariffs are not the approach to doing that and so we're sort of encouraging dialogue and so forth. In terms of the tariffs that have been imposed or have exited the comment period – I think there's one that's exiting today – there have been three of those and maybe I can walk through those briefly just to make sure everybody is on the same page. The first was the U.S. imposed a tariff on steel and aluminum. That was many, many different countries. That started I believe at the beginning of June. There have been two other tariffs that have totaled about $50 billion of goods from China that have either been implemented or exiting the comment period in this month. I think the latest one is today. If you look at those three tariffs, none of our products were directly affected by the tariffs. There is a fourth tariff which includes goods valued at $200 billion, also focused on goods that are imported from China. That one is out for public comment. Probably like everyone else, we're evaluating that one and we'll be sharing our views of it with the administration and so forth before the comment period for that one ends. It's actually a tedious process in going through it because you not only have to analyze the revenue products, which are a bit more straightforward to analyze, but you also have to analyze the purchases that you're making through other companies that are not related to revenue. Maybe they're related to data centers and this sort of thing and so we're going through that now and we'll be sharing our results later on those and feeding back public comment. Of course the risk associated with more of a macroeconomic issue such as an economic slowdown in one or more countries or currency fluctuations that are related to tariffs is very difficult to quantify. And so that, and we're not even trying to quantify that, to be clear about it. All of this said, we're optimistic, as I've been the whole time, that this will get sorted out because there is an inescapable mutuality between the U.S. and China that sort of serves as a magnet to bring both countries together, that each country can only prosper if the other does and of course the world needs both U.S. and China to prosper for the world to do well. That said, I can't predict the future, but I am optimistic that the countries will get through this and we are hoping that calm heads prevail.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Shannon. Could we have the next question, please?
Operator:
And that'll come from Brian White with Monness, Crespi. And Brian your line is open. Please go ahead.
Brian White - Monness, Crespi, Hardt & Co., Inc.:
Yes, Tim. I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about the multi-year partnership with Oprah Winfrey and what that says about your original content strategy and also Apple Music. If you can give us a little more colors or an update maybe around paid subscribers or total subscribers around Apple Music and how you feel that's rolled out.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Yeah sure, Brian. Thanks for the question. We're very excited to work with Oprah. We think that her incomparable ability and talent to connect with audiences around the world, that there's sort of no match and we think that we can do some great original content together and so we could not be happier in working with Oprah. As you know, we hired two highly respected television executives last year and they have been here now for several months and have been working on a project that we're not really ready to share all the details of it yet, but I couldn't be more excited about what's going on there and we've got great talent in the area that we've sourced from different places and feel really good about what we will eventually offer. In terms of the sort of the key catalysts and the changes, the cord cutting in our view is only going to accelerate and probably accelerate at a much faster rate than is widely thought. We're seeing the things that we have on the periphery of this like Apple TV, units and revenue grew by very strong double digits, very, very strong double digits in Q3. As I mentioned in my opening comments, we're seeing different providers pick up the Apple TV and use it as their box to go to market with their subscription service. There are, within the 300 million-plus paid subscriptions, some of these are third party video subscriptions and we see the growth that is going on there. It's like 100% year-over-year. And so all the things from a – all the forcing functions here from the outside all point to dramatic changes speeding up in the content industry, and so we're really happy to be working on some of them, but we're just not ready to talk about it in depth today. In terms of Apple Music, we're well over 50 million listeners now when you add our paid subscribers and the folks in the trial, and so we're moving along at a very, very good rate. It appears to us or in what we've been told is that we took the leadership position in North America during the quarter and we have the leadership position in Japan, and so in some of the markets that we've been in for a long period of time. We're doing quite well, but really, the key thing in music is not the competition between companies that are providing music. It's the real challenge is to grow the market, because if you add everyone up that's providing subscription music today or streaming music, it's, outside of China, it's less than 200 million probably around the world. And so it does seem to me there's an extraordinary opportunity in that business to grow the market well and I think if we put our emphasis there, which we're doing, that will be a beneficiary of that as other people will as well. But I like where we are. Our revenues on Apple Music grew over 50% as I'd mentioned earlier during the quarter, and so some really, really strong results. Thanks for the question.
Brian White - Monness, Crespi, Hardt & Co., Inc.:
Great. Thank you.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Brian. Could we have the next question, please?
Operator:
Toni Sacconaghi with Bernstein has our next question.
Antonio M. Sacconaghi - Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. LLC:
Yes. Thank you. I have one for Luca and one for Tim please. Luca, I'm wondering as we think about modeling Q4, iPhone ASPs are typically up sequentially about 2% to 4%, sort of low single digits. Perhaps you can help us think through how we should be thinking about Q4. I know you provided some commentary last quarter on how we should be thinking about Q3 ASPs.
Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.:
Toni, as you know, we do not provide guidance for either units or ASPs for any product category, but of course we provided guidance on revenue and that the guidance range implies growth of 16% to 19%. We expect the growth to come from strong growth from iPhone, from services and from wearables, which has been a bit of our pattern during the course of the year. On iPhone ASP, the only thing that I would point out is that obviously we're exiting the June quarter at a significantly higher level than in the past and so that I think is important to keep in mind as we move into the September quarter. It's important to keep in mind the type of revenue growth that we've implied in our guidance.
Antonio M. Sacconaghi - Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. LLC:
Okay. Thank you. Tim, I was wondering if you could just comment a little bit about the health of the smartphone market. Apple's smartphone iPhone units have been relatively flat for four years and I think you've probably been a share gainer during the period which would suggest at least at the high end of the market, that it's perhaps flat-to-down and I'm wondering if you can comment on, A, whether you believe that and what you think might be happening with replacement cycles. And specifically, also what impact if any you've seen from wider availability and less expensive replacement batteries for iPhones.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
I think the smartphone market is very healthy. I think it's actually the best market in the world to be in for someone that is in the business that we're in. It's an enormous sized market and whether it grows, from our point of view, whether it grows 1% or 2% or 5% or 6% or 10% or shrinks 1% or 2%, it's a great market because it's just huge. And so that's kind of the way that I view that. iPhone revenues are up 20% for the quarter over last year. We're really pleased with that and if you look at the sort of the cycle, which I'll define as Q1, Q2, Q3 for ease, you'll see that we've grown like mid single digits and on an average weekly sales point of view, and of course double digit on the ASP and so I think it's really healthy. In terms of replacement cycles, as I'd mentioned I think on a previous call, some replacement cycles are lengthening. I think that the major catalyst for that was probably the subsidy plans becoming a much smaller percentage of total sales around the world than they were at one time and so I think that some are lengthening. And, but I think for us, the thing that we always have to do is come out with a really great innovative product, and I think that iPhone X shows that when you deliver a great innovative product, there's enough people there that would like that and it can be a really good business, and so that's how to look at that. In terms of our installed base, which is something very important for us as it is one of the key drivers of services, our active installed base on iPhone grew double digits over last year during the quarter and so we're thrilled with that and you can see that carrying through to the services line and the growth that we had there. In terms of batteries, we have never done an analysis internally about how many people decided to get a lower-priced battery than buy another phone because it was never about that for us. It was always about doing something great for the user and I think if you treat the users and the customers well, then you have a good business over time and so that's how we'd look at that.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Toni.
Antonio M. Sacconaghi - Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. LLC:
Thank you.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Could we have the next question, please?
Operator:
Next we'll take a question from Laura Martin from Needham.
Laura Martin - Needham & Co. LLC:
Yeah, can you hear me okay?
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Yes.
Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.:
Yes.
Laura Martin - Needham & Co. LLC:
Great. Okay. Super. So I'd like to focus on product roadmap and strategy. There is a war going on for the home, the connected home, over the Internet of Things. And with two products, the HomePod and Apple TV in the home, my question is strategically, how do you feel about the importance of being in the home and whether it threatens your dominance outside the home with your core business in the mobile devices if you sort of lose that battle? I'm just trying to figure out strategically when you think about where the puck is going, how important is it for you to have a beachhead in the home as well as out of home?
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
I think the home business, Laura, is bigger than the HomePod and Apple TV. They're both important products clearly, but everybody has their iPhone at home as well and everybody has their Mac at home and everyone has their iPad at home. And so in terms of the Siri access point, as you can tell from the 100 billion number I quoted in the script, there's an extraordinary amount of usage of these products that are used to perform home-related functions. I do that every day with controlling all my home automation and so on and so forth. Part of that is on HomePod but part of it is with the Apple Watch and the iPhone and the iPad, and so I think home is important. Home is important. Work is important. The movement between the two are important. Health is important. So the smartphone has become the repository that goes across the whole of your life, not something that is just meant for a portion of it and so I think all of those are important and we're focused on all of them.
Laura Martin - Needham & Co. LLC:
Okay. That's helpful, actually. Okay.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Thanks for your question.
Laura Martin - Needham & Co. LLC:
Yeah. Sort of. I mean I'll watch your product roadmap and be able to tell what the answer is. The other thing, the thing I get in fights with investors about the most is this and I'd love your insight on this. I love the expansion of the new products. The question I have is are they actually on-ramps into the Apple ecosystem, the Beats, the Watch, the AirPods, subscriptions, are they on-ramps into the ecosystem or is the on-ramp to the ecosystem the iPhone and then these new products add revenue per member once you get somebody into the ecosystem via the iPhone?
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
A lot of people that buy Apple products buy for the whole ecosystem, even though they might not currently use all the different products. And so the way that I think about those products are they're products within the ecosystem itself. And there's the AirPods have really gone through the roof and the Apple Watch has hit an air pocket and has gone to a whole different level as I'd mentioned earlier with our overall wearables revenue. And so in my view, this is a part of the – they are a core part of the ecosystem.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Laura.
Laura Martin - Needham & Co. LLC:
But do they attract people to the ecosystem or does the person have to have an iPhone first?
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
It is, well, but on your point though, it is clear from communications I've had with users that some of them were attracted to iPhone because of the Apple Watch.
Laura Martin - Needham & Co. LLC:
Oh, I see.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
So the Apple Watch led them to the iPhone. The reverse of that is also true, is that somebody got the iPhone and then decided I really want something to coach me in fitness and to curate some of the communications and so forth like the watch does so well and so it's not always a linear path. I see these things as being somewhat fluid and different for each user.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Laura.
Laura Martin - Needham & Co. LLC:
So they're complementary and self-reinforcing? Okay. That makes sense. All right. Thanks very much.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
That's exactly right. Thank you for the question.
Laura Martin - Needham & Co. LLC:
Thank you.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Laura.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
A replay of today's call will be available for two weeks on Apple Podcast, as a webcast on apple.com/investor and via telephone and the numbers for the telephone replay are 888-203-1112 or 719-457-0820. Please enter confirmation code 5838188 and these replays will be available by approximately 5 PM Pacific Time today. Members of the press with additional questions can contact Josh Rosenstock at 408-862-1142 and financial analysts can contact Matt Blake or me with additional questions. Matt is at 408-974-7406 and I'm at 408-974-5420. Thanks again for joining us.
Operator:
That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for your participation.
Executives:
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc. Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc. Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.
Analysts:
Shannon S. Cross - Cross Research LLC Kathryn Lynn Huberty - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC Michael J. Olson - Piper Jaffray & Co. Amit Daryanani - RBC Capital Markets LLC Steven Milunovich - UBS Securities LLC Brian J. White - Monness, Crespi, Hardt & Co., Inc. Wamsi Mohan - Bank of America Merrill Lynch Jim Suva - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.
Operator:
Good day everyone, and welcome to the Apple Incorporated Second Quarter Fiscal Year 2018 Earnings Release Conference Call. Today's call is being recorded. At this time for opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn the call over to Nancy Paxton, Senior Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, ma'am.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you. Good afternoon, and thanks to everyone for joining us. Speaking first today is Apple's CEO, Tim Cook, and he'll be followed by CFO Luca Maestri. After that we'll open the call to questions from analysts. Please note that some of the information you'll hear during our discussion today will consist of forward-looking statements, including without limitation those regarding revenue, gross margin, operating expenses, other income and expense, taxes, capital allocation, share repurchases, dividends and future business outlook. Actual results or trends could differ materially from our forecast. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in Apple's most recently filed periodic reports on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q and the Form 8-K filed with the SEC today, along with the Associated Press release. Apple assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements or information, which speak as of their respective dates. I'd now like to turn the call over to Tim for introductory remarks.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Nancy, and to everyone joining us, welcome. We're proud to announce the results of a very successful quarter today, setting new March quarter records for both revenue and earnings. We generated $61.1 billion of revenue. That's up 16% from last year, making it our sixth consecutive quarter of accelerating revenue growth. Our performance was broad-based, with iPhone revenue up 14%, services up 31% and wearables up almost 50%. We grew in each of our geographic segments, and in Greater China and Japan, revenue was up more than 20%. iPhone's second quarter performance capped a tremendous fiscal first half with $100 billion in iPhone revenue, an increase of $12 billion over last year, setting a new first half record and achieving our highest first half growth rate in three years. iPhone gained share during the quarter based on IDC's latest estimates for the global smartphone market. And customers chose iPhone X more than any other iPhone each week in the March quarter, just as they did following its launch in the December quarter. Since we split the line with the launch of iPhone 6 and 6 Plus in 2014, this is the first cycle in which the top of the line iPhone model has also been the most popular. Q2 was our best quarter ever for services and momentum there continues to be incredibly strong. Revenue topped $9 billion for the first time, up more than $2 billion over last year's March quarter. We had all-time record revenue from the App Store, from Apple Music, from iCloud, from Apple Pay and more, all of which are a powerful illustration of the importance of our huge active installed base of devices and the loyalty and engagement of our customers. Across all our services, paid subscriptions surpassed 270 million, up over 100 million from a year ago and up $30 million in the last 90 days alone, contributing to the overall increase in services revenue. Apple Pay continues its strong growth with active users more than doubling and transactions tripling year-over-year. We believe the availability of Apple Pay at major transit systems have been a key driver of adoption among commuters and in March, we launched Express Transit with Apple Pay in Beijing and Shanghai, the second and third largest transit systems in the world. Apple Pay is already the most successful mobile transit payment system in Tokyo, which has the busiest transit system of all. With the launch of Brazil in April, Apple Pay is now available in 21 markets and we expect Norway, Poland and Ukraine to launch in the next several months. This was another outstanding quarter for our wearables business, which includes Apple Watch, Beats and AirPods with combined revenue of almost 50% year-over-year. Looking at its revenue over the last four quarters, our wearables business is now the size of a Fortune 300 company. Apple Watch had another great quarter with revenue growing by strong double digits year-over-year to a new March quarter record. Millions of customers are using Apple Watch to help them stay active, healthy and connected and they have made it the top selling watch in the world. We launched carrier support for Series 3 with cellular in Mainland China, Hong Kong and Thailand during the quarter with more markets on the way. And now with Watch OS 4.2, there are more features than ever before. For example, in addition to tracking your workouts and heart rate, skiers and snowboarders can record runs, see vertical descent and calculate speed, as well as contribute data directly to the Apple Watch activity app. AirPods are incredibly popular and we're seeing them in more and more places, in the gym, in coffee shops, wherever people are enjoying music on their Apple devices. This product is a runaway hit, and we're working hard to meet the incredible demand. We started shipping HomePod in February, and it's widely recognized as having the best audio quality for its size and class. HomePod is a breakthrough speaker that delivers amazing sound, and we believe it will change the way people listen to music at home. It's currently available in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, and we're looking forward to adding new features to HomePod and introducing it to more markets around the world soon. In March, we announced new products for the education community, including updating our most popular iPad with support for Apple Pencil. It empowers students to be even more creative and productive, from learning to code to sketching ideas and jotting down handwritten notes to marking up screenshots. And the new iPad's gorgeous retina display, advanced chip and enhanced cameras and sensors are designed to support the next generation of apps for immersive augmented reality experiences in the classroom. In addition to our successful Everyone Can Code initiative, we've launched Everyone Can Create. It's a new free curriculum that makes it fun and easy for teachers to integrate drawing, music, film making or photography into their existing lesson plans for any subject. We believe education is the great equalizer. And whether it's through our coding programs, our unrivaled augmented reality platform, or the creativity both can unleash, we're proud to help students everywhere reach new frontiers of learning with Apple technology. In March, we also released iOS 11.3, a major update offering new immersive augmented reality experiences, access to personal health records in the Health app and more. Apps can now deliver AR experiences that use vertical walls and doors in addition to tables and chairs and can make – more accurately map irregular shaped surfaces. The update to ARKit that made this possible came just six months after we launched the world's largest AR platform. Also in iOS 11.3, patients in nearly 40 health systems representing hundreds of hospitals and clinics can now consolidate their medical records from multiple sources and view them all in one place, right from their iPhone. This data is encrypted and protected with the user's iPhone passcode, and it can help them better understand their health history, have informed conversations with doctors and family members, and make future health care decisions. Consistent with our long-term focus, privacy is a key element of these initiatives for education and personal health. We're relentless about making the best products and experiences in the world, while fiercely protecting our users' privacy, because we believe privacy is a fundamental human right. Our environmental initiatives recently passed an important milestone. All of our global facilities across 43 countries are now powered with 100% clean energy. We work with communities around the world to build clean power sources. Apple now has 25 renewable energy projects operational and 15 more under construction. We're also driving our supply chain to use clean energy. As of last month, 23 of our suppliers are committed to operating on 100% renewable energy. We're now halfway through our fiscal 2018 with nearly $150 billion in revenue and double digit growth in all of our geographic segments. We generated almost $34 billion in earnings in six months, and we're very bullish on Apple's future. We have the best pipeline of products and services we've ever had. We have a huge installed base of active devices that is growing across all products, and we have the highest customer loyalty and satisfaction in the industry. Our services business is growing dramatically. Our balance sheet and our cash flow generation are strong and that allows us to invest significantly in our product roadmap and still return a very meaningful amount of capital to our shareholders. Recent corporate tax reform enables us to deploy our global cash more efficiently. In the United States, we expect our direct investment in the economy to exceed $350 billion over the next five years, including $30 billion in capital expenditures. And we expect to create over 20,000 U.S. jobs at Apple over that timeframe. We're narrowing the site selection for a new U.S. campus, and we look forward to sharing more information on that later this year. Consistent with our annual cadence, today we're providing an update on our capital return program. Tax reform makes it possible for us to execute our program more efficiently, both through share repurchases and payment of dividend to the tens of millions of investors who own Apple stock either directly or indirectly from large pension funds to individuals with retirement accounts. So today, given our strong confidence in Apple's future, we're announcing a significant update to our capital return program. Our Board of Directors has approved a new $100 billion share repurchase authorization as well as a 16% increase in our quarterly dividend, effective with our next dividend payable later this month. Luca will provide more details about our program as well as a more in-depth discussion of the quarter's results. So I'll now turn the call over to him. Luca?
Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Tim. Good afternoon everyone. We're very pleased to report record financial results for our March quarter with revenue growth of 16%, EPS up 30%. Starting with revenue, we generated $61.1 billion, our highest ever for a March quarter. Revenue grew in all of our geographic segments, setting new Q2 records in most countries we track. Performance was very strong in emerging markets where revenue was up 20% and we were especially pleased to see 21% year-over-year growth in Greater China, our strongest growth rate from that segment in 10 quarters. We also set Q2 revenue records in the Americas, in Europe and in Japan. Gross margin was 38.3%, essentially flat sequentially, as we offset the seasonal loss of leverage with cost improvements and a shift in mix toward services. Operating margin was 26% of revenue. Net income was $13.8 billion, up $2.8 billion over last year and a March quarter record. Diluted earnings per share were $2.73, up 30% to a new record for Q2, and cash flow from operations was very strong at $15.1 billion. iPhone revenue grew 14% year-over-year, with iPhone ASP increasing to $728 from $655 a year ago, driven primarily by the performance of iPhone X, iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus. During the quarter we sold 52.2 million iPhones, up 3% over last year, and we grew iPhone units by double digits in several markets including Japan, Canada, Switzerland, Turkey, Central and Eastern Europe, Mexico and Vietnam. Our performance from a customer demand standpoint was even stronger than our reported results, as we reduced iPhone channel inventory by 1.8 million units, 600,000 units more than the March quarter reduction last year. We exited the March quarter within our target range of five to seven weeks of iPhone channel inventory. Our customers are extremely happy with their iPhones. The latest survey of U.S. consumers from 451 Research indicates that across all iPhone models, the customer satisfaction rating was 95%, and combining iPhone 8, 8 Plus and iPhone X, customer satisfaction was even higher, at 99%. And among business buyers who plan to purchase smartphones in the June quarter, 78% plan to purchase iPhones. Turning to services. We had a sensational quarter with all-time record revenue of $9.2 billion, and that's up more than $2 billion from last year, an increase of 31% and double the services revenue we generated in the March quarter just four years ago. Our services business is growing at a very fast pace all around the world, with revenue up more than 25% year-over-year in each of our five geographic segments. The App Store set a new all-time revenue record in the March quarter and Apple Music reached a new record for both revenue and paid subscribers, which have now passed 40 million. iCloud storage revenue was up by over 50% year-over-year to a new all-time record, and AppleCare revenue grew at its highest rate in five quarters, setting a new March quarter record. Our other product category also set a new record for the March quarter with revenue of almost $4 billion. We began shipping HomePod in February and unit sales of both Apple Watch and AirPods reached a new high for the March quarter. When we combine all our wearables and home products, they accounted for over 90% of the total growth in the other products category. Next, I'd like to talk about the Mac which set a new March quarter revenue record including new records in both the Americas and Greater China. We sold 4.1 million Macs, generating year-over-year growth in many emerging markets including Latin America, the Middle East and Africa, Central and Eastern Europe and India. We were happy to see double digit growth in our active installed base of Macs to a new all-time high, with almost 60% of March quarter purchases coming from customers who are new to Mac. iPad grew both units and revenue for the fourth consecutive quarter. We sold 9.1 million iPads and about half of purchases were by customers new to iPad. Growth was particularly strong in Japan, in Latin America, Middle East and Africa and Central and Eastern Europe. All markets where iPad sales were up double digits compared to a year ago. We gained share of the global tablet market based on the latest estimates from IDC and our active installed base of iPads reached an all-time high. NPD indicates that iPad has 53% of the U.S. tablet market in the March quarter, up from 40% share a year ago. And the most recent customer survey from 451 Research measured iPad customer satisfaction ratings of 95% and among business customers who plan to purchase tablets in the June quarter, 73% plan to purchase iPads. We continue to make great strides in the enterprise market. In February, we announced a new cyber risk management solution for businesses with Cisco, Aon and Allianz. This combined approach is an industry first that integrates the most secure technology from Apple and Cisco, cyber resilience evaluation services from Aon and options for enhanced cyber insurance coverage from Allianz. Organizations will now be able to better manage and protect themselves from cyber risks associated with ransomware and other malware-related threats. We are thrilled that insurance industry leaders recognize that Apple products provide superior security. In March, we announced two new services with IBM to bring more dynamic and intelligent insights into apps. IBM Watson services for Core ML and IBM Cloud Developer Console for Apple will enable developers to more easily build native iOS apps that bring together machine learning with artificial intelligence and cloud services. In healthcare, iPhones are being used across leading health systems including Cedars-Sinai, the Mayo Clinic and HCA Healthcare with iOS apps to support clinical workflows, communications and care delivery. In fact, HCA Healthcare recently announced they plan to deploy 100,000 iPhones across their hospital sites within the next three years. We had great performance from our retail and online stores which produced their highest March quarter revenue ever. Year-over-year growth was led by iPhone as well as strong performance from AirPods and introduction of HomePod. Our stores hosted more than 250,000 of our very popular Today at Apple sessions with a particular emphasis on coding and app design. During the quarter, we opened beautiful new stores in South Korea and in Austria, our first in both countries, and three weeks ago we opened our newest store in Tokyo, bringing us to 502 stores across the world today. Let me now turn to our cash position. We ended the quarter with $267.2 billion in cash plus marketable securities, and we had $110 billion in term debt and $12 billion in commercial paper outstanding for a net cash position of $145 billion. We returned nearly $27 billion to investors during the quarter. We paid $3.2 billion in dividends and equivalents and spent $23.5 billion on repurchases of 137 million Apple shares through open market transactions. We also retired 5.7 million shares upon the completion of our 13 ASR during the quarter. We have now completed over $275 billion of our current $300 billion capital return program, including $200 billion in share repurchases against our cumulative $210 million buyback program. We will complete the $210 billion program during the June quarter, three full quarters sooner than initially planned. The biggest priorities for our cash have not changed over the years. We want to maintain the cash we need to fund our day-to-day operations, to invest in our future, and to provide flexibility so that we can respond effectively to the strategic opportunities we encounter along the way. As we said 90 days ago, the new tax legislation enacted in December gives us increased financial and operational flexibility from the access to our global cash. It allows us to invest for growth in the United States more efficiently and it also provides us the opportunity to work towards a more optimal capital structure. As we said in February, our goal is to become approximately net cash neutral over time. Given our strong confidence in Apple's future and the value that we see in our stock, our board has authorized a new $100 billion share repurchase program which we will start executing during the June quarter. Considering the unprecedented size of this new authorization, we want to be particularly thoughtful and flexible in our approach to repurchasing shares. Our intention is to execute our program efficiently and at a fast pace. As in the past, we will provide regular updates on our capital return activities at the end of every quarter. We're also raising our dividend for the sixth time in less than six years. As we know, it is very important for our investors who value income. The quarterly dividend will grow from $0.63 to $0.73 per share, an increase of 16%. This is effective with our next dividend which the board has declared today, payable on May 17, 2018, to shareholders of record as of May 14, 2018. With over $13 billion in annual dividend payments, we are proud to be among the largest dividend payers in the world and we continue to plan for annual dividend increases going forward. We will continue to review our capital allocation regularly, taking into account the needs of our business, our investment opportunities, and our financial outlook. We will also continue to solicit input on our program from a broad base of shareholders. This approach will allow us to be flexible and thoughtful about the size, the mix and the pace of our program. We expect to provide a new update to our capital allocation plans approximately 12 months from now. As we move ahead into the June quarter, I'd like to review our outlook which includes the types of forward-looking information that Nancy referred to at the beginning of the call. We expect revenue to be between $51.5 billion and $53.5 billion. We expect gross margin to be between 38% and 38.5%. We expect OpEx to be between $7.7 billion and $7.8 billion. We expect OI&E to be about $400 million. And we expect our tax rate to be about 14.5%. With that, I'd like to open the call to questions.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Luca. And we ask that you limit yourself to one one-part question and one follow up. May we have the first question, please?
Operator:
Your first question will come from Shannon Cross with Cross Research.
Shannon S. Cross - Cross Research LLC:
Thank you very much. I wanted to ask about your thoughts on sort of iPhone and positioning now that we're a couple of quarters out from the launch of the iPhone X. Given the $1,000 price point, and it's clearly selling but there's been a lot of questions in the market about sustainability of that price point and how you're thinking about it as you look out sort of holistically across your lineup. So if you could talk a bit about what you're hearing from your customers and then I have a follow up. Thank you.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Sure. Shannon, it's Tim. As Luca mentioned earlier, our revenues are up 14% year-over-year on iPhone and that's a combination of single digit unit growth and ASP growth that is mainly driven by iPhone X. I think that our iPhone line shows that there's a variety of different customers in a market that is as large as a smartphone market and so we're going to continue to provide different iPhones for folks to meet their needs. On iPhone X specifically, I think it's important to maybe emphasize again one of the things I mentioned in my opening comments, that customers chose iPhone X more than any other iPhone each and every week in the March quarter, just as they did following its launch in the December quarter. Also, since we split the line with the launch of iPhone 6 and 6 Plus back in 2014, this is the first cycle that we've ever had where the top of the line iPhone model has also been the most popular. And so with the customer set that Luca referenced as well, the 99%, the iPhone X is a beloved product. And so I think that it's one of those things where like a team wins the Super Bowl, maybe you want them to win by a few more points but it's a Super Bowl winner and that's how we feel about it. I could not be prouder of the product.
Shannon S. Cross - Cross Research LLC:
Okay. Thank you. And then, Luca, can you talk a bit about working capital, specifically inventory which went up pretty significantly quarter-over-quarter? What's driving that and how are you thinking about, I mean, it's one of the uses of cash obviously, so how are you thinking about inventory and maybe working capital in general as you're going forward?
Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.:
Yeah, Shannon, you know that we've always generated significant amount of cash through working capital. We've got a negative cash conversion cycle and we plan to continue to have that. Our inventory level has gone up. It's just a temporary event. We have decided to make some purchasing decision, given current market conditions, and that should unwind over time.
Shannon S. Cross - Cross Research LLC:
So that was essentially component purchases?
Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.:
Correct.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you. Shannon.
Shannon S. Cross - Cross Research LLC:
Okay. Thank you very much.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Can we have the next question, please?
Operator:
From Morgan Stanley, Katy Huberty.
Kathryn Lynn Huberty - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC:
Thank you. Good afternoon. The services growth acceleration is really the highlight this quarter in my mind. Can you talk about what the biggest drivers, whether it be products or regions that drove the acceleration and do you think that we can continue to see growth north of 30%? And then I have a follow-up.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Hi, Katy. It's Tim. The services grew 31%. We hit an all-time record at $9.2 billion, first time we cleared $9 billion. The great news about it is, it's not a single geo or a single service. If you look at it, each of the geos, the minimum was at 25%. So each of the geos did extremely well and we set records from the App Store to the Apple Music to iCloud to Apple Pay and more. And underneath that, if you look at the subscriptions, the number of subscriptions, I think I mentioned this in my comments, paid subscriptions had moved up over 100 million on a year-over-year basis to over 270 million by the end of the quarter. And so it's very broad-based in terms of type of service and geographic region. It's sort of exactly what we would like to see. In terms of forecasting moving forward, we've obviously made assumption for our guidance that Luca provided earlier and in terms of longer term, we're on target to our 2020 goal of doubling the services revenue of 2016 as we had talked about previously.
Kathryn Lynn Huberty - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC:
And it doesn't look like the threat of a trade war with China slowed down that business. In fact, growth accelerated. But anything anecdotally that you see in the business in recent weeks that would suggest that that is having an impact on demand and any actions that Apple is taking as a company to preempt any risk of tariffs going forward?
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Yeah, I think my own view is that China and the U.S. have this unavoidable mutuality where China only wins if the U.S. wins and the U.S. only wins if China wins and the world only wins if China and the U.S. win. And so I think there's lots of things that bind the countries together and I'm actually very optimistic. I think history shows us that countries that embrace openness and diversity do much, much better than the ones that are closed. And so I'm a big believer that the two countries together can both win and grow the pie, not just allocate it differently. And so that's our focus, and I'm optimistic that – I don't know every play by play that will happen, but over time, I think that view will prevail.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Katy. Could we have the next question, please?
Operator:
And that will come from Mike Olson with Piper Jaffray.
Michael J. Olson - Piper Jaffray & Co.:
Hey. Good afternoon, and thank you for taking my question. Just following on the services question, I'd be curious what the next drivers of services revenue are. Will it be continued penetration of Music and Pay that you see as kind of the largest future categories of incremental growth? Or maybe when could augmented reality become a material part of services? And then I have a follow up.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Well, Mike, it's Tim. Again, the great thing about services is there are several services that make up the total that are growing nicely. And I think the other good news is that because our active installed base is at such a level, that last quarter we said that we had exceeded 1.3 billion. This year – we're not going to release this number every quarter, but we've obviously grown again. And it's growing at a double digit number on a year-over-year basis. And so with that kind of change in the installed base and with the services that we have now and others that we are working on, I think this is just a huge opportunity for us and feel very good about the track that we're on.
Michael J. Olson - Piper Jaffray & Co.:
Okay. And then any potential tariff issues aside, what's working for Apple in China right now? You talked about it being the strongest year-over-year growth in 10 quarters. I guess, what's driving that? Is it iPhone X specifically, or something else that's behind that improvement? Thank you.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
It's a good question. iPhone X was the most popular smartphone in all of China last quarter. And so iPhone X has done well there. In order to hit a number like 21% on the growth that you see on your data sheet there, there has to be several things working well. And the things that have huge growth rates there are the other products category, which is our wearables business in China and the services business, which you and I just spoke about. The iPhone obviously had to do extremely well to get a 21% number. And we gained share in the market for the Mac as well. And so there's actually several vectors there that are working well for us. We also – more broadly on the iPhone, the iPhone was the top three selling phones in China. And so it's iPhone X was number one, but we had several in the top.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thanks, Mike. Could we have the next question, please?
Operator:
From RBC Capital Markets, Amit Daryanani.
Amit Daryanani - RBC Capital Markets LLC:
Thanks a lot. Two questions from me as well. I guess first one, just touching on the gross margin dynamics, if I look at the guidance for June on a year-over-year basis, I think sales are up double digit but gross margins are still flat at the high end, maybe down 20 basis points at the midpoint. Can you just talk about what's driving the lack of leverage on a gross margin basis on a year-over-year basis for June?
Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.:
Yeah, Amit, it's Luca. We tend to look at our gross margin dynamics on a sequential basis, and essentially we're guiding to about flat on a sequential basis. On a year-over-year basis, it's less relevant for our business. But in general, I would say that this year we are seeing a more difficult cost environment, particularly we're still dealing with about 70 basis points of impact from the memory pricing environment that we're working through.
Amit Daryanani - RBC Capital Markets LLC:
Got it. And if I could just follow up. Tim, you've been fairly vocal I think talking about the need for better privacy protection and well-crafted regulation over time. Could you just maybe help us understand, how does Apple protect consumer data? And how does this ongoing debate around data protection translate into a positive for Apple over time?
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
We protect it by encrypting it, and we keep the bulk of information or a significant amount of information on the device so that the user is in control of it. We also collect much less overall than others do. Because if you look at our model, if we can convince you to buy an iPhone or an iPad, we'll make a little bit of money. You're not our product. And so that's how we look at that. In terms of benefit, we don't really view it like that. We view that privacy is a fundamental human right and that it's an extremely complex situation if you're a user to understand a lot of the user agreements and so forth. And we've always viewed that part of our role was to sort of make things as simple as possible for the user and provide them a level of privacy and security. And so that's how we look at it.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Amit. Could we have the next question, please?
Operator:
We'll go to Steve Milunovich with UBS.
Steven Milunovich - UBS Securities LLC:
Great. Thank you. Luca, could you talk a bit more about the capital allocation? The dividend increase of 16% was relatively low relative to what you could have done, so are you really thinking the stock price is attractive here? And you said you would execute the buyback at a fast pace. Can you give us any timeframe of that $100 billion and how much debt do you think about in terms of net cash zero?
Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.:
Yes. Let's start with the dividend. We're increasing it by 16%. This is the largest increase that we've done since we've reintroduced the dividend back in August of 2012. So we think it's a very meaningful increase for all the investors that value income. Obviously, when we come down to capital allocation decisions, we obviously also keep in mind that the opportunity for us to do some M&A activities which we do in an ongoing basis. But when it comes down between dividends and buyback, our view is that for a variety of reasons we see a lot of value in the stock. We believe the stock is undervalued and so we have a bias towards the buyback. So the dividend is a very large component of capital return because we're going to be returning more than $13 billion a year to investors through dividends but we believe that given where we are with the valuation of the stock, we think that we continue to do the buyback primarily. We are not giving an end date to the program this time because the amount is very, very large and so we will try to execute it. As you've seen from our track record during the last five years, we will do it at a very fast pace but we also want to do it efficiently. We want to make sure that we buy back the stock at the right time. And so with that in mind, we have done $23.5 billion of repurchases during the March quarter. We will give you an update to our activities at the end of every quarter and then 12 months from now we will actually talk about an update to the entire program. So you will be able to keep track of our progress every 90 days.
Steven Milunovich - UBS Securities LLC:
Thank you. And, Tim, could you talk a bit about your healthcare opportunity? Is it merely selling watches over time or do you think more broadly about it? Is there a services play? You're doing some things for your employees. Could that potentially broaden out? How do you think about the opportunity there?
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
We think about it very broadly and you can tell that a bit by some of the things that we've had going with ResearchKit and CareKit and most recently the health records that I had referenced in my initial comments and those all came out of getting significantly engaged in the Apple Watch and sort of pulling the strings, so to speak. And we also have a heart study that is going on currently, and so I don't want to give too much away. But it's an area of great interest where we think we can make a big difference in. And so it's a major strategic thrust of ours.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thanks, Steve. Could we have the next question, please?
Operator:
We'll go to Brian White with Monness, Crespi.
Brian J. White - Monness, Crespi, Hardt & Co., Inc.:
Yes, Tim, I think there is China numbers are actually phenomenal in the quarter and third consecutive quarter of growth. I think there's been a lot of concerns just Apple in China and maybe misinformation out there. But what do you see as the drivers for Apple in both Mainland China and Greater China over the next few years? And also if you could just give us an update on what you're seeing in India.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Yeah, good question. Let me start with India, and then I'll talk more about China. India, we set a new first-half record. So we continue to put great energy there and try to – our objective over time is to go in there with all of our different initiatives from retail and everything else. And so we're working toward those things. It's a huge market and it's clear that many people will be moving into the middle class over time, as we've seen in other countries. China, I continue to believe is a phenomenal country with lots of opportunity from a market point of view, but also lots of opportunity from a app developer point of view. We have almost 2 million application developers in China that are writing apps for iOS and the App Store, and they're doing unbelievably creative work and innovative work. So we look at China holistically, not only as a market. On the market side, we've seen iPhone X, as I had mentioned before, as being the top selling smartphone during the quarter. We gained share during the quarter. I read some notes here and there about the market itself not being good. I think on any kind of, on a 90-day clock, lots of different things can happen. But my own personal view of China is that it's a great market, and we are certainly looking far beyond 90 days and feel very bullish on the opportunity and the environment there. I would say that the market for us is more than iPhone. The Mac gained share there as well. The Watch is getting some traction there. Services is doing extremely well. And so it has several catalysts and I'm very pleased with the results that we were able to show during the quarter.
Brian J. White - Monness, Crespi, Hardt & Co., Inc.:
Great. Thank you.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thanks, Brian. Could we have the next question, please?
Operator:
Next we'll hear from Wamsi Mohan with Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
Wamsi Mohan - Bank of America Merrill Lynch:
Thank you. Good afternoon. Tim, can you comment on the price elasticity of demand at the high end for iPhones, if that was in line with your expectations? Do you have a preference for unit growth versus ASP growth when it comes to maximizing that gross profit dollar growth? And I have a follow-up for Luca, please.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
We price for the value that we're delivering, and iPhone X is the most innovative product on the market. And I've said a few times, we have there sort of jam-packed with technologies that really set up the smartphone for the next decade. And so that's how we priced it. We were surprised somewhat that through all of this period of time that the iPhone X winds up at the most selling, most popular for every week of the time since the launch. And so that's I think a powerful point. And it's number one in China, which is another powerful point. And so obviously at some point if those technologies move to lower price points and that there's probably more unit demand. But the way we think about it is trying to price a reasonable price for the value that we deliver and I feel that we did that.
Wamsi Mohan - Bank of America Merrill Lynch:
Thank you, Tim. And, Luca, your gross margins have been very robust despite the headwinds that you absorbed on commodities, which you quantified, and frankly, also from the FX hedges that are limiting somewhat the FX upside that a lot of other companies are seeing. So as you, one, when do you expect these to turn into tailwinds? And when they do turn into tailwinds, would you consider reinvesting some of those into pricing or should we think about you flowing those through to the bottom line?
Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.:
Well, Wamsi, I think, let me start with where we are right now. I think you're right. I think we've been able to navigate a difficult foreign exchange environment for a number of years and now, as you know, because we have this hedging program as the dollar has weakened a bit in recent months, although during the last week it's actually started to turn the other way again, we've got the hedging program that works both ways. And also on the memory front, we feel that for NAND, we're going to be turning the corner very soon. For DRAM, we also think that we are near the peak, possibly at the end of this year. And so that should provide some level of stability. As I said earlier this year, I think we are experiencing in total a more difficult cost environment and so hopefully that can turn into a positive for us. At the same time, it's very difficult for me to give you an indication of what is going to happen in the future because every product cycle is different, and as you know, we don't provide guidance past the current quarter. There are some elements that we understand quite well and we tend to manage well over the course of the cycle. For example, our cost structures that we are able to manage throughout the year. But there are also elements that are not entirely under our control like foreign exchange. And the mix of products and services that we sell to our customers also has an impact on the overall gross margin. Our primary consideration is always around maximizing gross margin dollars, and that is the approach that we take around for example pricing decisions.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Wamsi. Could we have the next question, please?
Operator:
From Citi, we'll hear from Jim Suva.
Jim Suva - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.:
Thank you very much. And I'll ask actually both my questions at the same time, one for Tim and one for Luca. Tim, strategically when we talk to investors they often say, oh, iPhone market is saturated. There's not much room for growth. Yet when we do our analysis, we kind of still see emerging markets like India and all those still are growth. When you think about India and those markets, do you kind of believe that some of those markets could get to much higher or a more normalized market share that you have in some of the developing countries over time? And can you talk a little bit about some of those efforts you may be doing? And then, Luca, on the question for you, is about the gross margin. When we think about if component prices start to stabilize, seeing how Apple services have been so successful and accretive to margins, should we start to look for some potential margin, gross margin upside, again should components stabilize? Thank you, gentlemen.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Yeah, Jim, thanks for the question. In terms of the – let me address the smartphone market a bit and then I'll mention iPhone. In terms of the market in general, if you look at last year, which is the last data point we have on the full market, there were still 0.5 billion feature phones sold in the world. And so many of those were sold into emerging markets, not all of them, but many of them. And we still believe that over time every phone sold will be a smartphone. And so it seems to us that with that many feature phones being sold, that's a pretty big opportunity. In terms of the iPhone itself, even though we sell quite a few phones across the course of a year, our market share globally is low compared to the – our sales are low compared to the full market of smartphones. And so our task is to convince people that currently – or have another type of phone to switch, while really taking care of people that have an iPhone so that they choose – when they elect to buy another phone, that they buy another iPhone. And so we've spent quite a bit of time on that, as you might guess. I do think that India, India is the third largest smartphone market in the world. There's obviously huge opportunities there for us, and we have extremely low share in that market overall. And so we're putting a lot of energy there and working with the carriers in that market, and they're investing enormously on the LTE networks. And the infrastructure has come quite a ways since we began to put a lot of energy in there because of their leadership and so forth. And so I do think – I don't buy the view that market's saturated. I don't see that from a market point of view or – and certainly not from an iPhone point of view. I think the smartphone market is sort of like the best market for a consumer product company in the history of the world and – but that's how I feel about it. It's a terrific market, and we're very happy to be a part of it.
Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.:
Jim, on the gross margin side, I think I'll repeat what I said earlier, but you're right. Our services business, and I've said it in the past, is accretive to company margins. And so as we are able to grow the services business, that should provide a positive, a tailwind. At the same time, within the services portfolio that we have, we have services that have different levels of profitability, so we also need to take into account the mix of services that we're going to be selling. At a macro level, because about two-thirds of our company is outside the United States, a weak dollar is a positive for our gross margins; a strong dollar, as it's been during the last four years, has been a bit of a headwind for the company. We try to make it more stable through the hedging program. And in general, when we look at our process to innovate our products, typically when we launch a new product, that product tends to have a higher cost structure than the product it replaces. And so that is something that we need to work through every time we launch a new product and we have a pretty good track record and history of taking those cost structures down over time. So we need to balance all these different elements. I think we've done a pretty remarkable job during the last several years at managing all these different variables and coming out with a level of gross margins that we think is really good for investors and certainly it is our plan to continue to manage them that way. But it's very difficult for me to give you a prediction of where gross margins are going to be six months or 12 months from now.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Jim.
Jim Suva - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.:
Thank you for the details and congratulations.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
A replay of today's call will be available for two weeks on Apple Podcast, as a webcast on apple.com/investor and via telephone. And the numbers for the telephone replay are 888-203-1112 or 719-457-0820 and please enter confirmation code 5253762. These replays will be available by approximately 5:00 PM Pacific Time today. Members of the press with additional questions can contact Kristin Huguet at 408-974-2414. Financial analysts can contact Matt Blake or me with additional questions. Matt is at 408-974-7406, and I'm at 408-974-5420. Thanks again for joining us.
Operator:
Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude today's presentation. We do thank everyone for your participation, and you may now disconnect.
Executives:
Nancy Paxton - Senior Director of Investor Relations Tim Cook - Chief Executive Officer Luca Maestri - Chief Financial Officer
Analysts:
Shannon Cross - Cross Research Katy Huberty - Morgan Stanley Mike Olson - Piper Jaffray Toni Sacconaghi - Bernstein Laura Martin - Needham and Company Steve Milunovich - UBS Amit Daryanani - RBC Capital Markets
Operator:
Good day. And welcome to this Apple Incorporated First Quarter Fiscal Year 2018 Earnings Release Conference Call. Today’s call is being recorded. At this time for opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn the call over to Nancy Paxton, Senior Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you. Good afternoon, and thanks to everyone for joining us. Speaking first today is Apple CEO, Tim Cook and he’ll be followed by CFO, Luca Maestri. After that, we’ll open the call to questions from analysts. Please note that some of the information you will hear during our discussion today will consist of forward-looking statements including, without limitation, those regarding revenue, gross margin, operating expenses, other income and expense, taxes, capital allocations and future business outlook. Actual results or trends could differ materially from our forecast. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in Apple's most recently filed periodic reports on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q and the Form 8-K filed with the SEC today, along with the associated press release. Apple assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements or information, which speak as of their respective dates. And I'd like to remind that the quarter we’re reporting today included 13-weeks, whereas the quarter we reported a year ago included 14-weeks. And I’d now like to turn the call over to Tim for introductory remarks.
Tim Cook:
Thanks, Nancy and thanks everyone on the call, and welcome to everyone today. Before we dive into the quarter, I'd like to take a moment to talk about a significant milestone we recently crossed. Apple's active installed base reached 1.3 billion devices in January and is at an all-time high for all of our major products. 1.3 billion devices represents an astonishing 30% growth in just two years. It speaks to the strength and reliability of our products and our ecosystem, as well as the loyalty, satisfaction and engagement of our customers. It's also fueling tremendous growth in our services business, which I’ll talk about a little later in the call. Turning to the December quarter. We're thrilled to report Apple's biggest quarter ever, which set new all-time records in both revenue and earnings. We generated revenue of $88.3 billion, which is above the high-end of our guidance range, and it is up almost $10 billion or 13% over the previous all-time record we set a year ago. It's also our fifth consecutive quarter of accelerating revenue growth with double digit growth in each of our geographic segments around the world. What makes us even more remarkable is that the quarter we're reporting today was 13-weeks long, while the year ago quarter was 14-weeks. When we look at the average revenue per week in the December quarter this year compared to last year, our growth was a stunning 21%. Our growth was broad-based and a key driver was iPhone, which generated its highest revenue ever. iPhone X was the best-selling smartphone in the world in the December quarter according to Canalys, and it has been our top selling phone every week since it launched. iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus rounded out the top three iPhones in the quarter. In fact, revenue for our newly launched iPhones was the highest of any lineup in our history, driving total Apple revenue above our guidance range. I want to take a moment to recognize the tremendous amount of work that went into creating iPhone X. Our teams carried out an extremely complex launch from both an engineering and operations perspective, executing an outstanding product ramp that required years of research and development; one that introduced innovative features like an edge-to-edge Super Retina Display and the TrueDepth Camera, which enables Face ID. Our customers love these new features and the new gestures like simply swiping up from the bottom, which make using iPhone even more intuitive and enjoyable. Our team has put the technology of tomorrow in our customers’ hands today, set a standard for the next decade of smartphones and we are very proud of their achievements. It was another very strong quarter for services with revenue of $8.5 billion, up 18% over last year, and we’re on pace to achieve our goal of doubling our 2016 services revenue by 2020. The number of paid subscriptions across our services offerings passed 240 million by the end of the December quarter, that’s an increase of 30 million in the last 90 days alone, which is the largest quarterly growth ever. We had an all-time record quarter for the App Store with our best holiday season ever. We’re seeing great excitement around augmented reality with customers now enjoying over 2,000 ARKit enabled app, spanning every category in the App Store. In December, when Pokémon GO released its new augmented reality features built with ARKit, it jumped the top of the App Store charts. Last week, on a stop in Toronto, I met developers who are hard at work on creative applications using ARKit from art appreciation to ecommerce, and I was very impressed with what I saw. Just four months after ARKit launched to the public, we’ve already released ARKit 1.5 in beta to developers around the world, and the response has been tremendous. Augmented reality is going to revolutionize many of the experiences we have with mobile devices. And with ARKit, we’re giving developers the most advanced tools on the market to create apps for the most advanced operating system running on the most advanced hardware. This is something only Apple can do. In addition to the App Store, several other services had a biggest quarter ever, including Apple Music, iCloud and Apple Pay, all of which saw growth in both active users and revenue. Apple Pay has reached an important milestone in the U.S. As a result of 50% year-over-year growth in merchant adoption, it’s now accepted at more than half of all American retail locations, which includes more than two-thirds of the country’s top 100 retailers. Now available in 20 markets, global Apple Pay purchase volume more than tripled year-over-year and we’re delighted to be expanding to Brazil in the coming months. Today, you can use Apple Pay to take a subway in Guangzhou, China, see a concert at London’s Wembley Stadium or buy a souvenir in Yosemite National Park. In the U.S., we launched Apple Pay Cash in December, and it’s off to a terrific start. Millions of people are already using it to send and receive money with friends and family quickly, easily and securely; to split a bill, pay someone back, or send last minute gift right from the messages app. It was our best quarter ever for the Apple Watch with over 50% growth in revenue and units for the fourth quarter in a row and strong double-digit growth in every geographic segment. Sales of Apple Watch Series 3 models were also more than twice the volume of Series 2 a year ago. Apple Watch is the most popular, smart watch in the world and gained market share during the quarter based on the latest estimates from IDC. It was the third consecutive quarter of growth for iPad revenue, thanks to the strength of both iPad and iPad Pro. Based on the latest data from IDC, we gained share in nearly every market we track with strong outperformance in emerging markets. Worldwide, almost half of our iPad sales were the first-time tablet buyers or those switching to Apple, and that’s true in some of our most developed markets, including Japan and France. In China, new and switching users made up over 70% of all iPad sales. For Mac, we launched the all new, iMac Pro in mid-December. It’s an entirely new product line designed for our Pro users who love the all-in-one design of iMac and require workstation class performance. It's the fastest, most powerful Mac ever, delivering incredible computational power, for simulation and real time 3D rendering, immersive VR and complex photography audio and video projects. Worldwide, 60% of our Mac sales were to first time buyers and switchers and in China, that number was almost 90%. We're looking forward to getting HomePod in customers’ hands beginning next week. HomePod is an innovative wireless speaker, which delivers stunning audio quality wherever its placed in the home, thanks to the advanced Apple engineered hardware and software. Together with Apple Music, HomePod gives you instant access to one of the world's largest music catalogs. And with the intelligence of Siri, it’s a powerful assistant you control through natural voice interaction. We're very happy with the initial response from reviewers who've experienced HomePod ahead of its launch, and we think our customers are going to love this new product. We believe one of the key issues of the 21st century is education. And because of that, we've strengthened our commitment and investment into initiatives like everyone can code. To find the innovators of the future, we need to nurture the students of today. Our App Development with Swift curriculum, which is available free on iBooks, has been downloaded more than 1.2 million times worldwide with almost half of those coming from here in the United States. It’s also being taught in dozens of community colleges across the country, putting practical skills in the hands of today’s jobs seekers. I was in London two weeks ago as we announced that the program was expanding to more than 70 colleges and universities in Europe. Millions of students around the world will have the opportunity to add Swift to their coding vocabulary and gain skills that are essential for today’s economy. This is an exciting time at Apple and with the best lineup of products and services we've ever had and a set of initiatives that show how business can be a force for good in the world. We could not be more excited about our future. Now, for more details on the December quarter results, I'd like to turn over the call to Luca.
Luca Maestri:
Thank you, Tim. Good afternoon, everyone. Our business and financial performance in the December quarter were exceptional, as we set new all-time records for revenue, operating income, net income and earnings per share. Starting with revenue, we’re reporting an all-time record, $88.3 billion, up nearly $10 billion or 13% over the prior record set last year. It is our fifth consecutive quarter of accelerating revenue growth. As you know, the December quarter a year ago spanned 14-weeks compared to 13-weeks this year, which is important to consider as we assess the underlying performance of our business this year. When we look at average revenue per week, our growth rate was even higher at 21% with growth across all product categories for the third consecutive quarter. Our results were terrific all around the world with double digit revenue growth in all our geographic segments, an all-time quarterly record in the vast majority of markets we track, including the U.S., Western Europe, Japan, Canada Australia and Korea, as well as Mainland China, Latin America, The Middle East, Central and Eastern Europe, and India. In Greater China, we were very happy to generate double digit revenue growth for the second quarter in a row and in emerging markets outside of Greater China, we saw 25% year-over-year growth. Gross margin was 38.4% at the high end of our guidance range. Operating margin was 29.8% of revenue. Our net income was $20.1 billion an all-time record, and up $2.2 billion over the last year. Diluted earnings per share were $3.89 also an all-time record and cash flow from operations was very strong of $28.3 billion. During the quarter, we sold 77.3 million iPhones, the highest number ever for a 13-week quarter. Average weekly iPhone sales were up 6% compared to December quarter last year with growth in every region of the world despite the staggered launch of iPhone X. We established all-time iPhone revenue record in nearly every market we track with double-digit growth in all of our geographic segments. iPhone ASP increased to $796 from $695 a year ago, driven primarily by the launch of iPhone X and the success of iPhone 8 and 8 Plus. We exited the December quarter towards the lower end of our target range of five to seven weeks of iPhone channel inventory with less than 1 million more iPhones in the channel compared to the December quarter a year ago, in line with our growth in average weekly unit sales. Customer interest and satisfaction with iPhone are very, very strong for both consumers and business users. The latest data from 451 Research indicates U.S. customer satisfaction ratings of 96% or higher across iPhone models. In fact, combining iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus and iPhone X, consumers reported an amazing 99% satisfaction rating. And among business customers planning to purchase smartphones in the next quarter, 77% planned to purchase iPhone. Our customers are also incredibly loyal with Comcast latest U.S. research, reflecting a 96% iPhone loyalty rate, the highest ever measured. Turning to services. We had a terrific quarter with revenue of $8.5 billion, up 18% year-over-year and up 27% in terms of average revenue per week; that is an acceleration to the 24% services growth run rate that we experienced in the September quarter. The App Store set a new all-time revenue record. The Store’s all-new design is off to a fantastic start with quarterly store visitors, transacting accounts and paying accounts, reaching new all-time highs. During the week beginning December 24th, a record number of customers made purchases or downloaded Apps from the App Store, spending over $890 million in that seven-day period, followed by $300 million in purchases on New Year’s day alone. And according to App Annie’s latest report, the App Store continues to be the preferred destination for customer purchases by a very wide margin, generating nearly twice the revenue of Google Play. Across all our services offerings, paid subscriptions reached $240 million with growth of 58% over last year and they were a major contributor to the overall strong growth in services revenue. As Tim mentioned, it was our best quarter ever for Apple Watch. And when we add the results from Beats and AirPods, our total revenue from wearables was up almost 70% year-over-year. In fact, wearables were the second largest contributor to revenue growth after iPhone, which is impressive for a business that started only three years ago. In total, our other products category set a new all-time record with quarterly revenue exceeding $5 billion for the first time. Next, I’d like to talk about the Mac. We sold 5.1 million Macs during the December quarter, which translates to 2% year-over-year increase in average sales per week. Mac performance was particularly strong in emerging markets with unit sales up 13% year-over-year and with all-time records in Latin America, in India, Turkey and Central and Eastern Europe. On a worldwide basis, the active install base of Macs was up double-digits year-over-year to a new record. It was also another growth quarter for iPad. We sold 13.2 million units with average iPad sales per week up 8% over last year’s December quarter. iPad sales grew strong double-digits in many emerging markets, including Latin America, the Middle East, Central and Eastern Europe and India, as well as developed markets, including Japan, Australia and Korea. The active install base of iPad has grown every quarter since its launch in 2010, and it reached a new all-time high in December, thanks to extremely high customer loyalty and large numbers of first-time iPad users. NPD indicates that iPad had 46% share of the U.S. tablet market in the December quarter, up from 36% share a year ago. And the most recent surveys from 451 Research found that among customers planning to purchase tablets within 90 days, 72% of consumers and 68% of business users planned to purchase iPads. Customer satisfaction is also very high with businesses reporting a 99% satisfaction rating for iPad. We are seeing great traction in enterprise as businesses across industries and around the world standardize on iOS. For example, Intesa Sanpaolo, one of Europe’s leading banks, has chosen iOS as the mobile standard for its entire 70,000 employee base in Italy; choosing iOS for its security, user interface, accessibility and reliability, Intesa Sanpaolo will deploy native apps to improve employee productivity in customer support, human resources, and marketing across the company. And LensCrafters, one of the largest optical retail brands in North America, will be using over 7,000 iPad Pros to enable digital eye exams and digital optical measurements in a personalized and interactive experience. We’re also rolling out a new initiative, called Apple at Work to help businesses implement employee choice programs more easily and offer Apple products company-wide. Resources from both Apple and our channel partners will enable enterprise IT and procurement teams to buy or lease Apple products more efficiently, streamline the setup of iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and deliver a seamless onboarding experience for employees. We launched the program with CDW in the U.S. last week, and we would be expanding to more channels and regions later this year. The December quarter was extremely busy for our retail and online stores, which welcomed 538 million visitors. Traffic was particularly strong during the four-weeks following the launch of iPhone X, up 46% over last year. And across the quarter, our stores conducted over 200,000 Today at Apple sessions, covering topics including photography, music, gaming, and app development, and art and design. Just last weekend, we opened our first store in Seoul, Korea and we’re looking forward to opening our first store in Austria in a few weeks. These newest openings will mark the expansion of our retail store presence to 21 countries. Let me now turn to our cash position. We ended the quarter with $285.1 billion in cash plus marketable securities, a sequential increase of $16.2 billion. $269 billion of this cash, or 94% of the total, was outside the United States. We issued $7 billion in debt during the quarter, bringing us to $110 billion in term-debt and $12 billion in commercial paper outstanding, for a total net cash position of $163 billion at the end of the quarter. We also returned $14.5 billion to investors during the quarter. We paid $3.3 billion in dividends and equivalents, and spent $5.1 billion on repurchases of 30.2 million Apple shares through open market transactions. We launched a new $5 billion ASR program, resulting in initial delivery and retirement of 23.6 million shares and we retired 3.8 million shares upon the completion of our 12th ASR during the quarter. We’ve now completed over $248 billion of our $300 billion capital return program, including $176 billion in share repurchases against our announced $210 billion buyback program with $34 billion remaining under our current authorization. Turning to taxes. Due to the recently enacted legislation in the U.S., we estimate making a corporate income tax payment of approximately $38 billion to the U.S. government on our cumulative past foreign earnings. This amount is very similar to what we had been accruing on those earnings in our financial results through fiscal year 2017. Including the $38 billion payment, we will have paid over $110 billion of corporate income tax on our total domestic and foreign earnings during the last 10 years for a cash tax rate of about 26%. Our tax rate of 25.8% for the December quarter was close to our guidance of 25.5% as the lower U.S. statutory rate from the new legislation was effectively offset by the remeasurement of deferred tax balances. As we move ahead into the March quarter, I'd like to review our outlook, which includes the types of forward looking information that Nancy referred to at the beginning of the call; we expect revenue to be between $60 billion and $62 billion; we expect gross margin to be between 38% and 38.5%; we expect OpEx to be between $7.6 billion and $7.7 billion; we expect OI&E to be about $300 million; and we expect the tax rate to be about 15%. Tax reform will allow us to pursue a more optimal capital structure for our company. Our current net cash position is $163 billion. And given the increased financial and operational flexibility from the access to our foreign cash, we are targeting to become approximately net cash neutral over time. We will provide an update to our specific capital allocation plans when we report results for our second fiscal quarter, consistent with the timing of updates that we have provided in the past. Finally, today our Board of Directors has declared a cash dividend of $0.63 per share of common stock, payable on February 15, 2018, to shareholders of record as of February 12, 2018. With that, I’d like to open the call to questions.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Luca. And we ask that you limit yourself to one one-part question and one follow-up. May we have the first question please?
Operator:
Thank you. Our first question will come from Shannon Cross with Cross Research.
Shannon Cross:
Luca, I wanted to talk a little bit about, more about your comments on capital structure. I realize you don't want to give any specifics about what you're actually going to return in the timing. But just maybe if you can talk about how much cash you think you need to have here on the business? And then in terms of ongoing cash flow, since toe overseas cash flow no longer be encumbered, does that change your thought process, in general? And then I have a follow up. Thank you.
Luca Maestri:
Of course, we've been talking about the importance of tax reform over the years, because we believe it's really beneficial to the U.S. economy. What it means to us as a company of course is that, we have additional flexibility right now from the access to the foreign cash. And in the past, we've been addressing this issue by having to raise debt as the cash was overseas; the majority of the cash was overseas. And so we are now in a position where we have $285 billion of cash, we've got $122 billion of debt for a net cash of $163 billion. We have now the flexibility to deploy this capital. We will do that overtime, because the amount is very large. As I said earlier, we will be discussing capital allocation plans when we review our March quarter results. And when you look at our track record of what we’ve done over the last several years, you’ve seen that effectively we were returning to our investors essentially about 100% of our free cash flow. And so that is the approach that we’re going to be taking. We’re going to be very thoughtful and deliberate about it. Obviously, we want to make the right decisions in the best interest of our long-term shareholders.
Shannon Cross:
And then, Tim, maybe could you talk a little bit more about what you’re hearing from customers in terms of the iPhone demand. How you’re thinking about the potential decay rate, for lack of a better term, with the high-end phones and over $1,000 phone versus balancing that with now your ability to ship phones down below $400, because you’ve expanded the product line so much when you launched your phones in 2017? Thank you.
TimCook:
The revenue growth from iPhone across all the geographic segments was in the double-digits. And I think as Luca said earlier, when you change that for an average weekly sales basis, it’s actually 22%. And so it was a stellar quarter for iPhone. The iPhone X was the most popular and that’s particularly noteworthy given that we didn’t start shipping until early November, and we’re constrained for a while. The team did a great job of getting into supply demand balance there in December. But since the launch of iPhone X, it has been the most popular iPhone every week, every week sales. And that is even through today, actually through January. And so we feel fantastic about the results. The most important thing for us is that really the number, it’s customer satisfaction. And customer satisfaction is literally off the charts on iPhone X. We think about the advances in technology that were a part of the iPhone X from -- we went from Touch ID to Face ID; Face ID has been incredibly well received; the wireless charging, the edge to edge super retina display; and totally new gestures, the user experience is different. And so it’s great to get that kind of feedback. If you look at the the overall iPhone line to get to the essence of the question, I think. I looked -- I reviewed the top many markets, I’ll talk briefly about the top four. In Urban China and the U.S., the top five smartphones last quarter were all iPhones. And in Japan and the UK, six of the top seven were iPhones. And so in a market that is as large as the smartphone market is, people want some level of choice and they’re deciding which ones to buy. But we feel fantastic, particularly as it pertains to iPhone X.
Operator:
Next, we’ll go Katy Huberty with Morgan Stanley.
Katy Huberty:
Growing double-digits of such a large revenue base is impressive in itself. But if I look at March quarter guidance, it does assume a slower average weekly growth in total revenue, as well as, I think on my math, iPhone shipments when you compare it to the December quarter. So just how should we read into a modest slowdown in average weekly growth as it relates to the last question around the decay of demand around the higher priced products? Or any impact that you might be seeing from the lower-priced battery replacements or anything else in the market? And then I have a follow-up.
Luca Maestri:
We are guiding to $62 billion. It's a strong double-digit growth, 13% to 17%. In context, it's $7 billion to $9 billion above last year. So when you put things in perspective and you add the $10 billion of growth that we had in the first quarter and the $7 billion to $9 billion that we're guiding to for the second quarter, you're talking about $17 billion to $19 billion of growth in six months. This is at the macro level. We typically don't go into this level of detail, but think it's important this quarter to give you additional color. And maybe the two most important messages are that we believe iPhone revenue will grow double digits as compared to last year, during the March quarter. And also and importantly that iPhone sell-through growth on a year-over-year basis will be actually accelerating during the March quarter as compared to the December quarter. Let me explain the factors that we took into consideration as we came up with our iPhone units and ASP that are embedded in our guidance. Historically, because the channel fill and the holiday season, our selling volume during the December quarter is generally higher than sell-through. This year, the difference was further magnified, because we shipped iPhone X in November rather than the September quarter. We had a very successful product ramp. We were able to reach supply/demand balance in December, which placed the entirety of our channel fill for iPhone X in Q1 and this will have an effect on both units and ASP in Q2. Now, for units, there is a second point to consider. We typically reduced channel inventory for our newest iPhones in Q2, because they enjoy very large demand in the initial weeks of sales, which are compounded by the holiday season in Q1. So we anticipate doing that in Q2 this year as well. For ASPs, there's also another element that we need to consider. As you know, our newest products this year have a higher ASP than they had in the past. And so as a result, as we reduce inventories of these newest products, the overall ASPs for iPhone in Q2 will naturally decline sequentially by a higher percentage than we have experienced historically. So in summary, our guidance for iPhone; we got double digit year-over-year growth and acceleration of sell-through growth on a year-over-year basis. For the balance of the Company, in the aggregate, we expect to grow strong double-digits year-over-year and particularly very strong performance in service and in wearables like we’ve seen during the December quarter. I hope this helps.
Katy Huberty:
Yes, that's great color. Just a follow-up on gross margin. Guidance for flat gross margin in March is pretty seasonal, but you do have the tailwind from currency. And so if you can just comment on how you think that flows into the model over the next couple of quarters, the weaker dollar. And what your outlook might be around component costs in the near future. Thank you.
Luca Maestri:
Let me walk you through the sequential first. So we’re guiding about flat sequentially in spite of the loss of leverage. That is the largest element that we need to take into account because of our typical seasonality. And we expect to offset the seasonality impact with cost improvements and with mix. FX on a sequential basis is fairly muted, because as you know, we've got a hedging program that protects us from the volatility of currencies in the short term. Certainly, weaker dollar in the long term, if it holds, will be a positive but it's not something that you're going to be seeing translating to gross margin tailwind quickly. And so I think we need to keep that in mind. We also need to keep in mind that we continue to experience a difficult memory pricing environment, which we think is going to start improving as we move into the second half of our fiscal year. But it still has a negative impact in the March quarter.
Operator:
Mike Olson from Piper Jaffray has our next question.
Mike Olson:
I know you don't talk about future products, which is often presses to questions about future products and I'll give it a shot. When you think conceptually about the path for iPhone X Style devices going forward. Is there any reason the roadmap wouldn’t consists of multiple devices as we’ve seen with past iPhone upgrades? In other words, the 10 was unique amongst recent iPhone launches, because it's a singular device, potentially limiting the shots on go for upgrades given limited options. How do you think about that, going forward? And then I have a follow up.
TimCook:
Mike, you did a good job of answering your question. I think at the beginning, we don’t really comment on future products. But I would tell you that we’re thrilled with the reception of iPhone X. And as we said when we launched it, we were setting up the next decade. And that is how we look at it. And so that's the reason it's chockfull of incredible innovation. And so you can bet that we're pulling that string.
Mike Olson:
And then how you're think about AR beyond iPhone? You've created the world's largest AR platform. You've got developers generating a wide variety of apps. I realized it's still early days. But do you see Apple as a provider of a larger ecosystem of AR-enabled device beyond iPhone and iPad in the coming years? Or should investors focus on the opportunity within your existing device portfolio for at least the foreseeable future? Thanks.
TimCook:
I see AR as being profound. I think, AR has the ability to amplify human performance instead of isolating humans. And so I am a huge, huge believer in AR. We put a lot of energy on AR removing very fast. We've gone from ARkit 1.0 to 1.5 in just a matter of months. I couldn't be happier with the rate and face of the developer community, how faster developing these things. And I don’t want to say what we may do. But I could not be happier with how things are going right now.
Operator:
And next we’ll go to Toni Sacconaghi from Bernstein.
Toni Sacconaghi:
I have a question and follow-up. You commented on how your install based over the last couple of years has grown 30%. And iPhone is clearly the largest component of that, and so iPhone install base is probably growing close to that number perhaps last, call it 20% through 25%. Yet, if we look at iPhone unit growth for fiscal ’18 what’s implied with your guidance fiscal ’17 and fiscal ’16, it’s been relatively flat. So you have an install base that’s 20% plus higher, and a unit growth that relatively flat, which would suggest that your upgrade rate is going down or your replacement cycle is elongating. And I’m wondering whether you agree with that and whether investors should be worried about that. And maybe if I could just add one other wrinkle to potentially get your response on is. Given consumers’ heightened awareness of their ability to replace batteries going forward as opposed to upgrades. Isn’t that also something that investors should potentially be concerned about in terms of its impact on upgrade rate going forward? And then believe or not, I have a follow-up.
TimCook:
This is up to investors as to what things they would like to focus on, so I don’t want to put myself in the position of that. The way that I look at this and the numbers you’ve quoted have a different view of them. But generally what we see with iPhone is the reliability of iPhone is fantastic. The second or the previously owned market has expanded in units over the years. And you see in many cases, carriers and retailers having very vibrant programs around trading an iPhone in. And because iPhone has the largest residual rate on it, it acts as a buffer for the customer to buy new one and it lines up with another customer somewhere else that is perfectly fine with having a previously owned iPhone. And so I view all of that to be incredibly positive. It’s more people on iPhones the better. I would like to point out that the ever year major product hit a high on the active install base. And so that’s iPad, it’s Mac and those are huge numbers as well. And so as we’ve always said, there is a large part of the -- or the vast majority of the services are mapped to the install base instead of the quarterly sales. And this quarter is no different on that. On the battery, Toni, we did not consider in any way, shape, or form, what it would do to upgrade rates. We did it because we thought it was the right thing to do for our customers. And sitting here today, I don't know what effect it will have. And again, it’s not -- was not in our thought process of deciding to do what we've done.
Toni Sacconaghi:
And just a follow-up, maybe I could clarify two little things. One, Luca, on tax rate, you talked about 15% for Q2. Is that how we should think about the tax rate on an ongoing basis? And then just back to you on your response, Tim, I guess maybe you could just comment on whether you believe the upgrade rate has decreased over the last couple of years, because again, just mechanically install base is growing 20 and units are relatively flat over that period. Isn't that telling the install base is -- upgrade rate is going down, or am I not thinking about other considerations? Thank you.
Luca Maestri:
Toni, on the tax rate, I will make two comments. First of all, the new tax law in the United States is complex. And I think we, as many other companies, are really trying to absorb what this all means. And I think we're going to be receiving, over the next few months, implementation guidance. So we've taken some provisional estimates in coming up with our tax entries for the quarter, and we will have to do that as we go forward here during the year. So it may be a bit bumpy in the short-term as we understand the law in full, and it actually gets explained in full. But I would say that for the current fiscal year, the guidance that we provided for Q2 should be approximately what you should be seeing. As we get into new fiscal year, so many things change and we need to take that into account, the geographic mix of our products and so on. But I would say for the remainder of the year, it's what we’re guide to.
Tim Cook:
I think on the replacement cycle, Toni, the answer is, probably looks different by geography. In those geographies that had, in the early days of the smartphone market, had very traditional subsidies where you paid $199 out the door or $99 or whatever. I think it's accurate to save those type of markets. The replacement cycle is likely longer. Where that isn't the case, I am not nearly as sure on that. I would point out that that happened some time ago and so it's very difficult currently to ever get a real time handle on replacement rate, because you obviously not -- you don't know the replacement rate for the products you're currently selling, you only know that in an historical sense. So it's not something that we are overly fixate on.
Operator:
Next question comes from Laura Martin from Needham.
Laura Martin:
I love the 1.3 billion devices you gave us, updating from two years ago. And I’d love the onramp as you spread out the pricing. Do you get a sense that we have more unique users in that 1.3 billion than we had unique users back there in 2016?
Tim Cook:
Laura, I missed the first part of that, you broke up on the phone.
Laura Martin:
So we have 1.3 billion [technical difficulty] unique users or I mean fewer products, so we have a higher percentage of unique [users] in the 1.3 devices and more in the billion devices. Is it a [technical difficulty] are they….
Tim Cook:
Laura, you're cutting in and out. But I'm going to take a swing at what I think you're asking. I think you're asking, are there more active users today than there were two years ago when we had 1 billion active devices. And the answer is absolutely, there are many, many more.
Laura Martin:
Yes, I was asking as a percent, the ownership. You see 1.4 billion devices owned per person. Do you think it's now 1.2 billion or 1.6 billion?
Tim Cook:
Well, that 1.4 billion, I don't know where that came from. It did not come from Apple. And so that's one of the things that kind of flowed out there. And I want to divorce Apple from that number. We’re not releasing a user number, because we think that the proper way to look at it is to look at active devices. It's also the one that is the most accurate for us to measure. And so that's our thinking behind there.
Laura Martin:
Switchers in the quarter, you often give us switchers.
Tim Cook:
It is so early on this product cycle, particularly with the iPhone X only starting in November that we do not feel we have data at this point that would be very meaningful to share. And so I'll pump that question until next time around.
Operator:
Next we'll go to Steve Milunovich from UBS.
Steve Milunovich:
Tim, you said you don't want to tell investors what to do. But the first point you made was talking about the size of the install base. Later you've talked about the importance of customer satisfaction. Given that this doesn't look like a super-cycle in terms of unit growth, are you nudging us to focus on the size of the install base, the annuity opportunity here? And do you have confidence that you can monetize that install base through additional hardware and services?
Tim Cook:
What I said on the investor part is that I think every investor has to look at their own situation and conclude the things that they think are important. What I think is important, I think the active devices are hugely important and that's the reason that we released the number two years ago, and the reason that we’re releasing that again today. That number speaks to the strength of the product the loyalty of the customer, the strength of the ecosystem. And so we do put a lot of weight behind that. And it obviously also fuels the services business. So I have long believed that on 90 day clock on unit sales is a very surface way to view Apple. I think that the far bigger thing is to look over a longer period of time. And customer satisfaction and engagement and number of active devices are all part of that.
Steve Milunovich:
And could you address the positioning of HomePod? What category is it in, is it a music speaker, is it a home system, since people seem to be trying to position it versus Amazon and Google’s offerings? And is the target market primarily Apple Music users?
Tim Cook:
HomePod is an incredible product that is a unbelievable audio experience in a very small form factor with a super digital assistant in Siri that knows an enormous amount of music. But also can handle request to like home automation to close your garage door, open your door, turn the light on, turn the fireplace on, change the thermostat, all of the things that you would like to do in home automation. But takes it further, because we think do it right from the home app instead of seeing. So you can see, hey Siri, I’m reading and your room will change to the things you would like happening in that particular room for when you read, maybe it’s a particular light, maybe it’s a type of light, maybe it’s the fireplace, so on and so forth. It also, obviously, you can also do things with HomePod like use it as a speaker phone. And so if you’re talking to your parents or they’re talking to their grand kids, its unbelievable audio quality for speaker phone. You can also have Siri call for you, you can send messages, you can get a Uber car or a Lyft car. And so there is just a whole variety of things. And so I think the use cases on this much like our phones will be broad based. Some people will use it significantly for music and others may use it significantly for as a digital assistance; and I think the majority of people will likely use all of it and use all of the functionality of it.
Operator:
Our next question comes from Amit Daryanani from RBC Capital Markets.
Amit Daryanani:
I have two questions as well. I guess first one. Could you just touch on what you’re seeing in China in terms of underlying trends, right now? I think growth was up double-digit year-over-year but essentially in line to what you saw in September. I would have thought that would have accelerated a little bit with iPhone X. Just the puts and takes in China will be great.
Tim Cook:
It’s a good question. Keep in mind that this year had 13 weeks, last year had 14 weeks. And so even though we were reporting a similar year-over-year growth for Greater China, if you change that reporting to an average weekly sales, which probably is much better way to look at it, there was actually a really nice acceleration. And specifically the numbers this quarter as reported are 11% increase for Greater China year-over-year but on an average weekly revenue basis, we were up 19%. Also Mainland China, we had an all-time record for revenue in Mainland China. And of course a key part of that was iPhone. And as I’ve mentioned before, Kantar reported that the top five selling smartphones in urban China were all iPhones. And so we could not be more pleased with how we're doing. And if you look at the other -- we obviously grew share for iPhone in the quarter, but we also grew share in iPad and Mac during the quarter and wearables were extremely strong there in the quarter. And so everywhere I look, I feel really good about how we're doing in China.
Amit Daryanani:
Luca, maybe a question for you. When you talked about reducing Apple's net cash levels to zero effectively over time, I think that implies -- the number goes from $163 billion today to something like zero. What does over time mean for Apple? Is that one year, three years, 10 years, or how do you define over time? And does this change your thoughts around M&A at all, and is that one reason to get that number from $163 billion to zero. Does it change your M&A thought process?
Luca Maestri:
Let me answer, Amit, starting with M&A. Our thought process around M&A has always been the same, and really doesn't change. We've been acquiring companies over the years. In calendar 2017, we've acquired 19 companies. And the thought process is always to acquire something that allows us to either accelerate our product roadmaps, filling gap in our portfolio, providing a new experience to customers. So it's always with the customer experience in mind that we make acquisitions. We look at all sizes, and we will continue to do so. We have plenty of financial flexibility, of course. We had that even prior to tax reform. And as I said, we will talk about capital allocation plans when we report at the March quarter and that will include talking about timeframes and pace and so on. And so we’ll try to be to be very thoughtful. As we said, $163 billion is a large amount and there are even practical considerations around it. So we'll see.
Tim Cook:
And just for clarity, let me add one thing. What Luca is saying is not cash equals zero. He's saying there's an equal amount cash and debt, and that they balance to zero. Just for clarity.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Amit. A replay of today's call will be available for two weeks on Apple Podcasts, as a webcast on apple.com/investor and via telephone. And the numbers for the telephone replay are 888-203-1112 or 719-457-0820, and please enter confirmation code 4783460. These replays will be available by approximately 5:00 p.m. Pacific Time today. Members of the press with additional questions can contact Kristin Huguet at 408-974-2414, and financial analysts can contact Matt Blake or me with additional questions. Matt is at 408-974-7406, and I'm at 408-974-5420. And thanks again for joining us.
Operator:
That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for your participation.
Executives:
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc. Timothy D. Cook - Apple, Inc. Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.
Analysts:
Kathryn Lynn Huberty - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC Michael J. Olson - Piper Jaffray & Co. Shannon S. Cross - Cross Research LLC Steven Milunovich - UBS Securities LLC Antonio M. Sacconaghi - Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. LLC Jim Suva - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc. Amit Daryanani - RBC Capital Markets LLC Brian J. White - Drexel Hamilton LLC
Operator:
Good day everyone and welcome to this Apple Inc. Fourth Quarter Fiscal Year 2017 Earnings Release Conference Call. Today's call is being recorded. At this time for opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn the call over to Nancy Paxton, Senior Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, ma'am.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, good afternoon, and thanks everyone for joining us. Speaking first today is Apple CEO Tim Cook and he'll be followed by CFO Luca Maestri, and after that we'll open the call to questions from analysts. Please note that some of the information you will hear during our discussion today will consist of forward-looking statements including, without limitation, those regarding revenue, gross margin, operating expenses, other income and expense, taxes and future business outlook. Actual results or trends could differ materially from our forecast. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in Apple's most recently filed periodic reports on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q, and the form 8-K filed with the SEC today along with the associated press release. Apple assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements or information which speak as of their respective dates. I'd now like to turn the call over to Tim for introductory remarks.
Timothy D. Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Good afternoon, and thanks to everyone for joining us. As we closed the books on a very successful fiscal 2017, I have to say I couldn't be more excited about Apple's future. This was our biggest year ever in most parts of the world with all-time record revenue in the United States, Western Europe, Japan, Korea, the Middle East, Africa, Central and Eastern Europe and Asia. We had particularly strong finish this year, generating our highest September quarter revenue ever as year-over-year growth accelerated for the fourth consecutive quarter. Revenue was $52.6 billion, above the high end of our guidance range, and up 12% over last year. We generated revenue growth across all of our product categories and showed all-time record results for our Services business. As we expected, we returned to growth in greater China, with unit growth and market share gains for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. In fact, it was an all-time record quarter for Mac sales in mainland China as well as an all-time high for Services revenue. And revenue from emerging markets outside of greater China was up 40%, with great momentum in India, where revenue doubled year over year. We also had great results in enterprise and education with double digit growth in worldwide customer purchases of iPad and Mac in both markets. Gross margin for the September quarter was at the high end of our guidance range, and thanks to exceptional work by our teams, we generated record fourth quarter earnings per share of $2.07, up 24% from a year ago. iPhone sales exceeded our expectations. In the last week and a half of September, we began shipping iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus to customers in more than 50 countries. They instantly became our two most popular iPhone models and have been every week since then. As we speak, the launch of iPhone X is now underway as stores open across Australia and Asia. iPhone X is packed with innovative new technologies that chart our path for the next decade, technologies like the TrueDepth camera system, Super Retina Display, and A11 Bionic chip with neural engine, which has been in development for years with a focus on deep machine learning. iPhone X enables totally new experiences like unlocking your iPhone with Face ID, taking photos with studio-quality lighting effects, or playing immersive augmented reality games. We can't wait for people to experience our vision of the future. Orders have already been very strong, and we're working to get iPhone X into customers' hands as quickly as possible. Turning to Services. Revenue reached an all-time quarterly record of $8.5 billion in the September quarter. A few quarters ago, we established a goal of doubling our fiscal 2016 services revenue of $24 billion by the year 2020, and we are well on our way to meeting that goal. In fiscal 2017, we reached $30 billion, making our Services business already the size of a Fortune 100 company. We're also delighted to report our second consecutive quarter of double-digit unit growth for iPad. Customers have responded very positively to the new iPad lineup. And with the launch of iOS 11, the iPad experience has become more powerful than ever, with great new features for getting things done like the new dock, Files app, drag and drop, multitasking and more power than most PC notebooks. The launch of iOS 11 also made iOS the world's largest platform for augmented reality. There are already over 1,000 apps with powerful AR features in our App Store today, with developers creating amazing new experiences in virtually every category of apps aimed at consumers, students and business users alike. Put simply, we believe AR is going to change the way we use technology forever. We're already seeing things that will transform the way you work, play, connect and learn. For example, there are AR apps that let you interact with virtual models of everything you can imagine, from the human body to the solar system. And of course, you experience them like they're really there. Instantly, education becomes much more powerful when every subject comes to life in 3D. And imagine shopping when you can place an object in your living room before you make a purchase, or attending live sporting events when you can see the stats on the field. AR is going to change everything. iOS 11 is also allowing developers to integrate machine learning models into their apps with Core ML. Pinterest is already using Core ML to deliver fast and powerful visual search. PadMapper uses Core ML to provide intelligent features that make it easy to find or rent your apartment. And VisualDx is even pioneering new health diagnostics with Core ML, automating skin image analysis to assist dermatologists with their diagnoses. These are just a few examples. There's so much more to come. Next, I'd like to talk about the Mac, which had its best year ever, with the highest annual Mac revenue in Apple's history. It was also the best September quarter ever, with Mac revenue growth of 25% driven by the notebook refreshes we launched in June and a strong back-to-school season. The Mac experience has become even better since the September launch of macOS High Sierra, with new technologies to make Mac more reliable, capable and responsive and lay the foundation for future innovation. Moving on now to Apple Watch. With unit growth of over 50% for the third consecutive quarter, it continues to be the best selling and most loved smartwatch in the world. We began shipping Apple Watch Series 3 just six weeks ago and customers love the new freedom of cellular. The ability to go for a run with just your Apple Watch or go for a quick errand without your phone while staying connected is a game changer. Now more than ever, Apple Watch is the ultimate device for a healthy life and is already making a big difference in our customers' lives. We're very excited about the upcoming launch of the Apple Heart Study, which will use data from Apple Watch to identify irregular heart rhythms and notify users when unusual patterns are detected. Earlier this week, we introduced watchOS 4.1, bringing 40 million songs to your wrist through Apple Music. The combination of music streaming on Apple Watch and AirPods is truly a magical experience for people on the go. We're thrilled with the momentum of these products. In fact, our entire wearables business was up 75% year over year in the fourth quarter and in fiscal 2017, already generated the annual revenue of a Fortune 400 company. Late in the September quarter, we also launched Apple TV 4K, delivering a stunning cinematic experience at home. So now users around the world can watch movies and shows in 4K HDR quality and stream live sports and news on the Apple TV app. There's already a great selection of 4K HDR titles available through iTunes and other popular video services with many more movies and shows on the way. We're also very excited about the opening of Apple Michigan Avenue two weeks ago on Chicago's riverfront. This is the first store that brings together our complete vision for the future of Apple retail, providing a welcoming place for everyone to experience our products, services and inspiring educational programs right in the heart of their city. In addition to our very popular Today at Apple programming, which is available in all Apple Stores around the world, offering daily sessions in photography, music creation, art and design, coding and entrepreneurship, Apple Michigan Avenue is partnering with local nonprofits and creative organizations to make an ongoing positive impact in that community. Also this quarter, we expanded our free App Development with Swift curriculum to more than 30 community colleges across the country. We're very excited about this initiative, and we're thrilled by the momentum we're seeing. The schools we've launched with this summer are just the beginning. Community colleges have a powerful reach into communities where education is the great equalizer, and the colleges adopting our curriculum this academic year are providing opportunity to millions of students to build apps that will prepare them for careers in software development and information technology and much more. We're incredibly enthusiastic about what our teams have accomplished this year and all the amazing products in our lineup. As we approach the holiday season, we expect it to be our biggest quarter ever. I'd like to thank all of our teams, our partners and our customers for their passion, commitment and loyalty. You've helped us make 2017 a sensational year. Now for more details on the September quarter results, I'd like to turn over the call to Luca.
Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Tim. Good afternoon everyone. Revenue for the September quarter was a record $52.6 billion, up 12% over last year, and it has been great to see our growth rate accelerate in every quarter of fiscal 2017. Our terrific performance this quarter was very broad based, with revenue growth in all our product categories for the second quarter in a row and new September quarter revenue records in the Americas, in Europe and in the rest of Asia-Pacific segments. We grew double digits in the U.S., Canada, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Korea and several other developed markets. We were especially happy to return to growth in greater China, where revenue was up 12% from a year ago and with our momentum in India, where revenue doubled year-over-year. We grew more than 30% in Mexico, the Middle East, Turkey and Central and Eastern Europe. These results have fueled overall growth of over 20% from emerging markets. Gross margin was 37.9%, at the high end of our guidance range. Operating margin was 25% of revenue and net income was $10.7 billion. Diluted earnings per share were $2.07, up 24% over last year to a new September quarter record and cash flow from operations was strong at $15.7 billion. During the quarter, we sold 46.7 million iPhones, up 3% over last year. We were very pleased to see double digit iPhone growth in many emerging markets including mainland China, the Middle East, Central and Eastern Europe, India and Mexico. We gained share not only in those markets but also in Canada, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Sweden and Singapore, based on the latest estimates from IDC. iPhone channel inventory increased by 1.3 million units sequentially to support the launch of iPhone 8 and 8 Plus, significantly less than the increase in the September quarter a year ago. Customer interest and satisfaction with iPhone are very strong with both consumers and business users. In the U.S., the latest data from 451 Research on consumers indicates a customer satisfaction rating of 97% or higher across all iPhone models. Among consumers planning to buy a smartphone in the next 90 days, purchase intention for iPhone was 69%, more than 5 times the rate of the closest competitor with a loyalty rate for current iPhone owners of 95% compared to 53% for the next highest brand. For corporate smartphone buyers, iOS customer satisfaction was 95% and of those planning to purchase smartphones in the December quarter, 80% planned to purchase iPhone. That is the highest score for iPhone in the history of the survey. Turning to Services, we set an all-time quarterly record of $8.5 billion, up 34% year over year. Our results included a favorable one-time revenue adjustment of $640 million. On a run rate basis, excluding this adjustment, services growth of 24% was terrific and the highest that we have experienced this year. The App Store set a new all-time record, and according to App Annie's latest report, it continues to be the preferred destination for customer purchases by a wide and growing margin, generating nearly twice the revenue of Google Play. We're getting great response to the App Store's new design in iOS 11 from both customers and developers. We're seeing increases in the frequency of customer visits, the amount of time they spend in the store and the number of apps they download. The success of Apple Music also continues to build and we're seeing our highest conversion rates from customers trying the service. Revenue grew strongly once again in the September quarter and the number of paid subscribers was up over 75% year-over-year. We also saw great performance from our iCloud business with very strong double-digit growth in both monthly average users and revenue. Across all of our Services offerings, the number of paid subscriptions reached over 210 million at the end of September quarter, an increase of 25 million in the last 90 days. Apple Pay expanded to Denmark, Finland, Sweden and the UAE last month and continues to grow rapidly. Over the past year, active users have more than doubled and annual transactions are up 330%. In the U.S., 70% of leading grocery chains are now accepting Apple Pay with the recent launch of Safeway and over 5 million U.S. merchant locations will be Apple Pay enabled by the end of this year. Next, I would like to talk about the Mac, which for fiscal 2017 set a new all-time revenue record of $25.8 billion. We sold 5.4 million Macs during the September quarter, up 10% over last year and gained significant market share as the global market contracted by 1% based on IDC's latest estimate. This performance was fueled primarily by great demand for MacBook Pro and Mac revenue grew 25% to a new September quarter record. We had outstanding results all around the world with each of our geographic segments growing Mac revenue by 20% or more. We were also very happy with the success of Mac in the education market where customer purchases grew double digits year over year. It was also another great quarter for iPad. We sold 10.3 million units, up 11% over last year with strong demand for both iPad and iPad Pro and revenue grew 14%. It was great to see iPad unit and revenue growth in all of our geographic segments and particularly strong results in emerging markets, including greater China, where iPad units sales were up 25% year-over-year and India, which grew 39%. NPD indicates that iPad had 54% share of the U.S. tablet market in the September quarter, including seven of the 10 best-selling tablets. That's up from 47% share a year ago. Also, the most recent surveys from 451 Research measured customer satisfaction rates of 97% across iPad models. And among people planning to buy tablets, purchase intent for iPad was over 70% for both consumers and businesses. We are seeing great momentum with our enterprise initiatives. During the September quarter, we announced a new partnership with Accenture, who is creating a dedicated iOS practice in select locations around the world. Experts from Apple are co-locating with this team and together they'll be launching new tools and services that help enterprise clients transform how they engage with customers using iPhone and iPad. Examples include services to build new customer experiences and to facilitate iOS integration with enterprise systems to help businesses take greater advantage of data from Internet of Things platforms and to enable the smooth transfer of existing legacy applications and data to modern iOS apps. And last month, we announced a partnership with GE to reinvent the way industrial companies work by bringing GE's industrial IoT platform to iOS. The (20:37) SDK for iOS will enable developers to build native apps to drive industrial operations with more efficiency and speed than ever before. GE is also standardizing on iPhone and iPad for its global workforce of more than 330,000 employees and working with Apple, GE is developing iOS apps for both its internal and external audiences to bring predictive data and analytics to workers across a broad range of industries. Beyond our iOS devices, we are also seeing great traction for Mac in the enterprise market with all-time record customer purchases in fiscal year 2017. The September quarter was very strong for our retail and online stores, which welcomed 418 million visitors. Traffic was particularly heavy during the week of our new product announcements, up 19% over last year. Retail ran a very successful back-to-school promotion in the Americas, Europe, China and Singapore, with sales of Mac and iPad Pro up strong double digits compared to last year's program. And around the world, our stores conducted over 200,000 Today at Apple sessions during the quarter. Let me now turn to our cash position. We ended the quarter with $268.9 billion in cash plus marketable securities, a sequential increase of $7.4 billion. $252.3 billion of this cash, 94% of the total, was outside the United States. We issued $7 billion in new Canadian and U.S. dollar denominated debt during the quarter, bringing us to $104 billion in term debt and $12 billion in commercial paper outstanding. We also returned $11 billion to investors during the quarter. We paid $3.3 billion in dividends and equivalents and spent $4.5 billion on repurchases of 29.1 million Apple shares through open market transactions. We also launched a new $3 billion ASR program, resulting in initial delivery and retirement of 15.1 million shares and we retire 4.5 million shares upon the completion of our 11th ASR during the quarter. We have now completed almost $234 billion of our $300 billion capital return program, including $166 billion in share repurchases. As we move ahead into the December quarter, I'd like to review our outlook, which includes the types of forward-looking information that Nancy referred to at the beginning of the call. As a reminder, the December quarter in fiscal 2017 spanned 14 weeks, whereas the December quarter this year will include the usual 13 weeks. We expect revenue to be between $84 billion and $87 billion. We expect gross margin to be between 38% and 38.5%. We expect OpEx to be between $7.65 billion and $7.75 billion. We expect OI&E to be about $600 million and we expect the tax rate to be about 25.5%. Also, today our Board of Directors has declared a cash dividend of $0.63 per share of common stock, payable on November 16, 2017, to shareholders of record as of November 13, 2017. With that, I'd like to open the call to questions.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
And we ask that you limit yourself to one one-part question and one follow up. May we have the first question, please?
Operator:
First we'll hear from Katy Huberty with Morgan Stanley.
Kathryn Lynn Huberty - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC:
Thank you. Congrats on the quarter. Luca, when do you expect to catch up with iPhone X demand? And given it's likely to be not in the December quarter, should we think about March as a better than seasonal revenue quarter because of that iPhone X ramp? And then I have a follow-up.
Timothy D. Cook - Apple, Inc.:
I'll take that, Katy. It's Tim. The ramp for iPhone X is going well, especially considering that iPhone X is the most advanced iPhone we've ever created and it has lots of new technologies in it. And so we're really happy that we were able to increase week by week what we're outputting and we're going to get as many of them as possible to the customers as soon as possible. I can't predict, at this point, when that balance will happen. And in terms of March, we obviously don't give guidance beyond the current quarter.
Kathryn Lynn Huberty - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC:
Okay. And then China growth returned to strong double digits, 12% up. You've talked historically about that region being more sensitive than others to form factor changes and the new iPhone X form factor was not available in September. And so should we assume that growth in that region only accelerates from here as that new product gets pushed into the market.
Timothy D. Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Let me talk a little bit about Q4 in China to give you a little bit of color on the results. We increased market share for iPhone, Mac and iPad during the quarter. We hit all-time revenue records for Services and for Mac for the PRC during the quarter. We've had very strong iPad revenue growth. We had double digit unit growth in iPhone and both the upgraders and Android switchers were both up on a year over year basis during the quarter, and so the results were broad based. They were pretty much across the board, as I indicated. The other thing that's happened is that the decline that we've been experiencing in Hong Kong moderated. And so it's still down year over year but less so than it was and part of that is the compare is an easier compare. And then finally, in terms of another headwind that is a little less than it was, currency has been affecting us more significantly. Last quarter in China, it affected us 1 percentage point. And so the sum of all that, I feel great about the results. We don't obviously provide geographic-specific guidance but you can see from our overall guidance, we think we're going to have a really strong quarter.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Katy. Could we have the next question, please?
Operator:
From Piper Jaffray, Mike Olson.
Michael J. Olson - Piper Jaffray & Co.:
Good afternoon and congrats on a strong quarter. Is there any information you can provide on how iPhone X pre-orders compared to what you saw with iPhone 8 pre-orders? And then I have a follow-up as well.
Timothy D. Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Michael, we never go through mix, but I would share with you that the iPhone X orders are very strong for both direct customers and for our channel partners, which as you know, are lots of carriers throughout the world. And we couldn't be more excited to get underway. And I think as of a few minutes ago, the first sales started in Australia. And I'm told we had several hundred people waiting at the store in Sydney and I'm getting similar reports from across that region.
Michael J. Olson - Piper Jaffray & Co.:
All right. Thanks. And we're excited about augmented reality and from your perspective, and maybe from our perspective on the outside looking in, how do we gauge the success of AR and what are some of the applications of the technology that you're most excited about today? Thanks.
Timothy D. Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Yes, it's a great question. The reason I'm so excited about AR is I view that it amplifies human performance instead of isolates humans. And so as you know, it's the mix of the virtual and the physical world and so it should be a help for humanity, not an isolation kind of thing for humanity. As I go through different countries as I've been traveling lately, and looking at some things in the market, other things that are coming, the very cool thing is they're all over the place. I see things that the consumer's going to love because it's going to change shopping. I see things that consumers will love on the gaming side and the entertainment side. I see business-related AR apps as well. They're going to be great for productivity and between small and large business. And I see apps that makes me want to go back to K-12 again and repeat my schooling because I think it changes the game in the classroom a lot. And so the real beauty here is that it's mainstream. And of course, Apple is the only company that could have brought this because it requires both hardware and software integration, and it requires sort of making a lot of – or giving the operating system update to many people at once. And the software team worked really hard to make that go back several versions of iPhone so that we sort of have hundreds of millions of enabled devices overnight. And so there's 1,000-plus in the App Store right now. I think this is very much like in 2008, when we fired the gun in the overall App Store. And so that's what it feels like to me, and I think it will just get bigger from here.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thanks, Mike. Can we have the next question, please?
Operator:
From Cross Research, Shannon Cross.
Shannon S. Cross - Cross Research LLC:
Thank you very much. A couple questions. The first, Tim, can you talk a bit about how you're thinking in terms of the lineup? You go from $340 – this is for iPhone – you go from $349 to above $1,000. And it appears that you probably sold a fair amount at the lower end. Perhaps that was just some of the switchers in China and maybe drove some of the growth in China in terms of market share. But how are you sort of thinking about what went into the guidance for the December quarter? Are you seeing really strong demand at the low end and obviously expected benefit from the X at the high end? I'm just trying to understand because you have such a broader lineup than you've had in prior years.
Timothy D. Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Yes. In terms of what we saw in Q4, you can probably tell from the ASP we had good success, I would say, through the different iPhones. And we've tried hard to have an iPhone that is as affordable as possible for people that really want an iPhone but may have a more limited budget. And we've got some iPhones that are really great for that market. And then we've got three new iPhones and people will look at these and decide which one they want. And this is the first time we've ever been in the position that we've had three new iPhones at once like this at the top end of the line. And it's the first time we've had a staggered launch. And so we're going to see what happens, but we put our absolutely best thinking that we have here in the guidance that Luca presented, and you can tell from that, that we're bullish.
Shannon S. Cross - Cross Research LLC:
Great. Thank you. And then in terms of Services, $8.5 billion, up 34%, can you talk about some of the portions of that that outperformed, how sustainable? You mentioned China in terms of significant growth in Services, but I'm just curious. That's a pretty remarkable number, so I'm curious what the drivers were. Thank you.
Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.:
Yes, Shannon. It's Luca. As I mentioned in the prepared remarks, there was a $640 million adjustment and there was a one-off change. And it's important to call it out because of course it's a one-off. And so the underlying growth rate for service in the quarter was fantastic. It was 24%. It's the highest growth rate that we've had for services during fiscal 2017. So the business is going incredibly well. I would highlight maybe three of these businesses within Services at the App Store set a new all-time record. It's going incredibly well. The number of paying accounts continues to grow very strongly, and that's very, very important to us for the App Store business. Apple Music was up, subscriptions were up 75% year over year. We're getting the highest conversion rates that we've had since the launch of the service. And so we turned the corner in Music. You remember that a few years ago, we were actually declining in Music; now with the streaming service in addition to the download business, the business is growing again. And that really helps the growth rate for the entire Services business. iCloud is a service that continues to grow very strong double digits, and that's also helping. So we already become the size of a Fortune 100 company. We set a goal for ourselves to double what we did in fiscal 2016, and the trajectory is actually quite positive.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Shannon. Could we have the next question, please?
Operator:
Steve Milunovich with UBS.
Steven Milunovich - UBS Securities LLC:
Thank you. I wanted to try to push a little bit more on the mix. Could you comment whether the 8 Plus outsold the 8 in the quarter? There seems to be some data that suggests that. And the 451 Research survey that you're alluding to also finds that over the next 90 days, those buying an iPhone, 43% are planning on buying the X. Could you comment upon your expectations in terms of the mix going forward? And if you won't do that, perhaps you could comment a bit about your thinking in terms of pushing price elasticity. I think a couple years ago, nobody would've imagined selling a phone at this price and obviously, you're pretty confident that you can do it.
Timothy D. Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Obviously, I'm not going to talk about mix. That's something that we've done in the past. If you look at the 8 and 8 Plus, when we launched them, they instantly became our top two selling products. If you look at 8 Plus in particular, to provide a little color there, 8 Plus for the period of time that we can measure to date, has gotten off to the fastest start of any Plus model. That for us was a bit of a surprise, and a positive surprise, obviously. And so we'll see what happens next. As I've mentioned before, we've never had three products and it's only today that the first customers can sort of look at all three of those and I'm sure there's been some people that wanted to do that before deciding even which one. And so we'll see what happens there. But in terms of price elasticity, I think it's important to remember that a large number of people pay for the phone by month. And so if you were to go out on just the U.S., since that tends to be more of the focus of this call, you look at the U.S. carriers, I think you would find you could buy an iPhone X for $33 a month. And so if you think about that, that's a few coffees a week. It's let's say less than a coffee a day at one of these nice coffee places. The other thing to keep in mind is that many people are now trading in their current iPhone on the next iPhone. And the residual value for iPhone tends to be the highest in the industry and many people pick up $300, $350 or so for their iPhone and so that even reduces the monthly payment less. And then obviously, some carriers also have promotional things going on. And so I do think it's important to try to place it in that context. In terms of the way we price, we price to sort of the value that we're providing. We're not trying to charge the highest price we could get or anything like that. We're just trying to price it for what we're delivering. And iPhone X has a lot of great new technologies in there that are leading the industry, and it is a fabulous product and we can't wait for people to start getting it in their hands.
Steven Milunovich - UBS Securities LLC:
And then I wanted ask, the Street historically has been a little skeptical about continued innovation and you've suggested there is more to go. Historically, you weren't first to large screens, you weren't first to OLED. Now though, you're leading in AR, you're leading with face ID, which the all-in a year ago, as some of your guys have suggested, was kind of very reminiscent of the aggressive Apple. Is it possible going forward that you could accelerate share gains from Android because you're now in a stronger competitive position?
Timothy D. Cook - Apple, Inc.:
I think, Steve, we've been in a competitive position. And so I probably maybe have a different view than you do or the folks that you're quoting. There's always doubting Thomases out there. And I've been hearing those for the 20 years I've been here and suspect I'll hear about them until I retire, right. So I don't really listen to that too much. There's lots of fantastic people here and they're doing unbelievable things. And yes, I view AR as profound. Not today, not the app that you'll see on the App Store today, but what it will be, what it can be. I think it's profound and I think Apple is in a really unique position to lead in this area.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Steve. Could we have the next question, please?
Operator:
We'll go to Toni Sacconaghi with Bernstein.
Antonio M. Sacconaghi - Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. LLC:
Yes. Thank you. Just following up a little bit on that question, Tim. You talked a bit about providing a lot of value and that Apple sets its prices according to value. And I think given the uniqueness of the product you have with the iPhone X in particular, that makes a lot of sense. I guess the question is given the uniqueness of the value that you have in the marketplace, why shouldn't we – should we, or why shouldn't we expect gross margins to improve this cycle versus previous ones? And perhaps you can talk a little bit about how you think about pricing in the context of gross margin. And I have a follow-up, please.
Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.:
Toni, I'll take that one. When – you said we price our products for the value that we deliver. We also said that every time we launch new products, the cost structures of the new products tend to be higher than the products that they replace. It's inevitable. We are adding new technologies, new features, and therefore the cost structures go up. We have a very good track record of taking those cost structures and over the life cycle of the product, we are able to bring them down. There are a lot of elements in the gross margin line that we have good control over and there are also elements that we don't control. Take for example foreign exchange, which has been a significant headwind for the company for the last three years now. Also, the mix of products that we sell into the market tends to change over time, and that also has an impact on the overall gross margin for the company. There are situations where the commodities markets are in good shape. There are situations where commodity markets can be a bit out of balance. We have a case right now around memory pricing, which is a headwind for the time being. So there's many puts and takes. The fact that our Services business is growing, it should be a positive because our Services margins tend to be accretive to company margins. So there's many puts and takes. We tend to think about maximizing gross margin dollars because we think that's the most important thing for investors at the end of the day. When we look at our track record over years, I think we've found a good balance between unit grow and gross margins and revenue, and we will continue to do that as we go forward.
Antonio M. Sacconaghi - Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. LLC:
Okay. Thank you for that. And then I wanted to revisit this notion of supply and demand, and I realize it's very early and you can't make predictions. I think a common investor question is, the iPhone X was made available for sale. It quickly had pushed out availability levels to unprecedented levels versus history. And so I think the really significant question is, is that initial push-out really a function of uniquely strong demand versus history or is that push-out in availability really a function of much weaker supply versus history? So it'd be really helpful. You have in the past commented on first 24-hour orders, for which there were 4 million plus for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. You have very often on this call talked about targeting when you think you could reach supply/demand balance. So it'd be really helpful if you could provide some context in terms of what you know, either about initial orders or about a supplies versus history that can help investors try and better understand the little data points that they're seeing in terms of availability of the device. Thank you.
Timothy D. Cook - Apple, Inc.:
The truth is we don't know. We've put our best estimate into the guidance, and you can see from the guidance that we are very bullish. And so, and we feel really great about the product lineup. We just sold the first units minutes ago. And so we'll see how things go. Until you get all of them out there where customers have the ability to demo and support, I think any kind of mix discussion is very much estimating. And so we put our best estimates in, but grantedly, we've never done this before. So there's no comparison here, with either the three iPhones nor the staggered launch. So we're going to learn something.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Toni. Could we have the next question, please?
Operator:
That is Jim Suva with Citigroup.
Jim Suva - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.:
Thanks very much. And I'll ask my original question and follow-up at the same time because they're slightly different topics. But you'd mentioned great success in India. I believe, Tim, in your prepared comments you mentioned, I think, India doubled year over year. Based upon market analysis, it looks like Apple's still just a relatively small sliver of the pie there. So Tim, what would it take be even more successful in India? Is it a manufacturing footprint there? Is it partners? Is it more physical stores? Is it lower price points? Is it the bandwidth that has now caught up to many other countries, or how should we think about that? And then the follow-up question is on the AR/VR, where will it really show up in your income statement? Are you hoping more for hardware sales or services through the apps or where the excitement will then monetize it within Apple? Thank you.
Timothy D. Cook - Apple, Inc.:
In terms of India, many of the things that you mentioned are correct. Growing a market like India is a result of all of those things and doing them all well. And so it's analogous to the many years that we put into China. It's building stores. It's building channels. It's building markets. It's building the developer ecosystem. It's having the right product lineup for the market. And I feel like we're making good progress there and are gaining understanding of the market, but we still have a long way to go, which I sort of see as an opportunity instead of a problem. And I do feel great about the growth rate. And so that's India. I think it's all of those things. As you know, as I think we talked about before, we started manufacturing the iPhone SE there six, nine months ago so. And the majority of the iPhone SEs that we sold in the domestic market last quarter were manufactured there. And so we also have that going and are hoping that that winds up saving some amount of money over time and avoiding some of the compounding of taxes, et cetera. The bandwidth issue has also been an issue, but as you point out, it is being addressed and between the large carriers there with Bharti and now Jio investing the way they are, the service in India is materially better than it was just 12 months ago. So there's been a sea change there in a short period of time. So I feel good about all that, but we have a long way to go. In terms of the monetization question on AR/VR, we tend to focus first and foremost on customer experience. And so we're all about making sure the experience is great. And we think that if we get the experience right, that revenues and profits will be a result of getting that right. And so we're very much focused on the experience right now.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Jim.
Jim Suva - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.:
Thank you so much for your details. Thank you.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Can we have the next question, please?
Operator:
That will come from Amit Daryanani with RBC Capital Markets,
Amit Daryanani - RBC Capital Markets LLC:
Thanks a lot for taking my question, guys. I have two as well. I guess maybe to start with on gross margins. Luca, year over year revenues are going to be up high single digits at the midpoint, gross margin will be down a little. Could you just tell us what are the puts and takes on that? And are yield inefficiencies broadly much more severe this time versus what you've seen historically?
Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.:
Yes. Amit, so we're guiding 38% to 38.5%. That's up 35 bps sequentially. Obviously we're getting the leverage from the larger volumes. As I mentioned, I think to Toni, we have higher cost structures every time we launch new products. So that is going to be the offset, and I mentioned particularly the impact from the memory pricing environment which is a headwind at this point. Just to size it for you, the impact of memory on our gross margin is 40 bps sequentially and 110 bps on a year over year basis. So they are meaningful impacts, and I think that is what I think probably you're referring to.
Amit Daryanani - RBC Capital Markets LLC:
Got it. That's really helpful. And I guess if I could just follow up on the Services line. I mean you guys talked about it a fair amount earlier, but even if you exclude the one-time gain, it looks like the back half of 2017 accelerated by 500 basis points in fiscal 2017 versus the first half of 2017. Qualitatively or quantitatively, is there a way to think about how much of this is from expanding of the installed base, which is one of the three things you mentioned I think, versus more dollar per iOS device that you see?
Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.:
Yes. I think it's both. As I mentioned, particularly on the App Store, which is very important to us, the number of paying accounts has grown a lot. It's grown a lot because, as you said, the installed base has grown, but also because we have made a number of changes that have made it easier for our customers around the world to participate on the App Store and be able to transact on the App Store. We are accepting, for example, more forms of payment today than we were 12 months ago or even 6 months ago. So that's been very important. We also see that there is a typical spending curve for our customers. When they start transacting on the Store, they start at a certain level and they tend over time to get more familiar with the Store and they start to spend more. We're also now, very recently, made some changes, as you probably have seen, to the design of the App Store. And I was mentioning to you in the prepared remarks that these changes have been received very favorably. And so people now are spending more time on the Store, they download more apps, and that over time translates into monetization. But we also have other businesses that are growing very, very fast and actually accelerating. I mentioned Music. I mentioned iCloud, and so it all adds up. And as you correctly point out, our growth rate is accelerating.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Amit. Could we have the next question please?
Operator:
From Drexel Hamilton, Brian White.
Brian J. White - Drexel Hamilton LLC:
Yeah, Tim, I'm wondering if we take a look at mainland China and we think about iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus, they've been on sale for a while now. What has been the just general response to those two new iPhones and also preorders around the iPhone X in mainland China?
Timothy D. Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Brian, I hate to repeat this, but we don't really disclose mix. We view it as competitive information that we want to hold tightly ourselves. In terms of the way the preorder process works in China in the channel, so not in our direct channel, but in the broader carrier channel and channel, they generally take indications of interest versus something that I would label a preorder. And so I would hesitate to even quote a number for fear it could be misconstrued. And we'll find out what the demand and where the supply and demand meet sometime in the future. I don't know when yet, but we're really excited to get going to find out.
Brian J. White - Drexel Hamilton LLC:
And, Tim, it's interesting that sales grew 16% sequentially. If you look at the past five years, sales were up 7% in the September quarter, so that's an average. Yet you didn't have all your iPhones in the market. So if you had to, what would you attribute that to? It's a pretty big disconnect, 16% versus an average of 7%.
Timothy D. Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Our emerging market performance during the quarter was very strong. And if you take China out, it's even stronger. But you can see that China rebounded. And as I'd indicated before, the China rebound was broad based across the products. And so we just had a phenomenal quarter on iPad, on the Mac, on Services, on Apple Watch, on iPhone. I mean we're literally, we're firing on all cylinders. And so that's what, that and our new products give us great confidence headed into this holiday season that this is going to be the best holiday season yet.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Brian.
Brian J. White - Drexel Hamilton LLC:
And, Tim -
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
A replay of today's call will be available for two weeks on Apple Podcasts, as a webcast on apple.com/investor and via telephone. And the numbers for the telephone replay are 888-203-1112 or 719-457-0820, and please enter confirmation code 2484260. These replays will be available by approximate 5:00 p.m. Pacific Time today. Members of the press with additional questions can contact Kristin Huguet at 408-974-2414, and financial analysts can contact Joan Hoover or me with additional questions. Joan is at 408-974-4570, and I'm at 408-974-5420. Thank you again for joining us.
Operator:
Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude today's presentation. We do thank everyone for your participation.
Executives:
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc. Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc. Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.
Analysts:
Kathryn Lynn Huberty - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC Shannon S. Cross - Cross Research LLC Steven Milunovich - UBS Securities LLC Kulbinder S. Garcha - Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC Antonio M. Sacconaghi - Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. LLC Michael J. Olson - Piper Jaffray & Co. Amit Daryanani - RBC Capital Markets LLC Brian J. White - Drexel Hamilton LLC
Operator:
Good day, everyone, and welcome to this Apple Incorporated Third Quarter Fiscal Year 2017 Earnings Release Conference Call. Today's call is being recorded. At this time for opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn the call over to Nancy Paxton, Senior Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, ma'am.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you. Good afternoon and thanks to everyone for joining us. Speaking first today is Apple CEO Tim Cook, and he'll be followed by CFO Luca Maestri. After that, we'll open the call to questions from analysts. Please note that some of the information you'll hear during our discussion today will consist of forward-looking statements, including without limitation those regarding revenue, gross margin, operating expenses, other income and expense, taxes, and future business outlook. Actual results or trends could differ materially from our forecast. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in Apple's Form 10-K for 2016, the Form 10-Q for the first two quarters of 2017, and the Form 8-K filed with the SEC today along with the associated press release. Apple assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements or information, which speak as of their respective dates. I'd now like to turn the call over to Tim for introductory remarks.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Nancy, and good afternoon and thanks, everyone, for joining us. Today we're proud to announce very strong results for our fiscal third quarter, with unit and revenue growth in all of our product categories. We'll review our financial performance in detail, and I'd also like to talk about some of the major announcements we made in June at our Worldwide Developers Conference. It was our biggest and best WWDC ever, and the advances we introduced across hardware, software, and services will help us to delight our customers and extend our competitive lead this fall and well into the future. For the quarter, total revenue was at the high end of our guidance range at $45.4 billion. That's an increase of 7% over last year, so our growth rate has accelerated in three successive quarters this fiscal year. Gross margin was also at the high end of our guidance, and we generated a 17% increase in earnings per share. iPhone results were impressive, with especially strong demand at the high end of our lineup. iPhone 7 was our most popular iPhone, and sales of iPhone 7 Plus were up dramatically compared to iPhone 6s Plus in the June quarter of last year. The combined iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus family was up strong double digits year over year. One decade after the initial iPhone launch, we have now surpassed 1.2 billion cumulative iPhones sold. Services revenue hit an all-time quarterly record of $7.3 billion, representing 22% growth over last year. We continue to see great performance all around the world, with double-digit growth in each of our geographic segments. Over the last 12 months, our Services business has become the size of a Fortune 100 company, a milestone we've reached even sooner than we had expected. We had very positive results for iPad, with broad-based growth in units, revenue, and market share. iPad sales were up 15% year over year and grew across all of our geographic segments. We achieved our highest global market share in over four years based on IDC's latest estimate of tablet market results for the June quarter. And in markets like China and Japan, over half of iPads sold were to people buying their very first iPad. Our iPad product lineup is stronger than ever. The new iPad we launched in March offers great value and performance. And the all-new 10.5-inch iPad Pro, launched in June, features the world's most advanced display with ProMotion technology and is more powerful than most PC desktops. iPad is the perfect tool for teaching in new and compelling ways, and our iPad results were especially strong in the U.S. education market, where sales were up 32% year over year to over 1 million units. We believe that coding is an essential skill that all students should learn. We're thrilled that over 1.2 million students of all ages are now using iPad and Swift Playgrounds to learn the fundamentals of coding. And over 1,000 K-12 schools across the United States plan to use Apple's Everyone Can Code in their curricula this fall. And for high school and community college students who want to pursue careers in the fast-growing app economy, we announced app development with Swift, an innovative full-year curriculum designed by Apple engineers and educators and provided free to schools to teach students to code and design fully functional apps, gaining critical job skills in software development and information technology. I'd like to turn now to Mac, which gained global unit market share and reached new June quarter unit sales records in mainland China and Japan. Mac revenue grew 7% year over year, driven by the strength of the MacBook Pro and iMac despite IDC's latest estimate of a 4% unit contraction in the global PC market. And with the refresh of almost our entire Mac lineup in June, we're off to a great start for the back-to-school season. Sales of Apple Watch were up over 50% in the June quarter, and it's the number one selling smartwatch in the world by a very wide margin. Apple Watch is having a positive impact on people's health and daily lives and motivating them to sit less and move more. With features like built-in GPS and waterproofing, Apple Watch Series 2 is the perfect companion for hiking, running, and swimming. We're also seeing incredible enthusiasm for AirPod, with 98% customer satisfaction based on Creative Strategy's survey. We have increased production capacity for AirPods and are working very hard to get them to customers as quickly as we can, but we are still not able to meet the strong level of demand. We made some big announcements during the June quarter that I'd like to quickly review. We launched a new investment in the future through our Advanced Manufacturing Fund. We've earmarked at least $1 billion for this program, aimed at helping our manufacturing partners develop innovative production capabilities and create high-skill jobs in the United States. We believe this can lay the foundation for a new era of technology-driven manufacturing in the U.S. The first $200 million from the fund has been committed to Corning to support R&D, capital equipment needs, and state-of-the-art glass processing. And as we announced at WWDC, we have a very exciting fall ahead, with stunning advances in iOS 11, macOS High Sierra, and watchOS4. iOS 11 will make iPhones better than ever with Apple Pay peer-to peer payments, an even more intelligent and natural Siri, new expressive messages with full screen effects, richer and more powerful maps, enhanced live photos and memories and portrait mode effects, and much, much more. iOS 11 will also take the iPad experience to a whole new level, with features such as a customizable dock, Multi-Touch drag and drop, powerful new multitasking, more efficient QuickTime, and great new markup and scanning capabilities. One of the most exciting and most promising announcements from WWDC was the introduction of ARKit, a new set of tools for developers to create augmented reality apps. It's still early in the beta period, but it's clear that ARKit has captured the imagination of our developer community. We think ARKit will help the most creative minds in the industry tap into the latest computer vision technologies to build engaging content. We believe AR has broad mainstream applicability across education, entertainment, interactive gaming, enterprise, and categories we probably haven't even thought of. With hundreds of millions of people actively using iPhone and iPad today, iOS will become the world's biggest augmented reality platform as soon as iOS 11 ships. With iOS 11, we're also bringing the power of machine learning to all Apple developers with Core ML, enabling capabilities like face detection, object tracking, and natural language interpretation. Core ML lets developers incorporate machine learning technologies into their apps with all the processing done right on device, so it respects our customers' data and privacy. For Mac, we provided a peek at the immersive gaming, 3D, and virtual reality experiences made possible with the upcoming release of macOS High Sierra and the amazingly powerful new iMac Pro. We're proud to make the best personal computers in the industry and are very excited to deliver even more innovation in the months to come. Apple Watch will become more intelligent than ever this fall with watchOS4, featuring a proactive Siri watch face, personalized activity coaching, and an entirely new music experience. watchOS4 also introduces GymKit, a groundbreaking technology program to connect workouts with cardio equipment. We also previewed HomePod, a breakthrough wireless speaker for the home that delivers amazing audio quality and uses spatial awareness to sense its location in the room and adjust the audio automatically. Visitors to our listening room at WWDC were blown away by the HomePod's incredible sound, which is unlike any other wireless home speaker on the market. With deep knowledge of music, HomePod is designed to work with your Apple Music subscription to help you enjoy the music you already love as well as to discover great new music, based on your personal preferences. As an intelligent home assistant, HomePod is a great way to send messages, set a timer, get updates on news, sports, and weather, or control smart home kit devices by simply asking Siri to turn on the lights, close the shades, or activate a theme. We can't wait to deliver all of these powerful innovations in the months to come. And we might even have some others to share with you later in the year. Now for more details on the June quarter results, I'd like to turn the call over to Luca.
Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Tim. Good afternoon, everyone. Revenue for the June quarter was $45.4 billion, up 7% over last year, an acceleration to the growth rate we reported during the first half of our fiscal year. We achieved these results despite a 200 basis point negative impact from foreign exchange on a year-over-year basis, as currency movements, especially in Europe and China, affected our reported results. Our performance was very strong across the board with growth in all our product categories and almost every market around the world. We achieved double-digit revenue growth in many developed markets, including the U.S., Canada, Germany, Spain, Australia, and Korea, and emerging markets outside of Greater China grew 19% over a year ago. Gross margin was 38.5%, at the high end of our guidance range. Operating margin was 23.7% of revenue and net income was $8.7 billion. Diluted earnings per share were $1.67, up 17% over last year, and cash flow from operations was $8.4 billion. During the quarter we sold 41 million iPhones and reduced iPhone channel inventory by 3.3 million units, leaving us with our lowest level of channel inventory in 2.5 years and well within our five-week to seven-week target inventory range. iPhone sales were up year-over-year in most markets we track, with many markets in Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East growing unit sales by more than 25%. We are very pleased with these iPhone results, especially considering the tough comparison to the June quarter last year when we launched iPhone SE. iPhone ASP was $606, up from $595 a year ago, thanks to strong demand for iPhone 7 Plus, which represented a higher percentage of the iPhone mix compared to the Plus model a year ago. The impact of the stronger mix on ASP was partially offset by negative foreign exchange year over year and the reduction in channel inventory, which took place entirely at the high end of the portfolio. Customer interest and satisfaction with iPhone are very strong with both consumers and business uses. In the U.S., the latest data from 451 Research on consumers indicates a 95% customer satisfaction rating for iPhone 7 and 99% for iPhone 7 Plus. Among consumers planning to buy a smartphone, purchase intention for iPhone was nearly three times the rate of our closest competitor. Among corporate smartphone buyers, iOS customer satisfaction was 94%. And of those planning to purchase smartphones in the September quarter, 78% plan to purchase an iPhone. Turning to Services, we set an all-time quarterly record of $7.3 billion, up 22% year over year. The App Store was a major driver of this performance. And according to App Annie's latest report, it continues to be by a wide margin the preferred destination for customer purchases, generating nearly twice the revenue of Google Play. Revenue from our Apple Music streaming service and from iCloud storage also grew very strongly. And across all of our Services offerings, the number of paid subscriptions reached over 185 million, an increase of almost 20 million in the last 90 days alone. The reach, usage, and functionality of Apple Pay continue to grow. We launched Apple Pay in Italy in May. And the UAE, Denmark, Finland, and Sweden are scheduled to go live before the end of this calendar year. Apple Pay is by far the number one NFC payment service on mobile devices, with nearly 90% of all transactions globally. Momentum is strongest in international markets, where the infrastructure for mobile payments has developed faster than in the U.S. In fact, three out of four Apple Pay transactions happen outside the U.S. And with the launch of iOS 11 this fall, our users in the U.S. will be able to make and receive person-to-person payments quickly, easily, and securely. Next, I'd like to talk about the Mac. Thanks to great performance from the new MacBook Pro, we generated 7% revenue growth over last year and gained share in the global PC market based on the latest data from IDC. Customer satisfaction for Mac is very strong at 97% in the most recent survey from 451 Research, and our active installed base of Mac has grown double digits over a year ago. We ended the quarter within our four to five-week target range for Mac channel inventory, and we have a great lineup of Macs for our customers heading into the busy back-to-school season. Turning to iPad, we sold 11.4 million units, up 15% over last year. We were happy to see iPad growth in each of our geographic segments, with strong double-digit increases in key markets such as the U.S., Japan, Germany, France, and Greater China. We exited the quarter within our five to seven-week target range for iPad channel inventory. NPD indicates that iPad had 55% share of the U.S. tablet market in the month of June, including 8 of the 10 best-selling tablets. That's up from 46% share a year ago. And among tablets priced over $200, iPad's share was 89%. In addition, the most recent survey from 451 Research measured business and consumer satisfaction rates ranging from 95% to 99% across iPad models. And among those planning to buy tablets, purchase intent for iPad was over 70%. Our enterprise business continues to expand, and our customers are transforming the way work gets done with iOS and iPad. Walmart will be deploying more than 19,000 iPads for employee training across 50 states, with projections of over 225,000 associates trained on iPad by the end of the year. Initial response from businesses to iOS 11 and the new iPad Pro has been amazing. And companies including Bank of America, Medtronic, and Panera tell us that they will be rolling out the 10.5-inch iPad Pro throughout key areas of their organizations. We're also seeing real traction with our enterprise partners. Just last month, we unveiled the next set of technology announcements in our partnership with Cisco. This new wave adds a whole new category of security features designed to help enterprises and employees defend against growing cyber threats. We believe this investment in our joint security solutions for iOS will make cyber insurance even more attainable for businesses. SAP is making great strides since launching the SAP cloud platform SDK for iOS in March, with a pipeline of hundreds of global opportunities. SAP has also released SuccessFactors Mobile, its first native iOS app for human resources, which will support 47 million iPhone and iPad users worldwide across multiple industries. And our partnership with Deloitte has recently expanded to several more European countries. We're helping clients transform their businesses with iOS. We jointly developed programs such as the Connected Store, a pop-up version of a retail environment, demonstrating iOS tools for sales and demand generation, as well as tailored apps for safe associates, store management, and customers. We also had a tremendous quarter for iPad in education, up 32% year over year. Following the launch of our new iPad in March, an update to our popular Classroom app, and continued enhancements to iOS that make managing iPads in the classroom even easier. The St. Paul Public School District in Minnesota is renewing its One to One program by deploying over 40,000 iPads across every student and teacher in the district. iPad was chosen because of its power and durability, ease of use, multimedia and accessibility features, and the extensive catalog of iOS apps designed specifically for education. The Shawnee Mission School District outside Kansas City recently purchased 19,000 iPads, extending its One to One program started in 2014 thanks to iPad's intuitive interface, superior reliability, and expansive ecosystem of iOS tools for education. It was a very busy quarter for our retail and online stores, which collectively welcomed over 300 million visitors. In addition to our spectacular new store at the Dubai Mall, we opened our first stores in Singapore and in Taiwan during the quarter, expanding our total store footprint to 497 stores. In May, we kicked off Today at Apple, with new in-store programming from music to photography to art and coding. And our stores collectively hosted 87,000 sessions during the quarter. As Tim mentioned last quarter, we have entered a new chapter in retail with unique and rewarding experiences for our customers and some stunning new stores coming in the near future. Let me now turn to our cash position. We ended the quarter with $261.5 billion in cash plus marketable securities, a sequential increase of $4.7 billion. $246 billion of this cash, 94% of the total, was outside the United States. We retired $3.5 billion of debt and issued the equivalent of $10.8 billion in new euro and U.S. dollar-denominated debt during the quarter, including our second green bond, bringing us to $96.4 billion in term debt and $12 billion in commercial paper outstanding. We also returned $11.7 billion to investors during the quarter. We paid $3.4 billion in dividends and equivalents and spent $4.5 billion on repurchases of 30.4 million Apple shares through open market transactions. We launched a new $3 billion ASR program, resulting in initial delivery and retirement of 15.6 million shares, and we retired 3.4 million shares upon the completion of our 10th ASR during the quarter. We have now completed $222.9 billion of our $300 billion capital return program, including $158.5 billion in share repurchases. As we move ahead into the September quarter, I'd like to review our outlook, which includes the types of forward-looking information that Nancy referred to at the beginning of the call. We expect revenue to be between $49 billion and $52 billion. We expect gross margin to be between 37.5% and 38%. We expect OpEx to be between $6.7 billion and $6.8 billion. We expect OI&E to be about $500 million. And we expect the tax rate to be about 25.5%. Also today, our Board of Directors has declared a cash dividend of $0.63 per share of common stock, payable on August 17, 2017 to shareholders of record as of August 14, 2017. With that, I would like to open the call to questions.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Luca, and we ask that you limit yourself to one one-part question and one follow-up. Rebecca, may we have the first question, please?
Operator:
And that question will come from Katy Huberty with Morgan Stanley.
Kathryn Lynn Huberty - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC:
Yes, thanks. Good afternoon. Luca, first question for you, gross margin guidance is strong, but it did tick down from your June quarter guidance, and you also narrowed the range to 50 basis points. I wonder if you can just address. What is the driver of the sequential downtick, and what gives you confidence that you have more visibility than you did three months ago?
Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.:
Katy, sequentially from 38.5% that we just reported, typically we have product transition costs during the September quarter. That's the primary driver. This happens fairly regularly for us. We also have a more difficult memory pricing environment this year than a year ago. And we think that we're going to be able to partially offset this with the positive leverage. As you've seen, we guided up sequentially in revenue. So those are the major puts and takes. In terms of the range that we use for gross margins, we have a fairly good understanding on where we are with our hedging program, and that allows us to mitigate some of the volatility there. So we felt we could guide to a slightly narrower range, which we've done occasionally in the past.
Kathryn Lynn Huberty - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC:
Thank you, and maybe a question for both Tim and Luca. As you outlined on this call and at the Developer Conference in June, there is an unprecedented number of products that either ramped volume or launched in the back half of this year. So appreciating you only formally guide a quarter out, I wonder if there's any qualitative commentary you can provide to help us think about the back half of this calendar year and how all those new products that come into the model could impact either revenue seasonality versus past years or could impact just the costs associated with ramping that many products all at once. Thanks.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Katy, as Luca mentioned, we did assume some transitional costs in our guidance for the quarter, as is typically the case. And we're looking very much forward to the product rollouts.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Katy. Could we have the next question, please?
Operator:
We'll go to Shannon Cross with Cross Research.
Shannon S. Cross - Cross Research LLC:
Thank you very much for taking my question. Tim, could you talk a bit about what you're seeing in China? I think obviously, there continues to be strong demand for smartphones. But perhaps mix shift, I think you brought back the iPhone 6 this quarter to be a bit more price aggressive. And then can you just talk a bit about how you see that market developing with the growth of WeChat and some of the other developments that are happening there? Thank you.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Yeah. Thanks, Shannon. We were very encouraged by the results this quarter. We improved as we thought we would from the previous quarters a little more than I thought we would. If you look underneath the numbers, mainland China was actually flat year-over-year during Q3. And in constant currency terms, we were actually up 6% in mainland China. And so we're very encouraged about that. iPad grew dramatically more than the market. The Mac grew much more than the market. iPhone was relatively flat year-on-year, similar as the market was. And so we see all of those as very encouraging signs. On top of that, Services grew extremely strongly during the quarter. Hong Kong continued to drag down the total Greater China segment. But on a sequential basis, we're probably at the trough of that, which is nice. With the peg to the dollar there from a currency point of view and tourism being what it is, I don't really know when that market will come back. But what we see on the mainland is definitely much more encouraging. It's interesting to note that upgraders both for the quarter and actually for the full fiscal year to-date was our highest ever, and so that we felt very good about. In terms of WeChat, the way that I look at this is because our share – because iOS share is not nearly a majority of the market in China, the fact that a lot of people use that, it makes the switching opportunity even greater. And I think that's more the case than the risk that a lot of folks have pointed out. And so I see Tencent as one of our biggest and best developers. They've done a great job of implementing a lot of iOS features in their apps and we're looking forward to working with them even more to build even greater experiences for our mutual users in China.
Shannon S. Cross - Cross Research LLC:
Great. Thank you. And then can you talk a bit about the composition of the installed base of iPhones at this point, as obviously we're getting close to a refresh? Just you brought in the iPhone SE. You've obviously had strength at the high end. I'm just trying to think about what percent do you think have upgraded in the prior generation, any color you can give us on that?
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
From an absolute quantity point of view, the upgrades for this fiscal year are the highest that we've seen. And so we feel good about that. However, if you look at it from an upgrade rate point of view instead of the absolute number, the rate is similar to what we saw with the previous iPhones, except for iPhone 6, which as we called out in the past had an abnormally high upgrade rate. We do think that based on the amount of rumors and the volume of them that there is some pause in our current numbers. And so where that affects us in the short-term, even though we had great results, it probably bodes well later on.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Shannon. Could we have the next question, please?
Operator:
Steve Milunovich with UBS.
Steven Milunovich - UBS Securities LLC:
Thank you. I wonder if you wanted to make any comments about switching this quarter.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Sure. Switching outside of China was up year-on-year, and so we're happy with that. We continue to see people moving over to iOS and it helped with us making the results that Luca announced earlier, including the channel inventory reduction.
Steven Milunovich - UBS Securities LLC:
Okay, and then a government question. First of all, the President suggested that you may build three big beautiful plants. I wonder if you can comment on if that's a possibility either directly or indirectly. And then in China, I think, we all understand that you have to work within the regulations, but maybe you could comment a bit on how you feel your working relationship is with the government and if there is certain lines that you can't cross.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Sure. Starting with the U.S., let me just take this question from what are we doing to increase jobs, which I think is probably where it's rooted. We've created 2 million jobs in the U.S., and we're incredibly proud of that. We do view that we have a responsibility in the U.S. to increase economic activity, including increasing jobs, because Apple could have only been created here. And so as we look at that 2 million, there are three main categories of that, and we have actions going on in each of them to further build on that momentum. The first category is app development. About three-quarters of the 2 million are app developers. And we're doing an enormous amount of things to deliver curriculum to both K-12 with Swift Playgrounds in the K-to-6 area, other curriculum as you proceed beyond grade 6 under the Everyone Can Code area. And just a couple months ago, we announced a new curriculum that's focused on community schools and community colleges, junior colleges, technical colleges, for kids that did not have coding in their elementary and high school years. And so we're excited about that because we think it could increase the diversity of the developer community and the quantity. And I think this area in general and all the things we do for the developer community will be the largest contribution that Apple can make because this is the fastest growing job segment in the country, and I think will be for quite some time. If you look at the second area, we have purchased – or we purchased last year about $50 billion worth of goods and services from U.S.-based suppliers. Some significant portion of those are manufacturing-related, and so we've asked ourselves what can we do to increase this. And you may have seen that at the beginning of the quarter, sometime in April I believe, we announced a fund, an Advanced Manufacturing Fund, that we're initially placing $1 billion in. And we've already deployed $200 million of that. And the first recipient is Corning in Kentucky, and they'll be using that money to expand the plant to make very innovative glass. And we purchase that glass and essentially export it to the world with iPhones and iPads. We think there's more of these that we can do. I think there are probably several plants that can benefit from having some investment to grow or expand or even maybe set up shop in the U.S. for the first time, so we're very excited about that. And then the third area is we have about two-thirds or so of our total employee base is in the U.S. despite only a third of our revenues being here, and we'll have some things that we'll say about that later in the year. And so that's what we're doing from a job growth point of view, and we're very, very proud of that. Now turning to China, let me comment on what I assumed is at the root of your question about this VPN issue. Let me just address that head on. The central government in China back in 2015 started tightening the regulations associated with VPN apps, and we have a number of those on our store. Essentially, as a requirement for someone to operate a VPN, they have to have a license from the government there. Earlier this year, they began a renewed effort to enforce that policy, and we were required by the government to remove some of the VPN apps from the App Store that don't meet these new regulations. We understand that those same requirements are on other app stores, and as we checked through that, that is the case. Today there are actually still hundreds of VPN apps on the App Store, including hundreds by developers that are outside China, and so there continues to be VPN apps available. We would obviously rather not remove the apps, but like we do in other countries, we follow the law wherever we do business. And we strongly believe that participating in markets and bringing benefits to customers is in the best interest of the folks there and in other countries as well. And so we believe in engaging with governments even when we disagree. And in this particular case, now back to commenting on this one, we're hopeful that over time the restrictions that we're seeing are loosened because innovation really requires freedom to collaborate and communicate, and I know that that is a major focus there. And so that's what we're seeing from that point of view. Some folks have tried to link it to the U.S. situation last year, and they're very different. In the case of the U.S., the law in the U.S. supported us, which was very clear. In the case of China, the law is also very clear there. And like we would if the U.S. changed the law here, we'd have to abide by them in both cases, that doesn't mean that we don't state our point of view in the appropriate way. We always do that. And so hopefully that's a little bit probably more than you wanted to know, but I wanted to tell you.
Steven Milunovich - UBS Securities LLC:
Thank you.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Steve. Could we have the next question, please?
Operator:
We'll hear from Kulbinder Garcha with Credit Suisse.
Kulbinder S. Garcha - Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC:
Thank you, a question for Tim maybe on the iPhone install base. At various points in the past you've told us the rate at which that was growing. At the end of the first half, what is that up year on year? At what rate is it growing? Can you give us some sense of that? And on upgrade rates over the longer term, there are lots of moving parts, and I get that there's I guess geographic mix shift of your base. There's many new phones that you may or may not bring out. There's how carriers promote your products. But do you think this upgrade rate is sustainable? Do you think it gets faster all the time? How should we think about the major drivers that you want to see for it? Many thanks.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
I think the upgrade rate is a function of many, many different things, from the size of the installed base, the age of the installed base, the product that is new at the time, the regional distribution, the upgrade plans that are in various markets around the world. And so I think there are many, many factors in that. It's not a simple thing that you can apply a set formula to or one variable or a couple of variable formula in my opinion. But I think in general, because our installed base was up strong double digit once again, there's a lot of factors that are very positive for us. And between the upgraders and the switchers that we see, and the first-time buyer category is still out there too in several countries, including some that you may not think there is, there's still a sizable base in some. Between those three areas, I think we have a lot of opportunity.
Kulbinder S. Garcha - Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC:
Thank you.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Yes.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Kulbinder. Could we have the next question, please?
Operator:
Toni Sacconaghi with Bernstein.
Antonio M. Sacconaghi - Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. LLC:
Yes, thank you. I have one for Luca and one for Tim, please. Luca, typically in the fiscal Q4, Apple builds considerable iPhone channel inventory, like 2 million or 3 million units. You're starting from a very low point at the end of fiscal Q3, as you mentioned on the call, with the drawdown. As we think about what's embedded in your guidance for fiscal Q4 for channel inventory for iPhone, should we be expecting a normal seasonal build, or is it likely to be significantly higher given the very low starting point?
Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.:
As you know, Toni, we do not guide on channel inventory. We've never done that. We are providing a fairly wide range from a revenue standpoint, so obviously that also has an impact on potential channel inventory levels. One thing that I would tell you is that we feel very good about the performance of the business right now. We think that our Services business will continue to grow well. We've got a lot of momentum on iPad and Mac because we refreshed the lineups of those products. Watch and AirPods are doing incredibly well. We're getting a lot of positive customer feedback. And I think in general, even the performance in China, Tim has mentioned it. We think that the performance will continue to improve. So those are the drivers of our guidance range for the quarter.
Antonio M. Sacconaghi - Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. LLC:
Okay, thanks. Tim, I was wondering if you could maybe talk a little bit about two things that you mentioned in public before. One is television, which you have described as an area of intense interest, but I don't even think there was an update on Apple TV on this call. So perhaps you can talk to us about how you're thinking about content. I know you're doing some original content creation, and how that area is evolving in your thinking. And then recently you talked about how Apple is focusing on autonomous systems for automobiles. And there has been press reports that Apple has been testing autonomous vehicles for potentially up to a year. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about Apple's interest in autonomous vehicles and whether self-driving is really likely to be Apple's principal focus in the near to medium-term.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
On the first part of your question about original content, we have done some original content. It's focused on Apple Music. Currently, we have some more that's launching in a week or so that will be made available on Apple Music. The objective of this is really twofold. One is for our own learning, given that we're new in the video space in terms of creation. And two is to give the Apple Music subscriber some exclusive content and hopefully grow our subscriber base. And we've recently hired two great folks with lots of experience in creating content like Breaking Bad and The Crown and some really top-notch content. And so we'll see how this area goes, but it is still an area of great interest. In terms of autonomous systems, what we've said is that we are very focused on autonomous systems from a core technology point of view. We do have a large project going and are making a big investment in this. From our point of view, autonomy is the mother of all AI projects. And the autonomous systems can be used in a variety of ways and a vehicle is only one. But there are many different areas of it and I don't want to go any further with that. But thank you for the question.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Toni. Could we have the next question, please?
Operator:
That comes from Mike Olson with Piper Jaffray.
Michael J. Olson - Piper Jaffray & Co.:
Good afternoon. I just have one question for Tim. This may be a hard question to answer in a condensed way, but how would you describe what you expect the most near-term applications will be for developers to target using ARKit? Will it be consumer iPhone and iPad applications, enterprise applications, or I guess some combination of the two? And basically, how does this come to market in the most significant way in the next few quarters as Apple becomes the largest global platform for AR as you've talked about? Thanks.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Mike, that is a great question. And I could not be more excited about AR and what we're seeing with ARKit in the early going. And to answer your question about what category it starts in, just take a look at what's already on the web in terms of what people are doing and it is all over the place. From entertainment to gaming, I've seen what I would call more small business solutions. I've seen consumer solutions. I've seen enterprise solutions. I think AR is big and profound and this is one of those huge things that we'll look back at and marvel on the start of it. So I think that customers are going to see it in a variety of ways. Enterprise takes a little longer sometimes to get going. But I can already tell you there's lots of excitement in there. And I think we'll start to see some applications there as well. And it feels great to get this thing going at a level that can get all of the developers behind it, so I couldn't be more excited about it.
Michael J. Olson - Piper Jaffray & Co.:
Thank you.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thanks, Mike. Could we have the next question, please?
Operator:
We'll go to Amit Daryanani.
Amit Daryanani - RBC Capital Markets LLC:
Thanks a lot. Good afternoon, guys. I guess to start off with, on your Services segment, revenues actually I think accelerated by 400 basis points to worse than what you guys had in the first half of this year. Could you just help us understand what's driving this? Is there a way to think about ARPU in a traditional manner within that Services business versus the installed base growing?
Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.:
Amit, Luca. Our Services business is very broad. We've got multiple categories in the Services business, so it's difficult to talk about ARPU in general. It doesn't make a lot of sense. The reason for the acceleration also here is multiple factors. One that is very, very important for us is the fact that the App Store, which is the largest of our Services categories, is seeing an increasingly larger amount of paying accounts. On a year-over-year basis, the number of accounts that are actually transacting and paying on the App Store is growing very, very well. It is happening for a variety of reasons. One of them, for example, is the fact that we are making it easier for customers to pay on the App Store. Outside the United States, in many markets, not every form of payment is accepted. We are making it easier all the time. We launched on Alipay, for example, in China during the December quarter. That has obviously helped a lot with the growth in the number of paid accounts. And we continue to bring more and more forms of payment in the App Store around the world. That's a big reason for that. The other reason why the number of paying accounts is growing is the fact that the quality and the quantity of content continues to improve. And so there's many more ways of experiencing games and entertainment and other apps on the store. We have other businesses like the Apple Music streaming service, which is growing very fast because we just started it a couple of years ago, so we are getting a lot of new subscribers there. Our iCloud storage business continues to grow very, very fast. So it's multiple services. The number of people transacting on our stores continues to grow. In terms of ARPU, maybe I can make a comment on ARPU specifically related to the App Store. What we're seeing and we've seen over a long period of time as we keep track of these cohorts of customers, we see that as customers get on the App Store and start spending on it, we see the spending profile is very similar across generations of customers. People tend to spend more over time. Obviously, you have different spending profiles in different geographies around the world, but in general you see that trend across the board.
Amit Daryanani - RBC Capital Markets LLC:
Got it, that's really helpful. And if I could just follow up, on the iPhone side, there's been a large amount of discussion in blogs and among your component suppliers that the timing this time may be somewhat different and delayed versus past. Your guide almost seems you're more excited about this iPhone launch versus historically because the sequential growth is better. So I guess beyond the fact we probably shouldn't read every blog and believe every blog, what do you think is different with this product launch or product availability through the cycle versus what you've seen historically?
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
We have no comment on anything that's unannounced.
Amit Daryanani - RBC Capital Markets LLC:
Fair enough, I figured it was worth a shot. Thank you.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Amit. Could we have the next question, please?
Operator:
That will come from Brian White with Drexel.
Brian J. White - Drexel Hamilton LLC:
Yes. Tim, growth in the smartphone market is now crawling along at about a low single digit percentage. I know iPhone grew about 2% year over year this quarter, and it looks like you had about a mid-teens market share in units in 2016. So as we look forward maybe three to four years, do you think Apple can expand its unit market share? And if so, what will be the drivers be? And my second question is just about India, general thoughts about India in the quarter. Thank you.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
The answer to your first question is yes. I do think that we can grow both in units and market share. We don't predict those things, but yes, if you ask me what I think, that's what I think. And so what are the drivers? The installed base is growing. It's still growing very strongly. That will generate more upgrades over time. I feel good about our ability to convince people to switch. And where the developed markets the first-time buyer rates are down other than places like Japan perhaps, the emerging markets, we haven't even gotten started yet, really. From a revenue point of view, we had very strong growth there. Emerging markets ex-China were up 18% year on year. It was a record for us, so we see a lot of opportunity in these markets. We are investing in India. As you mentioned in your second point, we've already launched an app accelerator center. That's on top of working with the channel and looking at expanding our go-to-market in general. And we began to produce the iPhone SE there during the quarter, and we're really happy with how that's going. And so we're bringing all of our energies to bear there. I see a lot of similarities to where China was several years ago. And so I'm very, very bullish and very, very optimistic about India.
Brian J. White - Drexel Hamilton LLC:
Great, thank you.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thanks very much, Brian. A replay of today's call will be available for two weeks as a podcast on the iTunes Store, as a webcast on apple.com/investor, and via telephone. And the numbers to the telephone replay are 888-203-1112 or 719-457-0820. Please enter confirmation code 6376964. And these replays will be available by approximately 5:00 PM Pacific Time today. Members of the press with additional questions can contact Kristen Huguet at 408-974-2414. And financial analysts can contact Joan Hoover or me with additional questions. Joan is at 408-974-4570 and I'm at 408-974-5420. Thanks again for joining us.
Operator:
Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude today's presentation. We do thank everyone for your participation.
Executives:
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc. Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc. Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.
Analysts:
Kathryn Lynn Huberty - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC Shannon S. Cross - Cross Research LLC Rod Hall - JPMorgan Securities LLC Steven M. Milunovich - UBS Securities LLC A.M. Sacconaghi, Jr. - Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. LLC Simona K. Jankowski - Goldman Sachs & Co. Jim Suva - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.
Operator:
Good day, everyone, and welcome to this Apple Incorporated second quarter fiscal year 2017 earnings release conference call. Today's call is being recorded. At this time for opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn the call over to Nancy Paxton, Senior Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, ma'am.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you. Good afternoon and thanks to everyone for joining us. Speaking first today is Apple CEO Tim Cook, and he'll be followed by CFO Luca Maestri. After that, we'll open the call to questions from analysts. Please note that some of the information you'll hear during our discussion today will consist of forward-looking statements, including without limitation those regarding revenue, gross margin, operating expenses, other income and expense, taxes, future business outlook, and plans for capital return and debt issuance. Actual results or trends could differ materially from our forecast. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in Apple's Form 10-K for 2016, the Form 10-Q for the first quarter of 2017, and the Form 8-K filed with the SEC today along with the associated press release. Apple assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements or information, which speak as of their respective dates. I'd now like to turn the call over to Tim for introductory remarks.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Thanks, Nancy. Good afternoon and thank you for joining us. Today we are reporting strong March quarter results, with accelerating revenue growth and earnings per share up 10% over last year. We feel great about this performance. Revenue was $52.9 billion, near the high end of our guidance range. Global revenue was up 5% year on year, with growth accelerating from our December quarter performance. That's despite a $1 billion year-over-year revenue headwind from foreign exchange in the March quarter and a larger iPhone channel inventory reduction this year versus last year. iPhone sales were line in line with our expectations, and we're thrilled to see the continued strong demand for iPhone 7 Plus with its beautiful large display and dual-camera system. Our active installed base of iPhones grew by double digits year over year. And based on the latest data from IDC, we gained market share in nearly every country we track. Late in the quarter, we released the stunning (PRODUCT)RED Special Edition versions of iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus in recognition of 10 years of our partnership with RED. This relationship has given our customers an unprecedented way to contribute to the global fund and bring the world a step closer to an AIDS-free generation. We've seen wonderful customer response to these eye-popping new iPhones. For the second quarter in a row, our Services revenue topped $7 billion, and it's well on the way to being the size of a Fortune 100 company. We're very happy to see the deep level of customer engagement with the Apple ecosystem across all of our services. App Store momentum is terrific, with revenue growing 40% year over year to an all-time quarterly record. The number of developers offering apps for sale on our store was up 26% over last year, and we're thrilled to see their success. We also saw double-digit revenue growth from Apple Music subscriptions and iCloud storage and overall very strong growth in the total number of paid subscriptions for our own services and the third-party content we offer on our stores. Paid subscriptions now exceed 165 million. Apple Pay is experiencing phenomenal traction. With the launch of Taiwan and Ireland in the March quarter, Apple Pay is now live in 15 markets with more than 20 million contactless-ready locations, including more than 4.5 million locations accepting Apple Pay in the U.S. alone. We're seeing strong growing usage as points of acceptance expand, with transaction volume up 450% over the last 12 months. In the UK, for example, points of acceptance have grown by 44% in the last year, while monthly Apple Pay transactions have grown by nearly 300%. In Japan, where Apple Pay launched last October, more than 0.5 million transit users are completing 20 million Apple Pay transactions per month. And we're always excited to see our partners bring their customers new ways to use Apple Pay. You can now even send a Starbucks gift card via iMessage with just a touch. We're seeing great momentum from our powerful advances in Messages. In fact, at one point during the Super Bowl in February, customers were sending 380,000 Messages per second, more than double the previous year. A few weeks ago, we introduced Clips, a new app that's another great example of how we're continually making our products even more engaging, and it's off to a great start. With Clips, it's fun and easy to combine video, photos, and music on an iPhone or an iPad into great-looking expressive videos with great visual effects and titles just using your voice, then share your clips with friends through the Messages app or on social media. We had great Mac results during the quarter. Revenue grew 14% to a new March quarter record and gained market share thanks to strong demand for our new MacBook Pros. Our Mac business has generated over $25 billion in revenue over the past four quarters. We're investing aggressively in its future, and we are very excited about the innovation we can bring to the platform. We also updated our most popular sized iPad with a brighter Retina display and best-in-class performance at its most affordable price ever, and customer response to date has been very strong. iPad results were ahead of our expectations, and we believe we gained share during the March quarter in a number of major markets, including the U.S., Japan, and Australia. iPad remains the world's most popular tablet, and it's the primary computing device for millions of customers across the globe. Building on the momentum from the holiday quarter, Apple Watch sales nearly doubled year over year. Apple Watch is the best-selling and most loved smartwatch in the world, and we hear wonderful stories from our customers about its impact on their fitness and health. We're also seeing great response to AirPods, with a 98% customer satisfaction rating based on a recent Creative Strategy survey. Demand for AirPods significantly exceeds supply, and growth in Beats products has also been very strong. In fact, when we combine Apple Watch, AirPods, and Beats headphones, our revenue from wearable products in the last four quarters was the size of a Fortune 500 company. In Greater China, we were very pleased to see strong double-digit revenue growth from both Mac and Services during the March quarter. We also had great results from our retail stores in mainland China, with total store revenue up 27% over last year and comp store revenue up 7%. These results contributed to our improving performance in Greater China. Through the first two quarters of fiscal 2017, our year-over-year comparisons improved significantly over the last two quarters of fiscal 2016. First half revenue was down 13% year over year, about a third of which was attributable to FX. That's in contrast to a 32% revenue decline in the second half of last year. Our March quarter results were in line with our expectations, and similar to the year-over-year performance we experienced in the December quarter. We continue to be very enthusiastic about our opportunity in China. We set a new March quarter record for India, where revenue grew by strong double digits. We continue to strengthen our local presence across the entire ecosystem, and we're very optimistic about our future in this remarkable country with its very large, young, and tech-savvy population, fast-growing economy, and improving 4G network infrastructure. Apple Retail is entering an exciting chapter with new experiences for customers and breathtaking new store designs. With the opening of our newest store in Dubai this past weekend, we now have 495 retail locations worldwide. The new Apple Dubai Mall is a truly international store, with employees who collectively speak 45 languages, and are already welcoming customers from around the world. As Luca will discuss in a moment, today we're also providing an update to our capital return program. Given our strong confidence in our future, we're increasing the program size by $50 billion, bringing the total to $300 billion, and we're extending the timeframe through March of 2019. We're adding to our share repurchase authorization and increasing our dividend for the fifth time in less than five years. We're very excited about our upcoming Worldwide Developers Conference taking place in San Jose next month. The conference is significantly oversubscribed, and we'll be welcoming thousands of attendees. We look forward to helping them learn about breakthrough technologies across all four of our software platforms – iOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS – that enable developers to create incredible experiences for every aspect of customers' lives and improve the way they manage their homes, cars, health, and more. I'm very proud to mention that we recently released our 10th annual Environmental Responsibility Report, reflecting our amazing progress. In 2016, 96% of the electricity used at Apple's global facilities came from renewable sources of energy, reducing our carbon emissions by nearly 585,000 metric tons. We're now 100% renewable in 24 countries, including all of Apple's data centers. There's much more work to be done, but we're committed to leaving the world better than we found it. Closer to home, we're excited about moving into our new corporate headquarters, Apple Park, our new center for innovation. The main building on Apple Park is designed to house 13,000 employees under one roof in an environment that fosters even greater collaboration among our incredibly talented teams. We have many more ongoing investments in the United States economy, since Apple is a company that could only have been created in America. Through our innovative products and the success of our business, we're incredibly proud to support more than 2 million jobs in all 50 states, and we expect to create even more. Last fiscal year, we spent more than $50 billion in the United States with American suppliers, developers, and partners, and we continue to invest confidently in our future. Now for more details on the March quarter results, I'd like to turn the call over to Luca.
Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Tim. Good afternoon, everyone. Revenue for the March quarter was $52.9 billion, and we achieved double-digit growth in the U.S., Canada, Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, Turkey, Russia and Mexico. Our growth rates were even higher, over 20% in many other markets, including Brazil, Scandinavia, the Middle East, Central and Eastern Europe, India, Korea and Thailand. Gross margin was 38.9%, at the high end of our guidance range. That's a sequential increase from 38.5% in the December quarter, which is particularly impressive given the seasonal loss of leverage, sequential foreign exchange headwinds of 100 basis points, and cost pressures on certain commodities. Operating margin was 26.7% of revenue and net income was $11 billion. Diluted earnings per share were $2.10, an increase of 10% over last year, and cash flow from operations was strong at $12.5 billion. For details by product, I'll start with iPhone. We sold 50.8 million iPhones, and we reduced iPhone channel inventory by 1.2 million units in the quarter, compared to a reduction of about 450,000 a year ago. So our iPhone performance was slightly better than last year on a sell-through basis. We had very solid iPhone growth in four of our five operating segments and experienced especially strong results in Western Europe, the Middle East, and our Rest of Asia-Pacific segment, all areas of the world where iPhone sales were up double digits. iPhone ASP was $655, up from $642 a year ago, thanks to a strong mix of iPhone 7 Plus and in spite of unfavorable foreign exchange rates. We exited the March quarter within our five to seven-week target channel inventory range. Customer interest and satisfaction with iPhone are very strong, not only with consumers but also with business users. In the U.S., the latest data from 451 Research on consumers indicates a 96% customer satisfaction rating among iPhone 7 owners and 98% for iPhone 7 Plus. Among corporate smartphone buyers, iPhone customer satisfaction was 95%. And of those planning to purchase smartphones in the June quarter, 79% plan to purchase iPhone. Turning to Services, we generated $7 billion in revenue, an increase of 18% year over year and our best results ever for a 13-week quarter. We're very happy with the strong level of growth, especially given the tough compare to last year, as the busy week between Christmas and New Year's fell within the March fiscal quarter a year ago but was included in the December fiscal quarter this year. As we said last quarter, our goal is to double the size of our Services business by 2020. The App Store established a new all-time revenue record and grew 40% year over year. We continue to see growth in average revenue per paying account as well as the number of paying accounts across our content stores during the quarter. In fact, the quarterly increase in the number of paying accounts was the largest that we've ever experienced. And according to App Annie's latest report, the App Store continues to be the preferred destination for customer purchases, generating twice the revenue of Google Play during the March quarter. Next I'd like to talk about the Mac. Revenue was up 14% year over year and set a new March quarter record. We sold 4.2 million Macs, up 4% over last year, compared to zero growth in the PC market according to IDC's latest forecast. Demand for MacBook Pro was very strong, helping to drive overall portables growth of 10%, twice the growth of the portables market. We ended the quarter at the low end of our four to five-week target range for Mac channel inventory. Turning to iPad, we sold 8.9 million units, which was ahead of our expectations despite supply constraints throughout the quarter. We are very pleased to see iPad growth in the U.S. during the March quarter and revenue growth worldwide for our 9.7-inch and larger iPads over the last four quarters. iPad channel inventory was essentially flat from the beginning to the end of the quarter, and we exited just below our five to seven-week target range. iPad remains very successful in the segments of the tablet market where we compete. Recent data from NPD indicates that iPad had 81% share of the U.S. market for tablets priced above $200. And in February, 451 Research measured consumer satisfaction rates for iPad that range from 95% for the 9.7-inch iPad Pro to 100% for the 12.9-inch version. Among U.S. consumers planning to purchase a tablet within the next six months, purchase intention for iPad was 69%. Corporate buyers reported a 96% satisfaction rate and a purchase intent of 68% for the June quarter. All our products continue to be extremely popular and drive more buying transformation in the enterprise market. We set a new enterprise revenue record for the March quarter, and we expect this momentum to continue for the remainder of the year. Recently, Volkswagen selected iPhone as their corporate standard smartphone, so 620,000 employees around the world have the opportunity to enjoy the best-in-class mobile experience that iPhone offers. And Capital One has reimagined the customer banking experience by empowering their associates with Mac and Apple Watch and over 40 native iOS applications now running on nearly 30,000 iPhones and iPads. We're also seeing strong momentum with our enterprise partners, who are helping us deliver long-lasting innovation and differentiation for iOS versus competing platforms. The Deloitte partnership is off to a great start, with more than 115 customer opportunities in the pipeline across 15 different industries. SAP released the SAP Cloud Platform SDK for iOS at the end of March, and over 3 million SAP developers now have an even better means to develop powerful iOS-native apps for the enterprise. The partnership with Cisco enables optimized performance of iOS devices over their networks and is generating a large and growing pipeline of sales opportunities across multiple verticals, including healthcare and financial services. And our partnership with IBM continues to drive greater productivity and innovation, with IBM Mobile First for iOS apps now in more than 3,300 client engagements. And with its Mobile at Scale offering, IBM recently closed an agreement to deploy 11,000 iOS devices at Santander Bank to drive digital transformation. Our retail and online stores produced great results, with strong revenue growth in all our geographic segments and 18% growth overall. Visitors to our retail and online stores were up 16% over last year, and we added four new stores during the March quarter. And with the opening of our store in Dubai last week, we're now at 495 stores in 18 countries. Let me now turn to our cash position. We ended the quarter with $256.8 billion in cash plus marketable securities, a sequential increase of $10.8 billion. $239.6 billion of this cash, or 93% of the total, was outside the United States. We issued $11 billion in debt during the quarter, bringing us to $88.5 billion in term debt and $10 billion in commercial paper outstanding. We returned over $10 billion to investors during the quarter. We paid $3 billion in dividends and equivalents, and we spent $4 billion on repurchases of 31.1 million Apple shares through open market transactions. We also launched a new $3 billion ASR, resulting in initial delivery and retirement of 17.5 million shares. And we retired 6.3 million shares upon the completion of our ninth accelerated share repurchase program in February. All these activities contributed to a net diluted share count reduction of 66.3 million shares in the quarter. We have now completed $211.2 billion of our $250 billion capital return program, including $151 billion in share repurchases. As Tim mentioned, today we're announcing an update to our program, which we are extending by four quarters through March of 2019, and increasing in size to a total of $300 billion. Once again, given our strong confidence in Apple's future and the value we see in our stock, we are allocating the majority of the program expansion to share repurchases. Our board has increased the share repurchase authorization by $35 billion, raising it from the current $175 billion level to $210 billion. We will also continue to net share settle vesting employees' restricted stock units. In addition, we're raising our dividend for the fifth time in less than five years. As we know, this is very important to many of our investors who value income. The quarterly dividend will grow from $0.57 to $0.63 per share, an increase of 10.5%. This is effective with our next dividend, which the board has declared today, payable on May 18, 2017 to shareholders of record as of May 15, 2017. With over $12 billion in annual dividend payments, we're proud to be one of the largest dividend payers in the world, and we continue to plan for annual dividend increases going forward. In total, with this updated program, during the next eight quarters we expect to return $89 billion to our investors, which represents about 12% of our market cap at the current stock price. We expect to continue to fund our capital return program with current U.S. cash, future U.S. cash generation and borrowing from both domestic and international debt markets. We will continue to review capital allocation regularly, taking into account the needs of our business, investment opportunities, and our financial outlook. We'll also continue to solicit input on our program from a broad base of shareholders. This approach will allow us to be flexible and thoughtful about the size, the mix, and the pace of our program. As we move ahead into the June quarter, I'd like to review our outlook, which includes the types of forward-looking information that Nancy referred to at the beginning of the call. We expect revenue to be between $43.5 billion and $45.5 billion. We expect gross margin to be between 37.5% and 38.5%. We expect OpEx to be between $6.6 billion and $6.7 billion. We expect OI&E to be about $450 million, and we expect the tax rate to be about 25.5%. With that, I'd like to open the call to questions.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Luca, and we ask that you limit yourself to one one-part question and one follow-up. Rebecca, may we have the first question, please?
Operator:
First we'll hear from Katy Huberty with Morgan Stanley.
Kathryn Lynn Huberty - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC:
Yes, thanks. My first question is for Luca around gross margins. How were you able to expand gross margins sequentially and guide rather seasonally for the June quarter in light of what's going on in the memory market. And maybe if you can, comment in particular whether the hold back of payments to Qualcomm is benefiting you at all on gross margins year on year, and also whether your contracts around commodity prices is likely to hit gross margins by more in the back half of this calendar year.
Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Katy, a lot of questions. Let me take them one by one. Let me start with our performance for the March quarter, which we were very happy with. As you said, we were up 40 basis points sequentially. And this is in spite of the fact, as you know, that we lose leverage as we go from the December quarter to the March quarter. The foreign exchange headwind on a sequential basis was 100 basis points. Obviously, that was also a negative. And as you said, we started to experience some level of cost pressure on the memory side, particularly on NAND and DRAM. To offset that, and actually do better than that, we had very good cost performance on other commodities. And the fact that our Services mix increases as we go through the year, that is of course also helping, given the profile of our gross margin for Services. So that answers the question around Q2. As we move into the June quarter, as you know, we tend to have some level of gross margin compression as we go from the March quarter to the June quarter. Again, the majority of that comes from the sequential loss of leverage. We also have a different mix of products as we move into the June quarter, and the cost pressures on memory will remain. We expect to offset partially these impacts with other cost efficiencies, and again, with a mix shift towards Services. The impact on NAND and DRAM will continue to be there, and we expect it to be there. You know we don't guide past the June quarter, but we expect it to be there for the time being. On Qualcomm, I just want to make it very, very clear that we are accruing. We do not expect to be paying more than what we are accruing right now. So we didn't get any benefit in our P&L, in our margins, during the March quarter, and we're not getting any benefit during the June quarter either.
Kathryn Lynn Huberty - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC:
Okay, thank you. And just a follow-up for Tim, as you noted in your remarks, the iPhone 7 Plus demand, it's selling incredibly well. And this was a product that was pretty severely supply-constrained in the December quarter. And I just wonder whether there are any lessons learned as you go forward into future product launches around how you manage the timing of announcing a product when there are supply constraints, and how you might work with the supply chain differently around ramping some of these components that have particular difficulties around the yields early on.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Katy, one of the things that we did not get right was the mix between the iPhone 7 and the iPhone 7 Plus. There was – wound up that demand was much stronger to the iPhone 7 Plus than we had predicted. And so it took us a little while to adjust all the way back through the supply chain and to bring iPhone 7 Plus into balance, which occurred early this past quarter. What did we learn from it? Every time we go through a launch, we learn something. And you can bet that we're brushing up our models, and we'll apply everything we learn to the next time.
Kathryn Lynn Huberty - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC:
Thank you.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Katy. Could we have the next question, please?
Operator:
We'll go to Shannon Cross with Cross Research.
Shannon S. Cross - Cross Research LLC:
Thank you very much. Tim, can you talk a bit about what's going on in China and give us some more color, especially as you're going through the year? And then obviously you won't talk about the next product launch, but just are there any shifts in demand with Greater China down 14%? Was it all iPhone, or a mix? Anything you can provide, and then I have a follow-up.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Yes, thanks for the question, Shannon. We saw in Q2 a performance that combined with Q1 to form the first half of the year was much better than what we experienced in the second half of last year. And if you look at what was driving that, iPhone 7 Plus, we sold the highest number of Plus models in the first half than ever before, compared to 6s Plus or compared to the 6 Plus. Also, the Mac business did extremely well. The Mac revenue growth was up 20% in China, and we had extremely strong Services growth during the quarter in China. As I mentioned in my comments, our retail and online stores did well overall and in China. They grew by 21%, which is an acceleration from what we had seen in the previous quarter. And traffic – which for us is incredibly important in the retail stores because we do a lot more than sell – traffic was up 27% year on year. And now seven of our top ten highest traffic stores in the world are in Greater China. And so that's the set of things that went in our direction, so to speak. On the flip side, currency devalued by 5%, and so that's not an insignificant headwind. And our performance continued to be weak in Hong Kong, which has been hit a bit harder as the tourism market continues to slump. Also, where the iPhone 7 Plus did well, we didn't perform as well on some of the previous generation iPhones. And so that's the set of things on the plus and minus side. We did perform about where I thought we would. At least I thought it would be similar to the previous quarter, and it was. What I now believe is that we'll improve a bit more during this current quarter, not back to growth, but improve – but make more progress. And we continue to believe that there's an enormous opportunity there. And in the scheme of things, our business is pretty large there.
Shannon S. Cross - Cross Research LLC:
Great, thank you. And then I don't know if Luca wants to take this, but thoughts on cash usage. You increased your program, but you still have I think $160 billion of net cash and obviously continue to generate cash. So I'm curious as to, given some of the commentary that's come out of the administration, which I think most companies were expecting some sort of return, how do you generally think about what you need to run the business from a cash perspective, how you think about the balance sheet from a strength perspective as we look forward to what hopefully will come through?
Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.:
Shannon, you know how we run our capital return program. We've been pretty consistent during the last five years. Essentially for the last five years, the way we've run the company is essentially to return our free cash flow to our investors. That's what we've done with the program until now, and the expansion of the program that we've announced today goes in the same direction. We know how much we need to invest in the business. We will never underinvest in the business. We're in a very fortunate position that we generate cash beyond the needs that we have. And given the current capital structure that we have, we decided that until now we return about 100% of the free cash flow to investors. It's difficult for us to speculate about what might or might not happen. The program that we're announcing today reflects the current tax legislation in this country, and there's a lot that still needs to happen there, and we'll see. Obviously, we will reassess our situation if things change.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Shannon. Can we have the next question, please?
Operator:
From JPMorgan, Rod Hall.
Rod Hall - JPMorgan Securities LLC:
Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. I wanted to start off just going back to the 165 million subscriptions and ask Tim or Luca if you could comment on the unique number of users there. And I think you had made a comment, Tim, in your prepared remarks that the average revenue per user was up, or maybe that was you, Luca. But if you guys could just talk about any more color around that average revenue per user, it would be interesting to us. And then I have one follow-up to that. Thanks.
Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.:
Yes, I'll take it, Rod. We don't disclose into the number of subscriptions. Of course, we're just giving you the total count of subscriptions that are out there. Of course, there are several customers that subscribe to more than one of our services. There is some level of overlap, but the total number of subscribers is very, very large, obviously less than 165 million. But it's very good for us to see the breadth of subscriptions that we offer and that customers are interested in. It's a large number. And if you remember, we quoted the same number a quarter ago and we talked about 150 million. So when you think about a sequential increase of 15 million subscriptions from the December quarter to the March quarter, it really gives you a sense for the momentum that we have on our content stores. It's quite impressive to add 15 million subscriptions in 90 days. As we look at the dynamics that are happening on our content stores, particularly on the App Store, which is the largest, we see fairly consistently two things. We see that the number of paying accounts is growing a lot. And I mentioned the increase in number of paying accounts that we value in this last 90 days is the largest that we've ever had. So this very large number of people coming into the ecosystem, experiencing the ecosystem, which is obviously improving all the time in quality and quantity, and then start paying and transacting on our stores, and that number is growing very, very strongly, strong double digits. What we're also seeing as we look at people that start paying on our stores, we see a pretty common trend over time. And we keep track of that across cohorts of customers, that as people come into the ecosystem and start paying on the ecosystem, we see a spending profile that is very similar around the world. People start at a certain level and then they tend to spend more over time. And so obviously, the combination of people spending more over time and adding more people that are now actually spending on the stores contributes to this 40% growth that Tim mentioned for the App Store on a year-over-year basis.
Rod Hall - JPMorgan Securities LLC:
Okay, thanks, Luca, and then I had a follow-up for Tim. Tim, I wanted to just ask. The Services revenue keeps growing, and of course the profit contribution from that is growing. And we've also at the same time I think seen you maybe a little more aggressive than Apple has been historically in pricing certain key technologies, let's call them, that maybe you want to penetrate the market with. I just wonder if you could just comment a little bit on your strategy there in terms of the usage of that extra profit contribution from that Services business, how you intend to apply it to the rest of the business. Thank you.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Rod, the way that we think about pricing is we come up with a price that we think is a good value for the product that we're delivering, and we do that on the hardware side as well as on the Services side. And so that's how we think about it. We're really not thinking about taking profits from one to subsidize the other or vice-versa.
Rod Hall - JPMorgan Securities LLC:
Great, thank you very much.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Yes.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thanks, Rod. Could we have the next question, please?
Operator:
From UBS, Steve Milunovich.
Steven M. Milunovich - UBS Securities LLC:
Thank you. Tim, could you comment on the opportunity in wearables? The watch, some people consider disappointing, had what seems to be a very good quarter, and ironically the competition almost seems to be fading in that part of the market right now. The AirPods of course are doing well. Do you see wearables
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Thanks for the question. We have seen the watch as a really key product category for us since before we launched it. We took our time to get it right, and we've made it even better with the Series 2 offering. And we're really proud of the growth of the business. The watch units more than doubled in six of our top ten markets, which is phenomenal growth, particularly in a non-holiday quarter. And so we couldn't be more satisfied with it. As some people are doing when you begin to combine the watch revenues with the revenues for AirPods, and as you know, this was the first full quarter of shipments for AirPods. It's still very much in the ramping mode, and we're not coming close to satisfying the demand. And then add the Beats products that a group of our customers really enjoy as well, and look on the trailing 12 months – so this is not a forecast – that business was well into the Fortune 500. And so as I look at that, that's pretty fast to come that far. The watch hasn't out very long and AirPods has been out there for three, four months, and so we feel really great about it. Where does it go? I wouldn't want to comment on that, but we do have a really great pipeline here. And I think in terms of competition falling out and so forth, the watch area is really hard. It in essence from an engineering point of view is similar to a phone in terms of the intricacies and so forth. And so I'm not very surprised that some people are falling out of it. But we're very committed to it and believe that – it's already a big business and believe over time it will be even larger. Thanks for the question.
Steven M. Milunovich - UBS Securities LLC:
Thank you. And then there was a – you mentioned the 451 Research survey. They did have a couple findings that were interesting. One is a nine-year low in iPhone purchase intent, and that might just be where you are in the cycle. And the other was a declining retention rate in the U.S. toward 80%. Any comment on either of those and whether you're concerned?
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
I only glanced at it, and so I haven't had time to study it. But in general, what we are seeing, we're seeing what we believe to be a pause in purchases on iPhone, which we believe are due to the earlier and much more frequent reports about future iPhones. And so that part is clearly going on, and it could be what's behind the data. I don't know, but we are seeing that in full transparency.
Steven M. Milunovich - UBS Securities LLC:
Thank you.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Thanks for the question.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Steve. Can we have the next question, please?
Operator:
From Bernstein, we'll go to Toni Sacconaghi.
A.M. Sacconaghi, Jr. - Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. LLC:
Yes, thank you. I have two as well. First, Tim, I'm wondering if you can comment on your recent decision and the rationale for withholding royalty payments to Qualcomm. And really specifically, I wonder what you believe is the risk that Qualcomm could have a detrimental response, such as withholding modem chip sales or potentially even getting an injunction on iPhones in select geographies around the world. And I'd like to understand your perspective on whether either of those are real risk to any degree. And why would Apple potentially take on those risks just in advance of what will arguably be your most significant and largest product launch in history?
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Anyone that has a standards-essential patent has a responsibility to offer it to everyone that would like it under what are called FRAND terms. FRAND stands for fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms. That's both the price and the business terms. Qualcomm has not made such an offer to Apple. And so I don't believe that a – I don't believe anyone is going to decide to enjoin the iPhone based on that. I think that there's plenty of case law around that subject, but we shall see. In terms of why we're withholding royalties, you can't pay something when there's a dispute about the amount. You don't know how much to pay. And so they think we owe some amount, we think we owe a different amount, and there hasn't been a meeting of the minds there. And so at this point, we need the courts to decide that. Unless we are able to, over time, settle between us on some amount, but right now we're depending upon the courts to do that. And so that is the thinking. The reason that we're pursuing this is that Qualcomm's trying to charge Apple a percentage of the total iPhone value. And they do some really great work around standards-essential patents, but it's one small part of what an iPhone is. It's not – it has nothing do with the display or the Touch ID or a gazillion other innovations that Apple has done. And so we don't think that's right, and so we're taking a principled stand on it. And we strongly believe we're in the right, and I'm sure they believe that they are. And that's what courts are for. And so we'll let it go with that.
A.M. Sacconaghi, Jr. - Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. LLC:
Thank you. I was wondering if I could just follow up a little bit on iPhone demand. If I try and adjust for the drawdown in inventory and the extra week last quarter, I think sequentially iPhones declined about 27% if I make those adjustments. And that's actually quite a bit lower than the normal seasonality we would see from Q1 to Q2, which is typically closer to 20%. I understand your comments around China, but your comparison was 40 points easier this quarter relative to last quarter. And the growth rate improved only marginally, I think, when you adjust for the extra week. And then you made a final comment around a pause on iPhones. So I'm wondering if you could maybe elaborate on, was the below sequential, at least by my calculation, growth rate in Q2 attributable to a pause? And can you characterize what you think upgrade rates are doing, perhaps broadly by geography, to help us better understand what might be happening, or whether there are competitive dynamics that also are at play here that, again, might be contributing to that pause and that sequential decline that I referenced? Thank you.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
There are a lot of questions there. Let me give you some color as I see it. In this quarter, we reduced channel inventory by 1.2 million units. And so if you look on a year-over-year basis, which is primarily what we look at from a unit point of view because it would have the seasonality embedded in that, we grew sell-through on a year-over-year basis. Last quarter, I'm sure other folks remember, was a 14-week quarter, and so you have to adjust the rates last quarter to get at what the underlying sell-through growth was. And so I think that when you do that, you're going to find that actually the year-over-year performance is similar between the quarters. In terms of upgraders, we saw the largest absolute number of upgraders ever in any six-month period in the first half of this year, first half of this fiscal year to be precise. And we saw the largest absolute number of switchers outside of Greater China in the same period that we've ever seen. And so in four of the five operating segments, as I think Luca mentioned in his comments, we had very good growth. And it was really propelled by the demand for iPhone 7 Plus, which is growing incredibly fast around the world. And so that's kind of the color I would add there, and hopefully some of that is useful for you.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Toni. Could we have the next question, please?
Operator:
We'll go to Simona Jankowski with Goldman Sachs.
Simona K. Jankowski - Goldman Sachs & Co.:
Hi, thank you. I had a question for Luca first. Last year, you had a 4 million-unit channel inventory reduction for the iPhone in the June quarter. So just curious what you're expecting for this year just so we have an apples-to-apples comparison as we think about your guidance.
Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.:
As you know, Simona, we do not provide guidance around units and around channel inventory reduction, but our goal is always to have the right amount of weeks of inventory in the channel. And if you look at our history over the last several years, we have fairly consistently reduced channel inventory in the June quarter, so I think it's a fair expectation to have.
Simona K. Jankowski - Goldman Sachs & Co.:
Thank you, and then just for Tim. Tim, you've been excited about the India market for some time and have made strides in establishing a retail, manufacturing, and R&D presence there. So just curious as you look at that market and the rollout of 4G there, is it reasonable for us to assume that Apple can sell something on the order of 10 million to 20 million iPhones there next year and then grow from there?
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
We make it a point not to forecast by geo. We just provide a current quarter forecast. But as hopefully you've seen as we began to give you more information about India, we've been investing quite a bit. We have a ton of energy going into the country on a number of fronts, and it is the third largest smartphone market in the world today behind China and the United States. And so we believe, particularly now that the 4G infrastructure is going in the country and is continuing to be expanded, that there is a huge opportunity for Apple there. And so that and the demographics of the country is why we're putting so much energy there.
Simona K. Jankowski - Goldman Sachs & Co.:
Thank you.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Simona. Could we have the next question, please?
Operator:
Jim Suva with Citigroup.
Jim Suva - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.:
Thank you very much and congratulations on returning to growth consistently. That's great. I believe, Tim, in your prepared comments you mentioned India was growing double digit, which is great. But I believe if you look at geographic information, India is really underpenetrated from an Apple reception perceptive, but yet they have LTE, you have the iPhone SE, a lower priced iPhone. Do you think that say this next 12 – 18 months is going be a turning point, or is it more you need to work with the government to have Apple-owned stores or production there? Or what's it really going to take to get India going along because we think it's just truly a great opportunity?
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
We think it's a great opportunity too, and so we're bringing all the things that we brought to bear in other markets that we've eventually done well in, and that's from channel to stores to our ecosystem and so forth. Phil [Schiller] was just over there opening a developer center last quarter, and so there are a ton of things going on there. And we agree that we are underpenetrated there. Our growth rates are good, really good by most people's expectations, maybe not mine as much. And so we're putting a lot of energy in, just like we have in other geos that eventually wound up producing more and more. So I'm very excited about it. The 4G network investment really began rolling in in a significant way toward the last quarter of last year, as you know. But they are moving fast. They're moving at a speed that I have not seen in any other country in the world once they were started, and it is truly impressive.
Jim Suva - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.:
Great, thanks so much for the detail. That's greatly appreciated.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Yes.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Jim. A replay of today's call will be available for two weeks as a podcast on the iTunes Store, as a webcast on apple.com/investor, and via telephone, and the numbers for the telephone replay are 888-203-1112 or 719-457-0820. Please enter confirmation code 3540172. And these replays will be available by approximately 5:00 PM Pacific Time today. Members of the press with additional questions can contact Kristin Huguet at 408-974-2414. And financial analysts can contact Joan Hoover or me with additional questions. Joan is at 408-974-4570, and I am at 408-974-5420. And thank you again for joining us.
Operator:
Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude today's presentation. We do thank everyone for your participation.
Executives:
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc. Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc. Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.
Analysts:
Kathryn Lynn Huberty - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC Amit Daryanani - RBC Capital Markets LLC Shannon S. Cross - Cross Research LLC Brian J. White - Drexel Hamilton LLC Simona K. Jankowski - Goldman Sachs & Co. Antonio M. Sacconaghi - Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. LLC Steven M. Milunovich - UBS Securities LLC
Operator:
Good day, everyone, and welcome to this Apple Incorporated first quarter fiscal year 2017 earnings release conference call. Today's call is being recorded. At this time for opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn the call over to Nancy Paxton, Senior Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, ma'am.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you. Good afternoon and thanks to everyone for joining us today. Speaking first is Apple CEO Tim Cook, and he'll be followed by CFO Luca Maestri. And after that, we will open the call to questions from analysts. Please note that some of the information you'll hear during our discussion today will consist of forward-looking statements, including without limitation those regarding revenue, gross margin, operating expenses, other income and expense, taxes, and future business outlook. Actual results or trends could differ materially from our forecast. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in Apple's Form 10-K for 2016 and the Form 8-K filed with the SEC today along with the associated press release. Apple assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements or information, which speak as of their respective dates. I'd now like to turn the call over to Tim for introductory remarks.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Nancy, and good afternoon everyone, and thanks very much for joining us. I'm very happy to share with you the outstanding results of Apple's December quarter. We generated the highest quarterly revenue in Apple's history along with all-time unit and revenue records for iPhone and Apple Watch, all-time revenue records for Services and Mac, and all-time revenue records for four out of our five geographic segments. The strong performance of our business also produced all-time record earnings per share. Revenue in the quarter was $78.4 billion, which was above the top of our guidance range. iPhone had a tremendous quarter thanks to exceptional demand that beat our own internal expectations. While iPhone 7 is our most popular model, we saw especially strong demand for iPhone 7 Plus, which was a higher portion of the new product mix than we've ever seen with Plus models in the past. Demand for iPhone 7 Plus exceeded supply throughout the quarter, and we came into supply/demand balance in January. iPhone 7 Plus has earned rave reviews for its advanced new features, especially the dual camera system, which produces stunning portraits and high-quality zoom. This is a uniquely Apple feature that is surprising and delighting our users. Both iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus are empowering our customers to be more productive, more engaged, and more expressive than ever by integrating hardware, software, and services to create experiences that only Apple can deliver. It was our best quarter ever for Services, with almost $7.2 billion in revenue. App Store customers broke all-time records during the holiday quarter, including $3 billion in purchases in December alone, making it the App Store's single best month ever. Our innovative and vibrant developer community has created over 2.2 million apps for doing almost anything that you can imagine. Apple's developer community has now earned over $60 billion, including over $20 billion in 2016 alone. Revenue from our music business grew for the third quarter in a row, and our AppleCare and iPlus storage services had all-time record results. Apple Pay continued its strong momentum, with the number of users more than tripling over the past year and hundreds of millions of transactions and billions of dollars in purchases in the December quarter alone. Transaction volume was up over 500% year over year as we expanded to four new countries, including Japan, Russia, New Zealand, and Spain, bringing us into a total of 13 markets. Apple Pay on the Web is delivering our partners great results. Nearly 2 million small businesses are accepting invoice payments with Apply Pay through Intuit QuickBooks Online, FreshBooks, and other billing partners. And beginning this quarter, Comcast customers can pay their monthly bill in a single touch with Apple Pay. Services are becoming a larger part of our business, and we expect the revenues to be the size of a Fortune 100 company this year. Our Services offerings are now driving over 150 million paid customer subscriptions. This includes our own services and third-party content that we offer on our stores. We feel great about this momentum, and our goal is to double the size of our Services business in the next four years. The Mac not only returned to growth but generated its highest quarterly revenue ever. Our latest data shows that most Mac customers are buying their first Mac, with the vast majority of them coming from a Windows PC. The new MacBook Touch with Touch Bar is an outstanding example of the innovation made possible by integrating world-class hardware and software. We were supply constrained for the new MacBook Pro throughout the December quarter and are just now coming into supply/demand balance. It was also our best quarter ever for Apple Watch, both units and revenues, with holiday demand so strong that we couldn't make enough. Apple Watch is the best-selling smartwatch in the world and also the most loved, with the highest customer satisfaction in its category by a wide margin. Apple Watch is the ultimate device for a healthy life, and it is the gold standard for smartwatches. We couldn't be more excited about Apple Watch. We're also thrilled with the response to AirPods. Customers love the magical experience AirPods are delivering. And if you haven't tried them yet, you'll be delighted when you do. They're far ahead of anything else on the market today, and we're working hard to catch up with the incredible demand. With AirPods off to a fantastic start, a strong full first year for Apple Watch, and Beats headphones offering a great wireless experience using the Apple-designed W1 chip, we now have a rich lineup of wearable products. Their design, elegance, and ease of use make us very excited about the huge growth potential for wearables going forward. Our ecosystem is broadening to more and more of the areas where people spend their time, at the gym, on the go, in the home, and on the job. For example, every major automaker is committed to supporting CarPlay with over 200 different models announced, including five of the top 10 selling models in the United States. There are well over 1 million people using CarPlay now, and this continues to grow rapidly. And we are leading the industry by being the first to integrate home automation into a major platform with iOS 10. With Siri and a new Home app in iOS 10, everywhere you go, you can easily and securely control all of your home accessories with your iPhone, iPad, or your Apple Watch. The number of HomeKit-compatible accessories continues to grow rapidly, with many exciting solutions announced just this month, including video cameras, motion detectors, and sensors for doors, windows, and even water leaks. Perhaps even more importantly, we are unmatched when it comes to securing your home with HomeKit-enabled door locks, garage doors, and alarm systems. I'm personally using HomeKit accessories and the Home app to integrate iOS into my home routine. Now when I say good morning to Siri, my house lights come on and my coffee starts brewing. When I go to the living room to relax in the evening, I use Siri to adjust the lighting and turn on the fireplace. And when I leave the house, a simple tap on my iPhone turns the lights off, adjusts the thermostat down, and locks the doors. When I return to my house in the evening, as I near my home, the house prepares itself for my arrival automatically by using a simple geofence. This level of home automation was unimaginable just a few years ago, and it's here today with iOS and HomeKit. We're making great progress in the enterprise market alongside our major partners. The combination of iOS and Cisco technology is giving companies everywhere the opportunity to vastly improve the user experience for their mobile employees. With enhanced networking performance, up to eight times faster roaming, better reliability for apps, and native voice experience, we're excited about how much more productive the workforce will be with these great capabilities. In fact, the total number of joint customer opportunities has grown over 70% since last quarter. Enterprises are using IBM's new Mobile at Scale design and development model to deploy multiple iOS apps with speed and efficiency. For example, Finnair is transforming aircraft maintenance, and CEMEX is revamping activities from attracting new clients to invoicing to after-sales support. And later this spring, SAP will be rolling out its SDK for iOS, providing its community of more than 2.5 million developers the tools to build powerful native iOS apps that leverage the SAP HANA cloud platform. We're delighted with how these partnerships are making it even easier for enterprise customers to transform how work gets done with iOS. As we reflect on a record-breaking December quarter, I'd like to thank our developers, our business partners, and our employees for their incredible contributions and commitment. And I'd like to thank all of our customers around the world for their excitement and loyalty, which ultimately drive these results. Now I'd like to turn it over to Luca to talk about the quarter in more detail.
Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Tim. Good afternoon everyone. Revenue for the December quarter was $78.4 billion, the highest quarterly revenue in the history of Apple and above our guidance range. As Tim mentioned, the strength of our results was very broad-based, as we set new revenue records for iPhone, for Services, for Mac, and for Apple Watch. We also established new all-time revenue records in most developed and emerging markets, with strong growth rates in many countries, including the U.S., Japan, Canada, France, Australia, Brazil, India, Turkey, and Russia. We accomplished all this despite a very challenging foreign exchange environment due to the continued strength of the U.S. dollar. As we had expected, our year-over-year performance in Greater China improved significantly relative to the September quarter. Total Greater China segment revenue was down 12%, but revenue from Mainland China was even with the all-time record results from a year ago and grew in constant currency terms. In all other geographic segments, we generated all-time quarterly record results. We had the benefit of a 14th week during the quarter this year, but this was offset by four factors. First, this year we grew China inventory significantly less than a year ago. Second, iPhone 7 launched earlier in the September quarter compared to the iPhone 6s launch the previous year, creating a more difficult comparison for the December quarter this year. Third, the stronger U.S. dollar affected total revenue growth this year by 100 basis points. And fourth, our year-ago revenue included the benefit of a one-off $548 million patent infringement payment. Also, strong customer interest left us in supply/demand imbalance for several of our products throughout the quarter this year. Gross margin was 38.5%, at the high end of our guidance range. Operating margin was 29.8% of revenue, and net income was $17.9 billion. Diluted earnings per share were $3.36, a new all-time record, and cash flow from operations was $27.1 billion. We had a terrific quarter for iPhone as we sold 78.3 million units, a new all-time record and an increase of 5% over last year. Customer demand was even higher than our reported results, as iPhone unit sell-through was up 8%. We saw double-digit iPhone growth in the U.S., in Canada, Western Europe, Japan, and Australia, and even stronger growth in many emerging markets, including Brazil, Turkey, Russia, Central and Eastern Europe, and Vietnam. iPhone ASP increased to $695 in the December quarter from $619 in the September quarter, driven by the very strong product mix and the amazing success of iPhone 7 Plus. Despite stronger demand than last year, we added only 1.2 million units of iPhone channel inventory across the quarter, significantly less than the increase of 3.3 million units a year ago. And we exited the quarter near the low end of our 5 to 7-week target channel inventory range. Customer interest and satisfaction with iPhone are exceptional, not only with consumers, but also with business users. In the U.S., for instance, the latest data from 451 Research on consumers indicates a 97% customer satisfaction rating among all iPhone owners and a 99% satisfaction rating for owners of iPhone 7 Plus. Among corporate smartphone buyers, the iPhone customer satisfaction rating was 94%. And of those planning to purchase smartphones in the March quarter, 78% plan to purchase an iPhone. Turning to Services, we generated an all-time record $7.2 billion in revenue, an increase of 18% year over year. Our run rate growth was actually higher when taking into account two discrete items. On one hand, the 14th week added to Services revenue this December quarter. On the other hand, that benefit was more than offset by the comparison to the one-off $548 million patent infringement payment included in Services revenue a year ago. The App Store continued its impressive run, breaking all previous revenue records. Year-over-year App Store revenue growth was 43% through the first 13 weeks of the quarter. It's great to see that both average revenue per paying account and the number of paying accounts grew strongly during the quarter. And according to App Annie's latest report, App Store revenue continues to outpace the industry overall, with more than double the revenue of Google Play in calendar 2016. Next I would like to talk about the Mac. We sold 5.4 million Macs and generated our highest-ever quarterly Mac revenue. We were very happy to report double-digit unit growth in several countries, including Japan, Mainland China, India, the Netherlands, and Sweden, as well as in the U.S. education market. We ended the quarter at the low end of our 4 to 5-week target range for Mac channel inventory. Turning to iPad, we sold 13.1 million units, which was ahead of our expectations. And we posted double-digit growth in both Mainland China and India, as we've expanded distribution channels in those countries and we continue to attract a very high percentage of first-time tablet buyers. We also reduced channel inventory by about 700,000 units as opposed to an increase of 900,000 units last year, and we exited the quarter near the low end of our five to seven-week target range. iPad is incredibly successful in the segments of the tablet market where we compete, both in terms of market share and customer metrics. Recent data from NPD indicates that iPad had 85% share of the U.S. market for tablets priced above $200. And in November, 451 Research measured a 94% consumer satisfaction rate for iPad Mini, a 97% rate for iPad Air, and 96% for iPad Pro. Among U.S. consumers planning to purchase a tablet within the next six months, purchase intention for iPad is more than four times higher than any other brand measured, with iPad Pro once again the top choice for planned purchases. Corporate buyers reported a 96% satisfaction rate and a purchase intent of 66% for the March quarter. In fact, businesses of all sizes are choosing iPad and iPhone to have them reimagine their everyday activities. We're seeing strong momentum in sectors such as retail, where iOS solutions are being deployed for everything from product development to logistics to mobile point-of-sale. Companies like Toys "R" Us, Coach, and Kate Spade are using iOS and our mobility partner solutions to dramatically transform their customer and employee experiences. Our retail stores experienced strong double-digit growth in visitors and revenue in the December quarter. And we continued to expand our global presence, with plans to open our first store in Singapore and our second store in Dubai soon. We are continually updating our stores and adding new and exciting outreach programs to educate kids on our products, entertain the community with fresh live music, teach future Swift developers to code, and empower entrepreneurs to start, grow, and evolve their businesses. Let me now turn to our cash position. We ended the quarter with $246.1 billion in cash plus marketable securities, a sequential increase of $8.5 billion. $230.2 billion of this cash or 94% of the total was outside the United States. We also had $77.1 billion in term debt and $10.5 billion in commercial paper outstanding at quarter end. We returned almost $15 billion to investors during a very busy December quarter for our capital return activities. We paid $3.1 billion in dividends and equivalents. We spent $5 billion on repurchases of 44.3 million Apple shares through open market transactions. And we launched a new $6 billion ASR, resulting in an initial delivery and retirement of 44.8 million shares. We also completed our eighth accelerated share repurchase program, retiring an additional 4.4 million shares. This led to a net diluted share count reduction of 65.3 million shares during the quarter. We've now completed $201 billion of our current $250 billion capital return program, including $144 billion in share repurchases. And we plan to provide investors with our annual update on the capital return program in the spring. Our effective tax rate for the quarter was 26%, as expected. And as we move ahead into the March quarter, I'd like to review our outlook, which includes the types of forward-looking information that Nancy referred to at the beginning of the call. We expect revenue to be between $51.5 billion and $53.5 billion. This guidance range includes a $1.2 billion year-over-year headwind from foreign exchange. We expect gross margin to be between 38% and 39%. This guidance range includes an 80 basis points sequential headwind from foreign exchange. We expect OpEx to be between $6.5 billion and $6.6 billion. We expect OI&E to be about $400 million, and we expect the tax rate to be about 26%. Also today, our Board of Directors has declared a cash dividend up $0.57 per share of common stock, payable on February 16, 2017 to shareholders of record as of February 13, 2017. With that, I'd like to open the call to questions.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
And we ask that you limit yourself to one one-part question and one follow-up. Operator, may we have the first question, please?
Operator:
Your first question will come from Katy Huberty with Morgan Stanley.
Kathryn Lynn Huberty - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC:
Yes, thank you. First, Luca, what are the factors that caused you to widen the gross margin guidance for the March quarter? And what are the one or two factors that put you at the low end versus the tailwinds that might put you at the high end of that range? And then I have a follow-up, thank you.
Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.:
Sure, Katy. If you look back at our history, 100 basis points range for gross margin is not unusual. Clearly during a period when foreign exchange is very volatile, we think it's more prudent to broaden the range a bit. I've mentioned that we expect – assuming that rates don't move too much, we expect foreign exchange to be a major negative as we move from the December to the March quarter. You know that the dollar has appreciated significantly toward the end of the December quarter, and so we've got 80 basis points of sequential headwind from foreign exchange. We also have the sequential loss of leverage, which is typical of our seasonality, but we expect to offset these two impacts with cost efficiencies and also with our mix of products and services. So obviously if the dollar is a little less strong than it is today, we could do a bit better on gross margins. Obviously, we continue to work very hard on our cost efficiency, so we'll see where we land.
Kathryn Lynn Huberty - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC:
Thank you. And, Tim, there's a reasonable probability that you may get access to the $200 billion-plus of cash that's been locked overseas. So I think it would be helpful to just get an update on your views around potentially larger M&A and some of the areas of interest that you've noted in the past like owning more original content to penetrate more of the TV opportunity that the company has long talked about addressing. Thank you.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Katy, I am optimistic given what I'm hearing that there would likely be some sort of tax reform this year, and it does seem like there are people in both parties that would favor repatriation as a part of that. So I think that's very good for the country and good for Apple. What we would do with it, let's wait and see exactly what it is. But as I said before, we are always looking at acquisitions. We acquired 15 to 20 companies per year for the last four years. And we look for companies of all sizes, and there's not a size that we would not do based on just the size of it. It's more about the strategic value of it. In terms of original content, we have put our toe in the water with doing some original content for Apple Music, and that will be rolling out through the year. We are learning from that, and we'll go from there. The way that we participate in the changes that are going on in the media industry that I fully expect to accelerate from the cable bundle beginning to break down is, one, we started the new Apple TV a year ago, and we're pleased with how that platform has come along. We have more things planned for it but it's come a long way in a year, and it gives us a clear platform to build off of. Two, embedded in the 150 million paid subscriptions that I mentioned in my opening comments, there are a number of third-party services that are a part of that, where we participate economically in some of that by offering our platform in selling and distributing. And then thirdly, we are obviously, with our toe in the water, we're learning a lot about the original content business and thinking about ways that we could play at that. Thanks for the question.
Kathryn Lynn Huberty - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC:
Thank you.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thanks, Katy. Could we have the next question, please?
Operator:
We'll go to Amit Daryanani with RBC Capital Markets.
Amit Daryanani - RBC Capital Markets LLC:
Thanks a lot. Good afternoon guys. I guess the first question, I really appreciate the information you guys are providing around your Services business, which is up 18% year over year. Can you just talk about? How much of that do you think is growth in your installed base versus increased monetization on a per iOS to iOS basis? And so we are to think about those in two separate tranches?
Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.:
I think you're absolutely right, Amit. We look at it that those are the two key elements for us. And what is particularly interesting to us is to see that the number of people that are transacting on our stores is increasing strong double-digits, and we're also seeing that the ARPU per paying customer is increasing double digits, right. So it's a combination of the two. Obviously, the quality and the quantity of content that we make available in our services improves all the time. And we also see that as people getting to the platform and start transacting on the platform, and we keep track of their behavior over time, we actually see that they tend to spend more and more over time. And that's why we are excited about the future of the Services business. And that's why, as Tim said, we have a goal that – it's already become a very large business. It's going to be a Fortune 100 company this year, but we have a goal to double it over the next four years.
Amit Daryanani - RBC Capital Markets LLC:
Perfect. And if I could just switch gears on a follow-up, there has been a fair amount of discussions around your market share in China and what's happening over there. Your numbers actually look fairly impressive in Greater China, China specifically. So could you just talk about what are the demand trends you're seeing there on the ground, and how do you see that transpire through the year?
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Yeah, I'll take this one. If you look at how we did in the quarter, as I think Luca shared, our Greater China revenue was down 12%, and about 4 points of that was currency related, so it's an 8 point decline in constant currency. And then within Greater China, if you look at the PRC, our revenue was flat year over year, and that was against the all-time record quarter. And if you look at that on a constant currency basis, it was actually up 6%. So it's a significantly better performance on every way you look at it versus what we had experienced the prior three quarters. Underneath that, what we've seen is that iPhone 7 was the best-selling smartphone in China during the quarter, according to Kantar. Singles Day, which is a huge day in China, as you know, we were the most popular U.S. brand on Alibaba. We set a new record for Services in China, as the company did. And Mac revenue was up double digit year over year. iPad units were also up double digit in Mainland China, which was obviously different than the trend that we saw in the balance of the world. We also saw 50% of our iPhone sales in China were to switchers and first-time buyers, which is a very high number that we're pleased with. And obviously, our total installed base continues to grow there in the strong double digits. That said, the challenges that are there are, one, the currency has devalued 6% year over year. And two, Hong Kong remains a very, very difficult market. And so I look at it in – I'm encouraged with the significant improvement, but we're not without challenges there. And I wouldn't want to imply that, although I do like many, many things that I've seen and how broad-based the pluses were across our product line.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Amit. Could we have the next question, please?
Operator:
From Cross Research, Shannon Cross.
Shannon S. Cross - Cross Research LLC:
Thank you very much for taking my question. Can you talk a bit more about the Services business? And what I'm trying to figure out is I think the number was you're going to be doubling within the next four years, at least that's your expectation. So what gets you there? I don't know, maybe if you talk about geographies and how penetrated you are in certain geographies. And then, as you grow your Services business, is there anything we should keep in mind from a margin perspective? Would these be lower margin services or similar, just so we can think about the trajectory and the contribution to the bottom line.
Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.:
Yeah, Shannon, I'll take it. Obviously, within the Services business, we have a number of categories. The App Store is the one that is driving significant growth right now. I said in my opening comments that we grew 43% 13 weeks over 13 weeks, a little even more for the quarter, right. And what we like about the App Store is that it's truly a global platform. So we are seeing significant growth not only in the developed markets, where you expect to see a lot of transaction volume, but we see great growth in places like China, for example. And we know that there are parts of the world where we can do better. We can grow, for example, our developer community in a number of emerging markets. And so as we look, as I was explaining earlier, as we look at the number of people that transact growing double digits, we see the amount spent per paid account growing so well, we think that the App Store is going to be a significant driver of growth. On the music front, we are the market leader in digital music. Obviously now, by having the combination of the download business with the streaming service, which we didn't have until recently, we've been able to bring our music business back to growth. We've grown over the last three quarters, and we feel very good about that. Tim has talked about original content. We've had very good success with exclusives. So we know that it's another business that we can grow. Our iCloud storage business is growing very quickly, and so that is a business that also at a geographic level we can continue to grow significantly. Our AppleCare business is growing very well. A lot of it comes from the fact that our install base of devices around the world continues to grow very well, strong double digits. And as we've explained in the past, the vast majority of the services that we provide is not driven by what we sell during the last 90 days. It's much more driven by the install base, and that gives us a tailwind. We're also opening up several new markets because we are accepting new forms of payment. And therefore, it's easier particularly for international customers to take advantage of our services. You were asking about the margin profile. We said many times, in aggregate our Services business tends to have margins that are above company average. They are accretive, so they help us quite a bit from a margin standpoint. Within the Services business, we have very different margin profiles, also because, as you know, we account for some of these services in different ways. In some cases, we transact on a buy/sell basis. In other cases, we perform as agents, for example, to our developers, and that drives different margin percentages.
Shannon S. Cross - Cross Research LLC:
Thank you. And then my follow-up is just in terms of the elasticity of demand and some of the moves from a currency perspective. I think in the past there was some concern in some of the emerging markets the you were basically not able to – you weren't you're getting the volumes because you had to raise ASPs given the currency. But you talked about a lot of the emerging markets actually doing pretty well this quarter. So I'm just curious. You raised the price on the iPhone 7 Plus and that. What are you seeing, and what are your customers saying in terms of willingness to pay up?
Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.:
Shannon, I was looking back. Since June of 2014, so we're talking about 2.5 years ago, the dollar has strengthened 25% against the basket of currencies where we do business. And so obviously, it is a difficult situation for us. I've mentioned that foreign exchange is a significant headwind for us, both at the revenue level and at the gross margin level. In emerging markets, it's incredible. The level of interest for our products continues to be phenomenal. The brand continues to be very aspirational. There are more and more people that can afford our products around the world. The middle class is growing in places like China, India, Brazil, but certainly the strong dollar doesn't help us. And therefore, when we make pricing decisions, we need to be very careful. We always want to find the optimal balance between units, revenue, and margin, and it becomes more difficult as the dollar appreciates.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Shannon. Could we have the next question, please?
Operator:
Moving on, we'll hear from Brian White with Drexel.
Brian J. White - Drexel Hamilton LLC:
Luca, I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about gross margins. Sales obviously beat the high end of your revenue range. It looks like gross margin was dead down the middle. Can you talk about the puts and takes in gross margins in the quarter, please?
Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.:
Sure. We were actually at the high end of the range for gross margins. We had guided 38% to 38.5%, and we came in at 38.5% exactly. And really, the slight improvement over the midpoint of the guidance range was due to the fact that our revenue was ahead of our expectations, and so we got a bit more leverage out of the increased revenue levels. We felt very good about the gross margins for the quarter. Again, keep in mind the strong dollar doesn't help us on that front.
Brian J. White - Drexel Hamilton LLC:
Okay. And, Tim, I didn't hear much mentioned about India. How did India perform with the iPhone? And how should we think about it for 2017, especially with the 4G network going up?
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
That's a really good question. Despite the demonetization move in India that created lots of economic pressure there last quarter, despite that, we had all-time record revenue results, and so we were very happy about that. The demonetization impact has not worked its way through yet. It's still definitely having some overhang. But I think in the longer term, it's a great move, and I feel really good about how we're doing there. We are in discussions on a number of things, including retail stores, and fully intend to invest significantly in the country and believe it's a great place to be.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Brian. Could we have the next question, please?
Operator:
From Goldman Sachs, we'll hear from Simona Jankowski.
Simona K. Jankowski - Goldman Sachs & Co.:
Hi, thank you. I wanted to dig in a little bit more into the iPhone upside in the quarter with record revenues in every region except for Greater China. I think you touched on the percent of switchers in China. But can you give a little more color on the split of upgrades and switchers in some of the other regions and overall as well?
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Simona, it's Tim. We did have an exceptional quarter with iPhone, and that was with the backdrop of not predicting the demand very well on the iPhone 7 Plus and therefore being in constraint on it through the quarter. If you look at the absolute number of upgraders, it was the highest that we've seen in any quarter. And if you look at the switcher number, it's the highest that we've seen in any quarter. If you look at the upgrade rate, it's similar to last year. However, I think the big asterisk – I share all this with you for transparency's sake. I would tell you that the way we look at this is in a quarter where you have a supply constraint, it's difficult to draw too many conclusions from it. But I wanted to share that with you anyway so you have the backdrop.
Simona K. Jankowski - Goldman Sachs & Co.:
Thank you, and then just one follow-up on China specifically. As your comps get easier this year, I was curious if you think you're going to be returning to growth in that region. And then just to give us the context, I know you talked about the 6% constant currency increase in revenue in Mainland China. But curious if you strip out the double-digit increase in iPad and MacBook and potentially the mix shift to the iPhone 7 Plus, I'm curious what underlying iPhone units did in Mainland China.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
That's a big question, and I don't have the answer in front of me. If you look at iPhone 7 Plus, it was the most popular Plus model that we've ever had. It set a unit record, so that I can share. In terms of how are we going to do, we don't provide guidance at the segment level. But sitting here today, for Q2, I wouldn't expect the year-over-year performance to be dramatically different than the year-over-year performance in Q1. The real comp really begins in the following quarter to a more significant degree, and we'll have to see how that plays out as we get closer to it.
Simona K. Jankowski - Goldman Sachs & Co.:
Thank you.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Yes.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Simona. Could we have the next question, please?
Operator:
From Bernstein, Toni Sacconaghi.
Antonio M. Sacconaghi - Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. LLC:
Yes, thank you. I just wanted to better understand the upgrade rate dynamics. So I think iPhone units on a sell-through basis were up about 8%. You had an extra week, which gave you about 8%. I understand there were differences of the timing of the launch. So making all those adjustments, it looks like iPhone units were probably up low single digits. But, Luca, you alluded to the fact that your install base was growing double digits. So that would suggest to me that the upgrade rate, the upgrade percentage is actually declining. And more specifically, I'd just like your broader perspective on how investors should think about upgrade rates. It looked like they peaked in the iPhone 6 cycle, and it looks like they've been extending – going lower. Replacement cycles have been extending over the last couple years. I think some of the U.S. carriers alluded to that as well. So I'm wondering if you could step back and just talk a little bit more broadly about how investors should think about or what the trajectory has been over the last two years and how investors should think going forward. Do you believe there are opportunities for that upgrade rate to improve or replacement cycles to accelerate going forward? And what are some of the considerations we should think about?
Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.:
I think it's a good question, a number of points that I want to make. Starting with the growth in the install base of iPhones, yes, it's growing strong double digits, and that's very good for us for a number of reasons, including the fact that it's a big driver for our Services business. When we look at it geographically, I think we see different developments. For example, we felt very, very good about the unit growth that we had in many markets around the world. You've been quoting an overall total company growth rate. But when we look at a country-specific level, there were a lot of countries, I would say the majority of the countries, where iPhone units grew strong double digits, starting here in the United States, where for example, the fact that annual upgrade programs are becoming more and more popular is proving to be a positive for us. Same happened in a number of countries around the world, starting with Canada and Australia but also many places in Western Europe as well. Japan grew double digits in terms of units. So I think geographically we are seeing very, very good performance. The point that I think I need to make when you think about upgrade rates, clearly, this issue of the strong dollar doesn't help us. Could we sell significantly more and significantly faster from an upgrade cycle standpoint in places outside the United States, where we've been forced to increase prices by up to 20%, 30%, 40% in certain countries? And you think about the impact that this is having on local demand, obviously that doesn't help us. But overall, I would say as Tim said, when we look at the upgrade rate for and we look at it from the standpoint of the new phones, right, the new generation phones, the upgrade rate, the percentage of people that have upgraded to the new phone has been very similar to what we've seen last year. The 6 cycle was certainly a phenomenal cycle. There was pent-up demand for the larger screen phones. And certainly as we look ahead, we have a role to play. The more we're able to innovate with new generations of products, clearly that plays a role in the upgrade rate.
Antonio M. Sacconaghi - Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. LLC:
Okay, thank you. Tim, I have a question for you. Back in April 2012, you said on one of these earnings calls that I've always hated litigation and I continue to hate it, and I highly prefer to settle versus battle. Yet you recently decided to initiate a lawsuit against Qualcomm. I'm wondering if you can comment on the ostensible change or departure from this viewpoint, and what would be a successful end result of this litigation, and whether you can confirm whether there's any potential gross margin risk in the future as a result of this litigation.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
I feel the same way I did in April of 2012. I don't like litigation and view it as a last resort. And so you should take from our filing that we viewed it as we didn't see another way forward. They were insisting on charging royalties for technologies that they had nothing to do with. And so we were in a situation where the more we innovated with unique features like Touch ID or advanced displays or cameras, just to name a few, the more money Qualcomm would collect for no reason and the more expensive it would be therefore for us to innovate. And so it's somewhat like buying a sofa, and you charge somebody a different price depending upon the price of the house that it goes into. Just from our point of view, this doesn't make sense, and we don't believe it will pass muster in the courts. In addition to that, as a part of their increasingly radical steps they were taking to try to hold up that model, they withheld $1 billion in payments that they owed us. And so we felt like we had no choice was the net of it. In terms of where it goes, we'll see. I don't like litigation. And so if there's another way, then that would be great, but at this point I don't see it. I fully expect at this point in time that it will take some time, but in the end I think common sense will prevail and the courts will see it for what it is. And so that's the way I see it. Thanks for your question.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Toni. Could we have the next question, please?
Operator:
We'll go to Steve Milunovich with UBS.
Steven M. Milunovich - UBS Securities LLC:
Thank you. First, I wanted to ask about the iPad. It looked like it was about to turn possibly even positive. You said it was above your plan, but I think it was pretty well below the Street's expectations. And the ASP deteriorated pretty significantly. I don't know if it's a mix shift. But maybe you can talk about the iPad and what you see going forward.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
The iPad, Steve, we had a 1.6 million-unit swing on channel inventory between the years. In the year-ago quarter we increased by 900,000. In this quarter we decreased by 700,000. On top of that and from an ASP point of view, in the year-ago quarter we launched the iPad Pro 13 Edge. That would be the iPad with obviously the highest price on it. We would have done the channel fill plus the launch of the product, and so that would have bolstered the ASPs in that particular quarter. In addition to all of that, we did under-call the number of iPads that would be in demand for the quarter, and that compounded a shortage issue that we had with one of our suppliers. And so all in all, there were quite a few things going on there. If I zoom out of the 90-day clock and look at it, we've got some exciting things coming on iPad. I still feel very optimistic about where we can take the product. When we look at the number of people buying iPads for the first time, which is a good thing to look at from a point of view of whether things are reaching a penetration point or not, the numbers indicate that it's not close to that kind of thing. The customer sat numbers are through the roof. Literally, the customer sat for the iPad Pro is 99%. It's stunning. And so I see a lot of good things and hope for better results, but we are still currently in this shortage issue now, and I'm not projecting to get out of that totally during the quarter. And so it will damper this quarter somewhat. But again, beyond the 90-day clock, I'm very bullish on iPad.
Steven M. Milunovich - UBS Securities LLC:
Okay, that's great, thank you. And then, Tim, investors tend to think of the iPhone as mature and technology improvements as incremental, yet I believe you said there's plenty of runway left in terms of appealing new features. Do you think there are future enhancements coming that will be viewed as material by users, and particularly changes beyond form factor, beyond the way the phone looks? Are there functional things coming over time that you think could surprise people?
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
I think the smartphone is still in the early innings of the game. I think there's lots more to do. I think it's become – every year it becomes more important to people's lives and there are more things people are doing with it. I talked a little bit about home automation, but I could have talked about health. I could have talked more about CarPlay. The use of it in the enterprise is growing significantly. And so when I look at all of these things, usage going up, app developers still innovating, we've got some exciting things in the pipeline, I feel really, really good about it. So this is one that we think different about a bunch of things, but maybe this is just one more.
Steven M. Milunovich - UBS Securities LLC:
Thank you.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Yes.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Steve. A replay of today's call will be available for two weeks as a podcast on the iTunes Store, with a webcast on apple.com/investor, and via telephone. The numbers for the telephone replay are 888-203-1112 or 719-457-0820. Please enter confirmation code 3378275. And these replays will be available by approximately 5:00 PM Pacific Time today. Members of the press with additional questions can contact Kristin Huguet at 408-974-2414. And financial analysts can contact Joan Hoover or me with additional questions. Joan is at 408-974-4570, and I'm at 408-974-5420. Thanks again for joining us.
Operator:
Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude today's presentation. We do thank everyone for your participation.
Executives:
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc. Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc. Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.
Analysts:
Eugene Charles Munster - Piper Jaffray & Co. Kathryn Lynn Huberty - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC Shannon S. Cross - Cross Research LLC Antonio M. Sacconaghi - Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. LLC Simona K. Jankowski - Goldman Sachs & Co. Steven M. Milunovich - UBS Securities LLC Wamsi Mohan - Bank of America Merrill Lynch James D. Suva - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc. (Broker) Rod B. Hall - JPMorgan Securities LLC
Operator:
Good day everyone and welcome to this Apple, Incorporated Fourth Quarter Fiscal Year 2016 Earnings Release Conference Call. Today's call is being recorded. At this time, for opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn the call over to Nancy Paxton, Senior Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, ma'am.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you. Good afternoon and thanks to everyone for joining us. Speaking first today is Apple CEO Tim Cook, and he will be followed by CFO Luca Maestri. And after that, we'll open the call to questions from analysts. Please note that some of the information you'll hear during our discussion today will consist of forward-looking statements, including without limitation those regarding revenue, gross margin, operating expenses, other income and expense, taxes, and future business outlook. Actual results or trends could differ materially from our forecast. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in Apple's Form 10-K for 2015, the forms 10-Q for the first three quarters of fiscal 2016, and the Form 8-K filed with the SEC today along with the associated press release. Apple assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements or information which speak as of their respective dates. I'd now like to turn the call over to Tim for introductory remarks.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Thanks, Nancy. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us. We're in the middle of a very busy season for Apple, and on Thursday of this week, we're holding another event here on the Apple campus. All of us are excited and we think our customers are going to love these latest innovations. Our results for the September quarter were very strong. We generated $46.9 billion in revenue in the quarter, toward the high end of our guidance range. Gross margin was 38%, at the very top of our range. We sold 45.5 million iPhones, reflecting continued improvement in year-over-year performance compared to the last two quarters, as we forecasted in January. iPhone sales were up year-over-year in 33 of our top 40 markets. As you know, iPhone customers are the most satisfied and loyal customers in the world, and fiscal 2016 saw more customers switch from Android to iPhone than ever before. This is due to the superior customer experience we deliver with our products, and it's something no other company can match. We had a record-setting quarter for Services, with revenue growth accelerating to 24%, reaching $6.3 billion. App Store revenue continued to skyrocket, while Music revenue grew by 22% thanks to the growing popularity of Apple Music. In fact, J.D. Power recently announced that Apple Music enjoys the highest customer satisfaction rating in the streaming music market. Earlier this month I visited Japan, where Apple Pay went live yesterday. Japanese customers are already in the habit of making contactless payments where they commute, dine and shop, so we expect a strong response and rapid adoption of Apple Pay. Around the world, we're seeing very strong growth in transaction volume through Apple Pay, which also launched in Russia and New Zealand this month and is coming to Spain in the next few months. Apple Pay transactions were up nearly 500% year-on-year for the September quarter. In fact, we completed more transactions in the month of September than we did across all of fiscal 2015. And with Apple Pay support now built into Safari, hundreds of thousands of websites are bringing Apple Pay to their customers. Our major partners tell us that Apple Pay shows the highest conversion rate of any digital wallet. We remain very confident about the future of our Services business given the unmatched level of engagement, satisfaction and loyalty of our growing installed base. We have almost doubled the size of our Services revenue in the last four years, and as we've said before, we expect it to be the size of a Fortune 100 company in fiscal 2017. As for our newest products, we're thrilled with the customer response to iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus. These are the best iPhones we've ever made, with breakthrough camera systems, immersive stereo speakers, and the best iPhone performance in battery life ever, thanks to the custom-designed Apple A10 Fusion chip. They feature the brightest, most colorful iPhone displays to date and come in gorgeous new finishes. Demand continues to outstrip supply, but we're working very hard to get them into customers' hands as quickly as possible. We're also off to a great start with Apple Watch Series 2, the next generation of the world's most popular smartwatch, packed with new features including built-in GPS, water resistance, a dramatically brighter display and a powerful dual-core processor. Individuals and businesses alike are recognizing the potential of Apple Watch to help people stay healthy, motivated and connected. One recent example is Aetna, which has announced a new initiative to revolutionize its members' health experience by subsidizing Apple Watch for individual customers and select large employers. In addition, Aetna is also providing Apple Watch to nearly 50,000 of its own employees to encourage them to live a healthier day. We've just rolled out new versions of iOS, macOS and watchOS and customers are loving the many great new features including Siri on the Mac, enhanced health and fitness capabilities for Apple Watch and a delightful new way to experience your photos on iOS with a feature we call memories. We've made massive advances in messages, making them more expressive and fun than ever with powerful animations, invisible ink and handwritten notes. We're seeing great offerings from developers in the all new App Store for Messages, and there has been a marked increase in our monthly active users. One of the great new features of iOS 10 is the Home app, which is making home automation easy to set up and intuitive to use. Customers can easily set up and securely control all their HomeKit accessories, from lights and cameras to the garage doors and air conditioners, all from their favorite iOS devices. We expect over 100 HomeKit-compatible products to be on the market by the end of this year, all reviewed and approved by Apple to help ensure customer security when using them. Our Apple stores are wonderful places to discover and learn about these great products for the connected home. With our latest operating systems, machine learning is making our products and services smarter, more intuitive and even more personal. We've been using these technologies for years to create better user experiences, and we've also been investing heavily both through R&D and acquisitions. Today, machine learning drives improvements in countless features across our products. It enables the proactive features in iOS 10, which offers suggestions on which app you might want to use or which context you might want to include in an email. Our camera and photo software uses advanced face recognition to help you take better pictures and object and scene recognition to make them easier to sort and find. Machine learning makes the fitness features of Apple Watch more accurate and even helps extend battery life across our products. Machine learning continually helps Siri get even smarter in areas such as understanding natural language. We've extended Siri to work in many new ways by opening it to developers and most recently by making Siri available to Mac users in Mac OS Sierra. We're already seeing great momentum in just the first few weeks from developers leveraging the Siri and speech APIs and we're very happy with the engagement it's driving with Siri. Looking ahead, we're seeing some very exciting developments in India. Reliance Jio is rolling out a a first of its kind all-IP network in India with 4G coverage in 18,000 cities and 200,000 villages across the country. They're offering a free year of service to purchasers of new iPhones and we're partnering with them to ensure great iPhone performance on their network. Our iPhone sales in India were up over 50% in fiscal 2016 compared to the prior year, and we believe we're just beginning to scratch the surface of this large and growing market opportunity. We're also very happy with the progress of our enterprise market initiatives, which continue to expand. Just last month, we announced a partnership with Deloitte to help companies quickly and easily transform the way they work by maximizing the power, ease of use, and security of the iOS platform. Deloitte is creating a unique Apple practice with over 5,000 strategic advisors focused on helping businesses transform work in functions across the enterprise. We're also collaborating on the development of Enterprise Next, a new Deloitte consulting service designed to help clients across more than 20 industries take full advantage of the iOS ecosystem and quickly develop custom solutions through rapid prototyping. As we close the books on another incredible year, I'd like to thank our talented employees for their hard work and passion for making the best products in the world, our amazing developer community for their relentless creativity and our wonderful customers, business partners and shareholders for their loyalty and support. Now I'll hand it over to Luca to share more details on the September quarter.
Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Tim. Good afternoon, everyone. Revenue for the September quarter was $46.9 billion, towards the high end of our guidance range. Our revenue grew very strongly in many emerging markets, including Russia, Turkey, the Middle East, Thailand and Vietnam, and we continue to see solid growth in Japan and in Latin America. Gross margin was 38%, at the top of our guidance range, thanks to favorable cost performance. Operating margin was 25.1% of revenue and net income was $9 billion. Diluted earnings per share were $1.67 and cash flow from operations was $16.1 billion, which is a new record for the September quarter. For details by product, I will start with iPhone. We sold 45.5 million iPhones in the quarter, thanks to the very successful launch of iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus and continued strong demand for other iPhones. Including 2.7 million iPhones that were in transit at the end of the quarter, we increased iPhone channel inventory by 2.5 million units, and we exited the quarter well below our five to seven week target range of channel inventory. We experienced strong iPhone growth in many markets around the world, including Canada, Latin America, Western Europe, Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, India and South Asia. iPhone sales in Greater China declined during the quarter, but the initial customer response to iPhone 7 and 7 Plus gives us confidence that our December quarter performance in China will be significantly better on a year-over-year basis than our September quarter results, even as we lap the all-time record period from a year ago. Worldwide demand for iPhone 7 and 7 Plus has significantly outpaced supply, particularly on iPhone 7 Plus, and we're working very hard to get the new iPhones into the hands of our customers as quickly as possible. iPhone ASP increased to $619 in the September quarter, which was above our expectations. That's up from $595 in the June quarter when we launched iPhone SE and we had a significant channel inventory reduction. We expect iPhone ASP to increase markedly on a sequential basis to a level similar to our ASP in the December quarter last year. Customer interest and satisfaction with iPhone remains extremely strong. In the U.S. for instance, the latest survey fielded by 451 Research found that among consumers planning to purchase a smartphone within 90 days, 65% plan to purchase iPhone, with the current iPhone owners reporting a 97% customer satisfaction rating. Among corporate smartphone buyers, the latest survey measured a 95% iPhone customer satisfaction rating and found that of those planning to purchase smartphones in the December quarter, 79% planned to purchase iPhone. Turning to Services, we generated an all-time record $6.3 billion in revenue with an increase of 24% over a year ago. The App Store growth rate has now accelerated for five consecutive quarters, reaching 43% in the September quarter. The App Store remains the preferred destination for both customers and developers. According to App Annie, it generated 100% more global revenue than Google Play in the September quarter. In addition to the great performance from apps, we saw strong double-digit revenue growth in several other service categories and Apple Pay transaction volume has grown dramatically, as Tim mentioned. Next I'd like to talk about the Mac. We sold 4.9 million Macs, facing a difficult year-over-year compare, given the launch of new Macs in the spring of 2015. Despite this, our Mac installed base reached a new all-time high at the end of the September quarter and we'll have some exciting news to share with current and future Mac owners very soon. We ended the quarter below our four to five week target range for Mac channel inventory. Turning to iPad, revenue was flat compared to last year. iPad ASP was $459, $26 higher than a year ago, with increase driven by the new iPad Pro line. We sold 9.3 million iPads, and we reduced channel inventory by about 80,000 units, exiting the quarter below our five to seven-week target range. We continue to be highly successful both in terms of market share and customer metrics in the segments of the tablet market where we compete. Recent data from NPD indicates that iPad gained share in the U.S. tablet market in the September quarter and had 82% share of tablets priced above $200. And in August, 451 Research measured a 96% consumer satisfaction rate for iPad mini, 95% rate for iPad Air, and a 93% rate for iPad Pro. Among U.S. consumers planning to purchase a tablet within the next six months, 73% plan to purchase an iPad, more than eight times the purchase intention rate of the next highest brand measured, with iPad Pro once again the top choice for planned purchases. Corporate buyers reported a 94% satisfaction rate for iPad and a purchase intent of 68% for the December quarter. In the enterprise market, we are seeing some great examples of iPad and Mac deployment. Our Mobility Partner Program continues to grow stronger, with over 120 partners around the world offering tailored solutions to businesses of all sizes. Revel Systems, a leading iPad point-of-sale solution partner, recently announced a global agreement with Shell retail to implement Revel's iPad based POS system services at 34,000 Shell locations worldwide, including support for Apple Pay in countries where Apple Pay is available. IBM has just released new data on the great results of its Mac rollout. With more employees choosing Mac than ever before, there are now more than 90,000 Macs across the organization in addition to 48,000 iPads and 81,000 iPhones. IBM reports that PCs have three times the cost to manage, drive twice the number of support calls and are 5 times more likely to require a follow-up appointment to resolve an issue than Macs. Thanks to much lower support cost and significantly higher residual value, the company is saving as much as $535 per computer when comparing the total cost of Mac ownership to a PC over a full-year lifecycle. Let me now turn to our cash position. We ended the quarter with $237.6 billion in cash plus marketable securities, a sequential increase of $6.1 billion. $216 billion of this cash or 91% of the total was outside the United States. We issued $7 billion of debt in July, leaving us with $79 billion in term debt at the end of the quarter. We returned over $9 billion to investors during the September quarter as follows. We paid $3.1 billion in dividends and equivalents. We spent $3 billion on repurchases of 28.6 million Apple shares through open market transactions, and we launched a new $3 billion ASR, resulting in initial delivery and retirement of 22.5 million shares. We also completed our seventh accelerated share repurchase program, with adding an additional 12.3 million shares. So total buyback activity during the quarter reduced our share count by 1.5%. We have now completed $186 billion of our current $250 billion capital return program, including $133 billion in share repurchases. During the September quarter, we also completed four acquisitions and incurred $3.6 billion in capital expenditures. Our total CapEx for the year was $12.8 billion. Our effective tax rate for the quarter was 26%, slightly higher than the 25.5% we guided to because of a differential graphic mix of earnings relative to our regional expectations. Our tax rate for the full fiscal year was 25.6% As we move ahead into the December quarter, I would like to review our outlook, which includes the types of forward-looking information that Nancy referred to at the beginning of the call. We expect revenue to be between $76 billion and $78 billion. This represents a return to growth over the all-time revenue record set in the December quarter a year ago. We expect gross margin to be between 38% and 38.5%. We expect OpEx to be between $6.9 billion and $7 billion. We expect OI&E to be about $400 million, and we expect the tax rate to be about 26%. Also today, our Board of Directors has declared a cash dividend of $0.57 per share of common stock, payable on November 10, 2016, to shareholders of record as of November 7, 2016. With that, I would like to open the call to questions.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
And we ask that you limit yourself to one one-part question and one follow up. May we have the first question, please?
Operator:
First we'll hear from Gene Munster with Piper Jaffray.
Eugene Charles Munster - Piper Jaffray & Co.:
Hey, good afternoon and congratulations. And Tim, now that we're a month in the iPhone 7, are you seeing anything measurable in terms of the growing trend of annual upgrades? And second is, historically in terms of new product categories, you guys have always looked for unique advantage before getting into a segment. And I'm curious about the car. There are a lot of rumors out there, and would like your perspective on how you think about an advantage that Apple could add in the auto space?
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
In terms of iPhone 7, Gene, the carriers that had upgrade plans, the information that we have from them is that demand is very robust. But from a worldwide point of view, the truth is that demand is outstripping supply in the vast majority of places, particularly on the iPhone 7 Plus. And so it's sort of we are in a situation at the moment, it's difficult in the early weeks to be able to differentiate. But on an anecdotal basis, it's clear the upgrade programs are a win. I can't speak about rumors, but as you know, we look for ways that we can improve the experience and the customers' experience on different sets of products. And we are always looking at new things, and the car space in general is an area that it's clear that there is a lot of technologies that will either become available or will be able to revolutionize the car experience. And so it's interesting from that point of view, but nothing to, certainly nothing to announce today.
Eugene Charles Munster - Piper Jaffray & Co.:
Just one quick follow up in terms of the supply. Do you think we'll be at equilibrium by the end of the quarter for iPhone supplies?
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
It's hard to say. I believe that on iPhone 7 we will. On iPhone 7 Plus, I'm not sure. I wouldn't say yes at this point, because the underlying demand looks extremely strong on both products but particularly on the iPhone 7 Plus versus our forecast going into the product launch.
Eugene Charles Munster - Piper Jaffray & Co.:
Thank you.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thanks, Gene. Can we have the next question, please?
Operator:
Katy Huberty with Morgan Stanley.
Kathryn Lynn Huberty - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC:
Thanks. Good afternoon. Luca, can you help us understand what's embedded in revenue guidance for the extra week as well as any rebuilding of channel inventory given all the major products are running below target? Just trying to get at whether you see revenue and in particular iPhone growth year on year on more of a sellout basis when you adjust for those two factors? And then I have a follow up.
Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.:
Yes Katy, sure. Let me say a few things on the 14th week and revenue up for the December quarter. Keep in mind that December quarter a year ago for us was an all-time quarterly revenue record. We think we can grow this year. As Tim said, the interest from customers on iPhone 7 and 7 Plus is very strong. The strength of our Services business, you've seen we've grown 24% in September. We think we can continue to grow very well into the December quarter. You mentioned the 14th week, and the few extra days do help us this quarter. But I think it's important to keep in mind that there are other factors that go and offset these extra few days. As you know, the launch timing of the new iPhone is different this year. We had the first 90 days of sales this year hit Q4. There were only two days last year, so the cadence has moved more towards the Q4 this year versus Q1 last year. As you know, we increased iPhone channel inventory by 3.3 million units in the first quarter of 2016. As Tim said, we are very supply constrained on iPhone 7 Plus this year. We're simply more supply constrained this year than we were a year ago. And then keep in mind that there were a couple of things that affect the compare as well, which is the fact that a year ago, we had an award for a patent infringement of $548 million, which is obviously a one-off item that is not going to repeat this year. And also the foreign exchange environment remains difficult, and we expect FX to be about $650 million headwind on a year-over-year basis into the December quarter. So I hope that gives you a bit of a sense that when you take into account all these factors, we believe that this is a good guidance for the December quarter.
Kathryn Lynn Huberty - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC:
That's great color. Thank you for that. A follow up for Tim. What should we read into the fact that R&D has more than doubled over the past three years while sales growth was sort of a fifth of that? Are R&D investments just less efficient than they were in the company's history, or should we think about that as incremental spend for products that haven't yet come to market?
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
There's clearly some amount of R&D that are on products that today are in the development phase that have not reached the market, and so that's a part of it. And we feel really great about the things that we've got. We've also put a lot of emphasis on our Services business as well and on making the ecosystem even better. And so we're very much, we're confidently investing in the future, and that's the reason you see the R&D spend increasing.
Kathryn Lynn Huberty - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC:
Thank you.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Katy. Could we have the next question, please?
Operator:
From Cross Research, Shannon Cross.
Shannon S. Cross - Cross Research LLC:
Thank you very much. A couple of questions. The first, Tim, can you talk a bit more about China, just how you're thinking about it, where you're seeing pressure? I know you mentioned that you expect to see a significant rebound during the first quarter, but what are your customers telling you about the demand in China?
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Yeah, it's a good question, Shannon. So to sort of back up from our results for the quarter, the 90-day clock, and look at the full year of 2016, we were down 17% compared to the fiscal year 2015 which was up 84% from the previous year. So if you look at 2014 to 2016, the revenue grew 52% and the CAGR was 23%, which is really a pretty good result. Also as you probably know, the fiscal year 2016 performance was hurt by the devaluation of the currency which affected it about 3%, so the underlying business performance was 14% down. And so, why was it down? There's lots of reasons, but the largest one in our view is that when you look at what happened in 2015 in China, we had a surge of upgraders that came into the market for the iPhone 6 or iPhone 6 Plus, and the upgrade rate increased relatively more in Greater China than elsewhere around the world. And so when that upgrade rate in fiscal year 2016 returned to a more normal upgrade rate, which would be akin to what we saw with the iPhone 5S as a point, it had further to fall. And so that's the main reason in our view that you see a difference. Now that spun or created another issue for us, because we didn't forecast that accurately. So in Q1 of last year, we put in too much channel inventory and had been resetting the channel inventory over the few quarters that came beyond it or came after it. And so those two issues, which really the main one is really the first one and the second one was a symptom of it, are in our views the main issue. Now looking forward, the response to the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus has been very positive. It's very hard to gauge demand, as you know, when you're selling everything you're making. And so we'll find out more through the quarter, but we're confident enough to give you guys guidance that we're returning to growth this quarter, which obviously feels very good for us. And from a longer-term point of view, out of the 90-day clocks and so forth, we are very bullish on China. We continue to see a middle class that is booming there. There might be some sort of a new normal in the economy, but a new normal there is still a good growth rate. And so with the number of middle class – people growing into the middle class and the LTE adoption rate being still fairly low, around 45%, 50% or so, then I think we continue to have a really good opportunity there, and so we continue to focus significantly in China.
Shannon S. Cross - Cross Research LLC:
Great. Thank you.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Yes.
Shannon S. Cross - Cross Research LLC:
And then can you talk a bit about acquisitions? And I don't mean like the smaller ones that you've done sort of at a normal cadence, but there was clearly a fairly large one announced at least this week in the content world. And especially if you find a way to have repatriation of some of the cash at a low tax rate possibly with the next administration. So I just, if you can give sort of an overall view of how you think about acquisitions that might be a little bit larger than normal.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
We are open to acquisitions of any size that are of strategic value where we can deliver better products to our customers and innovate more. And so we look at a whole variety of companies, and based on that, we choose whether to move forward or not. But we're definitely open and we definitely look.
Shannon S. Cross - Cross Research LLC:
Thank you.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Yes.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Shannon. Could we have the next question, please?
Operator:
We'll go to Toni Sacconaghi with Bernstein.
Antonio M. Sacconaghi - Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. LLC:
Yes. Thank you. I have a question and a follow-up, please. I guess a cynic could say Apple is benefiting from an extra week this quarter and is benefiting from Samsung being in complete disarray. And yet from your guidance, it's unclear that iPhone unit growth will be up or certainly not up more than low single-digits implied from your guidance. And I appreciate some of the issues around channel inventory build and the timing of the launch, but if I just stand back from that and say you have terrific new products, your major competitor's laying down, you have an enormous, you have a significant contribution from an extra week, arguably 7% or 8%, and yet the iPhone growth is sort of flattish, what does that really say about how investors should think about iPhone on a sustained basis growing forward? And is it reasonable to think that this is an ongoing growing business for the company?
Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.:
Toni, let me take this one. I think you mentioned a number of the things that are affecting us in the December quarter, and I went through them with Katy just a few minutes ago. You're right, we've got an extra few days. You know very well the launch timing is different. You know that we increased iPhone channel inventory by 3.3 million units a year ago. I mentioned two issues that affect us, the one-timer from a year ago that you obviously need to exclude from the compare and the FX that is the reality of our business right now. But maybe the most important element of this is the fact that we are supply constrained on 7 and 7 Plus. And so when you talk about other competitors, it's not particularly relevant to us right now because we are selling everything that we can produce. And so when we look at all these things in its totality, we think that for the total company of course, we believe that revenue's going to grow. You know that we don't get into specific product from a unit standpoint giving guidance, and so we feel very confident about the trajectory for the company and for iPhone going forward.
Antonio M. Sacconaghi - Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. LLC:
Okay. Tim, if I could ask you one, please. You've talked in the past about television being an area of intense interest. I was wondering if you could reaffirm that statement. Is that still the case? And then additionally, given what's happening with acquisitions, how broadly you think about the role of content. Apple has started creating on a very limited scale some of its own content and whether you think content creation and ownership is important to Apple, or whether Apple ultimately sees its place in the value chain as being more around the ecosystem and distribution.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
I would confirm that television has intense interest with me and many other people here. In terms of owning content and creating content, we have started with focusing on some original content, as you point out. We've got a few things going there that we've talked about. And I think it's a great opportunity for us both from a creation point of view and an ownership point of view. and so it's is an area that we're focused on.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Toni. Could we have the next question, please?
Operator:
From Goldman Sachs, Simona Jankowski.
Simona K. Jankowski - Goldman Sachs & Co.:
Thank you. I have a question for Luca and then one for Tim as well. Luca, I wanted to dig into the Services business a bit more. As you pointed out, it accelerated again to 24%. How does that compare to the pace of growth of the installed base, just to help us decouple how much of it is consumption driven on a per user basis versus the base as a whole?
Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.:
Simona, the installed base number is something that we talk about periodically. The last time we talked about it, it was in the January call. It is growing. Our installed base is growing very well, which is very important for us. It's growing on all major products and it's growing of course in total. When you look at our Services revenue, the growth of the Services revenue has been accelerating during the course of the year during a period when, as you know, our revenue came down slightly. So what that means in practice is that what we are seeing with our customers that consume our services is that the people that are actually taking advantage of our services over time tend spend more and more on our services. We've got customers that are very engaged with our products. They're very loyal, and so you see this upward trajectory of our Services business. It's not only with the App Store but there's several categories that are growing very well for us. Tim mentioned Apple Music, but we got other parts of the business that continue to do well, even as I said during a period of time when our sales have come down a bit.
Simona K. Jankowski - Goldman Sachs & Co.:
Thank you. And then Tim, we've seen an increasing focus on artificial intelligence, both in smartphones like the new Pixel from Google but also in some of the home assistance, like the Amazon Echo. And you guys have obviously had Siri for a while as well. But I just am curious how you think about balancing AI with your focus on privacy. And then also how important it is to have a dedicated home assistant versus just having the phone as the home assistant?
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
I think to answer your second question first, I think that most people would like an assistant with them all the time. And we live in a mobile society. People are constantly moving from home to work and to other things that they may be doing. And so the advantage of having a assistant on your phone is it's with you all the time. That doesn't say that there is not a nice market for a home one. I'm not making that point. I'm just saying on a balance point of view, I think the usage of one on the phone will likely be much greater. In fact, you can just look at Siri today and this is now accelerating with iOS 10 and the Mac, but we've been getting 2 billion requests a week for Siri. And so it's very large and to the best of our knowledge, we've shipped more assistant enabled devices than probably anyone out there. Our focus is on this worldwide, and so it's not only a U.S. focus, but we want to deliver a great experience around the world and deliver it globally, and so we've put a lot of the energy into doing that. In terms of the balance between privacy and AI, this is a long conversation, but at a high level, I think it's a false trade-off that people would like you to believe that you have to give up privacy in order to have AI do something for you. We don't buy that. It may take a different kind of work. It might take more thinking, but I don't think we should throw our privacy away. It's sort of like the age-old argument about privacy versus security. We should have both. It shouldn't be making a choice. And so that at a high level is how we see it.
Simona K. Jankowski - Goldman Sachs & Co.:
Thank you.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Yes.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Simona. Could we have the next question, please?
Operator:
We'll go to Steve Milunovich with UBS.
Steven M. Milunovich - UBS Securities LLC:
Thank you very much. Luca, I wanted ask you about the total deferred revenue which was down about $1.3 billion in June and I think down another $400 million in September. Those are rather large declines, even given the fact that your units are coming down and you had the accounting change back in September. Could you talk about some of the drivers of that and what you might expect going forward?
Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.:
Steve, you mentioned by far the largest driver. The largest driver is the fact that we made the change, an accounting change to our ESPs exactly a year ago. So we are lapping the year where you see the effect. I think you're not going to see the same thing going forward. And then we tend to defer some revenue on some other categories, like for example gift cards or some AppleCare, but in general by far the largest element is the change in ESPs. And again, I don't think you're going to see the same impact going forward.
Steven M. Milunovich - UBS Securities LLC:
Okay. Thank you. And then, Tim, some investors are antsy that Apple has not acquired new profit pools or introduced a financially material new product in recent years. The question is, A, does Apple today have a grand strategy for what you want to do? I know you won't tell us what it us, but do you know what you want to do over the next three to maybe five years? Or is it more a read the market and quickly react? And B, do you have any sense that we're kind of in a gap period where the technology and arguably what we'd call the next job to be done haven't yet aligned? And so maybe in a couple years, we will see this flurry of new products and it'll sort of match what people want to do, but it's not quite here yet?
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
We have the strongest pipeline that we've ever had and we're really confident about the things in it. But as usual, we're not going to talk about what's ahead.
Steven M. Milunovich - UBS Securities LLC:
But in terms of your approach I guess to new products, do you have a strong sense of where technology is going and where you're going to play? Or is it still enough up the year that you are willing to react fairly quickly, which arguably your organization allows you to do for the size of company you are?
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
We have a strong sense of where things go and we're very agile to shift as we need to.
Steven M. Milunovich - UBS Securities LLC:
Okay. Thank you.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thanks, Steve. Could we have the next question, please?
Operator:
From Bank of America, Wamsi Mohan.
Wamsi Mohan - Bank of America Merrill Lynch:
Yes. Thank you. So, Tim and Luca, you saw that you could raise the ASP on the iPhone 7 Plus by $20 and you're completely sold out. So clearly this device plays a central role in our lives, so much that owners probably look at that incremental cost as a great trade-off to get the best device out there. So as you see more and more features being added into iPhones, do you conceptually expect that you are anywhere close to the point where raising ASPs further would be net disruptive to demand? Or do you see more rooms to raise ASPs over time as you add incremental features? And I have a follow up.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
With the iPhone 7 Plus, we put an incredible amount of innovation into the camera and the overall photo experience, and customers are obviously using that and have discovered that they love it. And so we're getting an incredible amount of feedback there. We also get incredible feedback on the iPhone 7. And, but the mix that we projected on iPhone 7 Plus is short of what the reality is and so we are chasing supply there. In terms of the ASP, the way we think about it is we want to charge a fair price and so we don't want to charge more than that, and we think it's worth being fair. And so that's how we look at it.
Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.:
If I can add, Wamsi, keep in mind that in a lot of countries around the world, the reality is that our customers have seen some significant price increases because of the FX situation, right. And that's something that we need to keep in mind as well.
Wamsi Mohan - Bank of America Merrill Lynch:
Great. Thanks. Thanks for the clarification. And Tim, this year we saw carrier incentives come back to force post the launch of the iPhone 7, 7 Plus. Two years ago there was a giant upgrade to iPhone from the iPhone 6, 6 Plus. Do you think every couple of years we are likely to see carrier incentives come back into play given worries around customer churn, thereby making the phone even more affordable? Thanks.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
We clearly saw that this year. There's a lot of competition for customers in the U.S. which I think is the market that you're talking about. Whether that'll happen every two years, I don't know. But I suspect that any time there are large numbers of customers that have a phone that's in that two year kind of range that it tends to be a sweet spot, and I think you probably will see a lot of people trying to recruit those customers.
Wamsi Mohan - Bank of America Merrill Lynch:
Thanks, Tim.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Yeah. Thank you.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Wamsi. Could we have the next question, please?
Operator:
Jim Suva with Citi.
James D. Suva - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc. (Broker):
Thank you very much. A strategy question for Tim and then more of a financial question for Luca. Tim, you'd mentioned in your prepared comments a little bit about India and we've been doing a lot of work talking about the opportunity in India. And we get a lot of pushback talking about disposable income metrics and lots of things like that, yet the population being so large, can you talk a little bit about, do you see that India could at some point be as big of an opportunity as China? And it appears that the legal rules have kind of prevented you from going in a lot, but it looks like that's changing. Can you just kind of give us a little more clarity on India? And then, Tim, for the clarification questions, is it fair to say that the OpEx has a disproportionate more expense side with the 14th week that we should kind of think of maybe as we go forward, that we shouldn't expect the OpEx to kind of be chugging along at that high rate? Or is it just kind of the rate of investing that you're going? Thank you very much, gentlemen.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Yeah, thanks for the question. I'll let Luca talk about the OpEx piece of it. On India, I think it's important to look not only at per capita income, which may be what you're looking at, but sort of look at the number of people that are or will move into the middle class sort of over the next decade. And the age of the population, if you look at India, almost 50% of the population is under 25. And so you have a very, very young population. The smartphone has not done as well in India in general. However, one of the key reasons for that is the infrastructure hasn't been there. But this year or this year and next year, there are enormous investments going in on 4G and we couldn't be more excited about that because it really takes a great network working with iPhone to produce that great experience for people. And so I see a lot of the factors moving in the right direction there. I also think the government is much more focused on the infrastructure and on creating jobs, which is fantastic, because you really need the kind of infrastructure and the technology to do that. Will it be as big as China? I think it's clear that the population of India will exceed China sometime in probably the next decade or so, maybe less than that. I think it will take longer for the GDP to rival it, but that's not critical for us to have a great success there. The truth is, there's going to be a lot of people there and a lot of people in the middle class that will really want a smartphone, and I think we can compete well for some percentage of those. And given our starting point, even though we've been growing a lot, there is a lot of headroom there in our mind, and so we are working very hard to realize that opportunity.
Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.:
And, Jim, on OpEx, our approach to OpEx is quite clear and quite simple. We want to continue to invest in the business in all the areas where we think is critical for us to invest. So you see that we make significant investments in R&D. You've seen the growth rates over the last couple of years. We are making important investments in data centers because we want to support our services business. We continue to open retail stores around the world. We continue to invest in marketing and advertising. At the same time, we want to continue to be efficient and lean. It's something that we've done very well over the years and want to continue to do that. So what you've seen, for example in fiscal 2016, you've seen investments in R&D growing at 25% and then our SG&A expenses to be about flat. And this is kind of the approach that we want to take and continue to take going forward. If you step back for a second and you look at our implied guidance for the December quarter, we got an expense to revenue ratio of 9%. This is extremely competitive in our industry and I would say in general. And so we want to continue to have this balance, make the right investments and remain efficient.
James D. Suva - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc. (Broker):
Thank you, and congratulations and thanks for the details, gentleman.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Jim. Can we have the next question, please?
Operator:
We'll go to Rod Hall with JPMorgan.
Rod B. Hall - JPMorgan Securities LLC:
Yeah, hi, guys. Thanks for the question. I had one for Luca and then a follow-up for Tim. So, Luca, I wanted to ask about the gross margin guidance. I think that the Street and we were expecting something a little bit higher. And again, that's about 50 basis points lower and the Street it was I think 70 basis points lower. And I'm just curious, do you think that people are mis-modeling that or is there something going on with pricing or mix there that you could provide us more color on? So that's my first question.
Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.:
Yeah, Rod, let me give you some detail both on a sequential basis and I'll give you also something on a year-over-year basis because maybe that's where the disconnect comes from, looking at the last year's gross margins in the December quarter. On a sequential basis, we are essentially guiding to some improvement in gross margins. We had 38% both in the June quarter and in the September quarter. We're guiding slightly higher for the December quarter because on the positive, we're going to have of course better leverage and the mix in the December quarter tends to be better. But we need to keep into account the fact that these positives are going to be partially offset by the cost structures of the new products that we are launching now and we've launched already a few during the September quarter and that will have an impact on our December quarter results. On a year-over-year basis, keep in mind that last year we did, in Q1, we did 40%, around 40%, 40%, 41%, but there's a couple of things that I think need to be considered before doing a year-over-year compare. And it's the fact that last year we had this award for a patent infringement of $548 million. That is, at the gross margin level, is 40 bps. And then we've got the FX situation, which I mentioned before, which is worth another 60 bps, 70 bps. And so you're left with less than 100 basis points deterioration on a year-over-year basis where again, we have the reality of new cost structures into our products. It is very, very important I think for investors to understand that what's happened during the last two years. During the last two years, the U.S. dollar has appreciated by 15% over the basket of currencies where we do business. And we're a company that generates two thirds of our revenues outside the United States, 15% appreciation of the U.S. dollar. So on a year-over-year basis, just 2016 over 2015 was 340 bps impact from foreign exchange. This is something that we have offset almost entirely through a number of initiatives going from pricing actions to cost initiatives to our hedging program, but at some point, the strong dollar becomes the new normal and we need to work with that. And I think over the years, we made very good trade-offs and our gross margins have been quite stable over time.
Rod B. Hall - JPMorgan Securities LLC:
Okay. Great. Thanks, Luca. And then, Tim, I wanted you to ask you, this question comes up once in a while, but I just wanted to ask you if you could talk to us a little bit about the arguments on both sides of the dividend question. I mean, Apple seems to be perpetually undervalued. It's a very large company. It's getting harder and harder to grow. Your payout ratio is significantly below the S&P 500. I know you can't tell us what your intentions are here, but if you could help us understand how that thinking around the dividend works, it would be great.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
We review the capital return annually, and we've established a cadence now to announce our thinking on that every April. And so we have a robust discussion around the dividend and the buyback. We very much believe that Apple is very undervalued, and so we're investing with confidence in the company that we know really well. And so that thinking has I think proven out over time and I think been very good for our shareholders. And in addition to that, we know that some shareholders really like a dividend and some ongoing income, and so we've provided a amount that we think is a good amount and have a good track record of raising it annually. And so we'll be able to say more on that I'm sure in April of next year.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Rod.
Rod B. Hall - JPMorgan Securities LLC:
Great. Okay, thank you.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
A replay of today's call will be available for two weeks as podcast on the iTunes Store, as a webcast on apple.com/investor and via telephone, and your numbers for the telephone replay are 888-203-1112 or 719-457-0820. Please note the confirmation code 2017273. These replays will be available by approximately 5:00 PM Pacific Time today. Members of the press with additional questions can contact Kristin Huguet at 408-974-2414, and financial analysts can contact Joan Hoover or me with additional questions. Joan is at 408-574-4570 and I'm at 408-974-5420. Thanks again for joining us.
Operator:
And that does conclude today's presentation. We do thank everyone for your participation.
Executives:
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc. Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc. Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.
Analysts:
Shannon S. Cross - Cross Research LLC Steven M. Milunovich - UBS Securities LLC Kathryn Lynn Huberty - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC Toni Sacconaghi - Bernstein Research Simona K. Jankowski - Goldman Sachs & Co. Gene Munster - Piper Jaffray & Co. Mark Moskowitz - Barclays Capital, Inc. Kulbinder S. Garcha - Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC (Broker)
Operator:
Good day, everyone, and welcome to this Apple, Incorporated third quarter fiscal year 2016 earnings release conference call. Today's call is being recorded. At this time for opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn the call over to Nancy Paxton, Senior Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, ma'am.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, good afternoon and thanks to everyone for joining us. Speaking first today is Apple CEO Tim Cook, and he'll be followed by CFO, Luca Maestri. And after that, we'll open the call to questions from analysts. Please note that some of the information you'll hear during our discussion today will consist of forward-looking statements, including without limitation those regarding revenues, gross margin, operating expenses, other income and expense, taxes, and future business outlook. Actual results or trends could differ materially from our forecast. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in Apple's Form 10-K for 2015, the Forms 10-Q for the first two quarters of fiscal 2016, and the Form 8-K filed with the SEC today along with the associated press release. Apple assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements or information, which speak as of their respective dates. In addition, today's comments will refer to a metric we describe as installed base related purchases. This is a non-GAAP measure, and a reconciliation to the corresponding GAAP measure can be found on our Investor Relations website at Apple.com/investor. I'd now like to turn the call over to Tim for introductory remarks.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Thanks, Nancy. Good afternoon and thank you for joining us. Today we're pleased to report third quarter results that reflect stronger customer demand and business performance than we anticipated just 90 days ago and include several encouraging signs. Revenue of $42.4 billion was near the high end of our guidance range and gross margin of 38% was at the top of our guidance range. We achieved these results while reducing channel inventory by about $3.6 billion, significantly more than the $2 billion inventory reduction we had expected. So our sell-through was markedly greater than our sell-in. iPhone accounted for the vast majority of the channel inventory reduction. iPhone unit sell-through was down just 8% year on year, an even greater improvement over the March quarter than we predicted, and we expect the September quarter sell-through comparison to improve further. We feel good about our channel inventory levels and believe they position us well for the months ahead. We had a very successful global launch of iPhone SE, and demand outstripped supply throughout the quarter. We brought on additional capacity and were able to achieve supply/demand balance as we entered the September quarter. At its launch, we said that the addition of the iPhone SE to the iPhone lineup placed us in a better position to meet the needs of customers who love a four-inch phone and to attract even more customers into our ecosystem. In both cases, that strategy is working. Our initial sales data tells us that the iPhone SE is popular in both developed and emerging markets, and the percentage of iPhone SE sales going to customers who are new to iPhone is greater than we've seen in the first weeks of availability for other iPhones launched in the last several years. Overall, we added millions of first-time smartphone buyers in the June quarter, and switchers accounted for the highest percentage of quarterly iPhone sales we've ever measured. In absolute terms, our year-to-date iPhone sales to switchers are the greatest we've seen in any nine-month period, and our active installed base of iPhones is up strong double-digits year over year. We saw tremendous performance from our Services businesses, which grew 19% to a June quarter record of $6 billion. The growth was broad-based, with App Store revenue up 37% to a new all-time high, in addition to strong increases in Music, iCloud, and AppleCare. In the last 12 months, our Services revenue is up almost $4 billion year on year to $23.1 billion, and we expect it to be the size of a Fortune 100 company next year. Most of our terrific Services performance during the quarter was fueled by our active installed base of devices, with installed base-related purchases of $10.3 billion accelerating to 29% growth year on year. We had our best iPad compare in 10 quarters, with revenue growing 7% thanks to the rollout of the 9.7-inch iPad Pro. We're proud to have the most exciting lineup of tablets and accessories in the world and exceptionally high customer satisfaction and engagement. Our surveys also show that about half of iPad Pro purchases are buying them for work. iPad Pro is the ultimate upgrade for existing iPad users and the ultimate replacement device for customers switching from PC notebooks. Apple Watch continues to be the best-selling smartwatch in the world. And just this month, J.D. Power ranked it highest in customer satisfaction among all smartwatches. With watchOS 3 coming this fall, customers will be able to update their Apple Watches with an enhanced user interface, significantly improved performance and all-new fitness and health capabilities, including activity sharing. We're just getting started with the Apple Watch, and we look forward to even more exciting announcements in this space. On a personal note, during the past quarter I visited China and India, and I am very encouraged about our growth prospects in those countries. We remain very optimistic about the long-term opportunities in Greater China and we continue to invest there. We opened our 41st Greater China retail store during the quarter, and we also made a $1 billion investment in Didi Chuxing. Switchers and first-time smartphone buyers represented the lion's share of our iPhone sales in the quarter, and our installed base of iPhones in China has grown by 34% over the last year alone. According to China Mobile, there are more iPhones on their network than any other brand, with iPhone users ranking first in terms of customer loyalty, data usage and ARPU. By far, the largest portion of our global channel inventory reduction was in Greater China, so our underlying business there is stronger than our results imply. We face some challenges in Greater China, as the economic environment has slowed down since the beginning of the year. This is reflected in consumer confidence and retail spending, and the Chinese yuan has depreciated by 7% relative to the U.S. dollar since August of last year. Hong Kong's tourism and retail businesses also continue to be significantly impacted by the stronger Hong Kong dollar relative to other Asian currencies. Combining this backdrop with the tough comparison to last year, when revenue grew 112%, and the channel inventory reduction this year, we're reporting a decline in revenue in the June quarter. But to keep things in perspective, when we look back on our accomplishments in this segment over the last couple of years, they are truly remarkable. In the first three quarters of this fiscal year, our total revenue from Greater China was almost $40 billion, up 55% from the same timeframe just two years ago, while iPhone units were up 47%. India is now one of our fastest growing markets. In the first three quarters of this fiscal year, our iPhone sales in India were up 51% year on year. We just announced a first of its kind design and development accelerator to support Indian developers creating innovative applications for iOS, and we opened a new office in Hyderabad to accelerate maps development. We're looking forward to opening retail stores in India down the road, and we see huge potential for that vibrant country. As we look forward to the fall, we are thrilled by customers' response to the software and services we previewed at our Worldwide Developers Conference last month. This was our biggest WWDC ever. And for the first time, we have four innovative Apple platforms for our developers' apps, iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS. In fact, iOS 10 will be the biggest release ever for iOS. The momentum of all four platforms shows the strong relationship Apple enjoys with customers throughout their day and wherever they go, whether it's at home, in their car, at work, or everywhere in between. The Apple ecosystem is thriving and growing, and our new OS releases this fall will take these great experiences to a new level. Customers can look forward to more expressive ways to communicate with messages now with its own App Store, allowing users to create and share content, make payments, add stickers and more, all without leaving messages, which is now one of the largest messaging services in the world. Customers can also look forward to a broader and more intelligent role for Siri, which will work with your favorite apps from the App Store, so you can ask Siri to book a ride with your favorite ride sharing app or send money to someone with Square. There are also beautifully redesigned apps for music, maps and news, significant enhancements to HomeKit, CarPlay, and the Health app, building on our strategy to give users a seamless experience in all aspects of their lives. There's also a major update with macOS Sierra, with new features like Siri and Apple Pay that make the Mac smarter and more helpful than ever, and even stronger continuity features across all the Apple devices. These experiences become more powerful and intuitive as we continue our long history of enriching our products through advanced artificial intelligence. We have focused our AI efforts on the features that best enhance the customer experience. For example, machine learning enables Siri to understand words as well as the intent behind them. That means Siri does a better job understanding and even predicting what you want, then delivering the right responses to requests. To make Siri an even smarter assistant, we're opening the service to developers, and this fall Siri will be available across our entire product line. We're also using machine learning in many other ways across our products and services, including recommending songs, apps, and news. Machine learning is improving facial and image recognition in photos, predicting word choice while typing in messages and mail, and providing context awareness in maps for better directions. Deep learning within our products even enables them to recognize usage patterns and improve their own battery life. And most importantly, we deliver these intelligent services while protecting users' privacy. Most of the AI processing takes place on the device rather than being sent to the cloud. And starting this fall, we'll be using sophisticated technology called differential privacy, enhancing our ability to deliver the kinds of services we dream of and customers love without compromising on the individual privacy our customers have come to expect from us. This fall we'll also bring Apple Pay to Safari so users can easily make secure and private purchases when shopping on participating websites. Tens of millions of users around the world are enjoying Apple Pay today at stores and in app, with estimated monthly active users up more than 450% year on year last month. Leading financial partners tell us that three out of four contactless payments in the U.S. are made with Apple Pay. This is amazing. There are more than 11 million contactless-ready locations in the countries where Apple Pay is available today, including 3 million locations now accepting Apple Pay in the United States. With the launch of France, Switzerland, and Hong Kong this month, Apple Pay is now live in nine markets, including six of our top 10. Adoption outside the U.S. has been explosive, with over half of transaction volume now coming from non-U.S. markets. With our latest OS releases, the unparalleled continuity across Apple devices will become even more powerful. For example, macOS Sierra will sense other devices and use secure protocols to communicate. With an authenticated Apple Watch, I can auto-unlock my Mac when I open it without typing a password. With Universal Clipboard, I can copy and paste text, images, and even video between my iOS devices and my Mac. And I can automatically access the files on my Mac desktop and documents folder from another Mac, iOS device, or even a PC. Innovations like these are the kinds of things that only Apple can do. We have an incredible lineup of products in our pipeline, and I'm very bullish about our long-term opportunity. Now I'd like to hand it over to Luca to share more details with you on the June quarter.
Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Tim. Good afternoon, everyone. Revenue for the June quarter was $42.4 billion, near the high end of our guidance range, compared to $49.6 billion in the year-ago quarter. Customer demand for our products and services was stronger than we had anticipated at the beginning of the quarter. As Tim mentioned, we reduced overall channel inventories by roughly $3.6 billion. On a geographic basis, our revenue grew strongly in Japan to a new June quarter record, and we experienced healthy growth in a number of other important markets, including Russia, Brazil, Turkey, India, and Canada. Gross margin was 38%, at the top of our guidance range. Operating margin was 23.9% of revenue, and net income was $7.8 billion. Diluted earnings per share were $1.42, and cash flow from operations was strong at $10.6 billion. For details by product, I will start with the iPhone. We sold 40.4 million iPhones in the quarter. We also reduced channel inventory by over 4 million units compared to about 0.5 million units a year ago, so sell-through was down by 8%. We exited the quarter near the low end of our five-week to seven-week target range for channel inventory. The rollout of our new entry-level iPhone SE concurrent with the channel reduction of more than 4 million higher-end iPhones resulted in a lower than usual iPhone ASP of $595. Therefore, we expect ASPs to improve this quarter. We experienced strong iPhone growth in many markets, with sales in Russia more than doubling year over year, and double-digit growth in many other key countries, including Japan, Turkey, Brazil, India, Canada, and Sweden. iPhone continues to show great momentum in business markets. A recent survey by 451 Research found that among U.S. corporate buyers planning to purchase smartphones in the September quarter, 75% plan to purchase iPhones. This is the highest corporate purchase intent ever measured by the survey for the September quarter. Turning to Services, we generated $6 billion in revenue, an increase of 19% over the June quarter last year. We set a new record for customers transacting on our iTunes Stores. And among our customers who purchase apps and content, the average amount spent per customer was the highest that we've ever measured. The App Store's growth rate has now accelerated for four consecutive quarters, reaching 37% in Q3. The App Store is overwhelmingly the preferred destination for both customers and developers. According to App Annie, we generated 100% more global revenue than Google Play in the June quarter, widening our lead from the March quarter. Because of this continued growth, for the first nine months of our fiscal year, Services increased from 8% of our total revenue a year ago to 11% this year, and it represents an even higher percentage of our profitability. Next I'd like to talk about the Mac. We sold 4.3 million Macs compared to 4.8 million last year. It was a challenging quarter for personal computer sales across the industry, with IDC estimating a 4% global contraction. In addition to the overall market slowdown, we faced a very difficult compare to the year-ago quarter, when we introduced a new MacBook Pro and a new iMac. Despite these challenges, Mac continues to gain a high percentage of new customers, and our Mac installed base has grown to a new all-time high at the end of the June quarter. We ended the quarter below our four-week to five-week target range for Mac channel inventory. Now turning to iPad, revenue grew 7%. iPad ASP was $490 compared to $415 in the year-ago quarter, with the increase driven by iPad Pro, and we sold 10 million iPads compared to 10.9 million in the year-ago quarter. We also reduced channel inventory by about 500,000 units and exited the quarter within our five-week to seven-week target range. In the segments of the tablet market where we compete, we continue to be highly successful both in terms of market share and customer metrics. Recent data from NPD indicates that iPad gained share in the overall U.S. tablet market in the June quarter and has 84% share of tablets priced above $200. And in May, 451 Research measured a 96% consumer satisfaction rate for iPad mini and a 95% rate for iPad Air. Among U.S. consumers planning to purchase a tablet within the next six months, 63% plan to purchase an iPad, almost four times the purchase intention rate of the next highest brand measured, with iPad Pro the top choice for planned purchases. Corporate buyers report a 94% satisfaction rate for iPad and a purchase intent of 71% for the September quarter. One recent example of iPad business adoption is Sberbank, Russia's largest bank, which is adding 22,000 iPads to more than 10,000 purchased last year to deploy corporate mobility solutions across the organization and enable its consultants to serve customers in a more engaging and more efficient way. More broadly, we're making great progress with our enterprise initiatives and we see strong growth opportunities ahead of us. In May, we announced a global strategic partnership with SAP to reimagine business processes with native iOS apps. SAP is the world's largest enterprise software provider, with more than 130 million potential users among its 300,000 global customers. In fact, it's estimated that 76% of global business transactions touch an SAP system. Our partnership will deliver an SDK to fast-track iOS projects for SAP environments, an iOS academy to enable the 2.5 million SAP developers around the world to build great native iOS apps, and a portfolio of industry-specific apps to accelerate mobile transformation in the enterprise. Last month, we announced the first three solutions from our Cisco partnership, two that will dramatically improve the network performance of iOS traffic running on Cisco networks, and one that will bring the desk phone to the 21st century by integrating iPhone Wi-Fi calling into Cisco Spark. Let me now turn to our cash position. We ended the quarter with $231.5 billion in cash plus marketable securities, a sequential decrease of $1.4 billion. $214.8 billion of this cash, or 93% of the total, was outside the United States. We issued a total $2.4 billion of debt in Taiwan and in Australia, while retiring $2.5 billion in U.S. debt, leaving us with $72 billion in term debt at the end of the quarter, essentially unchanged from last quarter. We returned a total of over $13 billion to investors during the June quarter as follows. We paid $3.2 billion in dividends and equivalent. We spent $4 billion on repurchases of 41.2 million Apple shares through open-market transactions. And we launched a new $6 billion ASR, resulting in initial delivery and retirement of 48.2 million shares. We also completed our sixth accelerated share repurchase program, retiring an additional 8.7 million shares. We've now completed almost $177 billion of our current $250 billion capital return program, including $127 billion in share repurchases. During the quarter, we also spent $1 billion on a minority investment in Didi Chuxing in China, completed three acquisitions and incurred $4.2 billion in capital expenditures. As we move ahead into the September quarter, I'd like to review our outlook, which includes the types of forward-looking information that Nancy referred to at the beginning of the call. We expect revenue to be between $45.5 billion and $47.5 billion. We expect gross margin to be between 37.5% and 38%. We expect OpEx to be between $6.050 billion and $6.150 billion. We expect OI&E to be about $350 million, and we expect the tax rate to be about 25.5%. Also today, our Board of Directors has declared a cash dividend of $0.57 per share of common stock, payable on August 11, 2016 to shareholders of record as of August 8, 2016. With that, I'd like to open the call to questions.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Luca. And we ask that you limit yourself to one one-part question and one follow-up. Operator, may we have the first question, please?
Operator:
Your first question will come from Shannon Cross with Cross Research.
Shannon S. Cross - Cross Research LLC:
Thank you very much for the question. Tim, can you talk a little bit about your thoughts on investments? You made the Didi investment this quarter. Obviously, you continue to make acquisitions over time. We just saw I guess you invested in buying some of Carpool Karaoke. I'm just curious as to how you're thinking about where you're putting your investment dollars for more of an acquisition or a potential equity stake standpoint as you look at overall capital allocation.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Shannon, we obviously invest a ton of capital in our business itself to support research and development and the production of our products. And that's the main source of our capital. However, we're constantly looking on the outside for great talent and great intellectual property. And we have been buying companies on average every three to four weeks or so, and we continue to do that. And we think we've made some really great choices there. In terms of the investment in Didi, it was an unusual investment in that, as you know, we don't have a long history of doing a lot of these, but we have done some before. We invested in ARM in the early days. We invested in Akamai and a few other companies. So it wasn't the first. From a Didi point of view, we see that as, one, a great financial investment. Two, we think that there are some strategic things that the companies can do together over time. And three, we think that we'll learn a lot about the business and the Chinese market even beyond what we currently know, and Didi has an incredible team there. And so that's the rationale for why we did that. Would we do more investments? Yes, but it's not something that you'll see a whole string of from us. But we will constantly look for things that are smart to do.
Shannon S. Cross - Cross Research LLC:
Great. Thank you. And then just as a follow-up for Luca. If you could, talk a little bit about the gross margin puts and takes for guidance, 37% to 38%. How are you thinking about commodity pricing and mix of the new products and that just as you look to how you guided gross margin?
Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.:
Yes, Shannon. Let me correct you. It's 37.5% to 38%...
Shannon S. Cross - Cross Research LLC:
Sorry. I had that written down, but I said the wrong thing.
Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.:
...for the September quarter. So essentially, we're guiding GM flat to slightly down sequentially. On the positive side, we're going to have leverage because we are guiding to a sequential increase in revenue, and we expect to have positive mix as we get into the September quarter, and these positives being offset more or less by what we call product transition costs, which are typical at this time of the year for us.
Shannon S. Cross - Cross Research LLC:
Great. Thank you.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Shannon, on the commodity side and for the September quarter, we see NAND being pretty much in balance while DRAM and LCDs and other major commodities remain in an oversupply situation. And so overall commodity prices we expect to decline at at-least historical rates.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Shannon. Could we have the next question, please?
Operator:
From UBS, we'll hear from Steve Milunovich.
Steven M. Milunovich - UBS Securities LLC:
Great, thank you very much. Regarding your revenue guidance for September, it's up about 10% sequentially, which is clearly at the high end historically. So what can you tell us about the timing of the new iPhone model? Is that affecting this? You mentioned that 451 Research is finding business interest in phones, but their survey on consumers actually finds the lowest level of expectation for purchases in the next three months since 2008. You've seen the upgrade numbers from the carriers are quite low. So it seems like it's still a very tough demand environment. So where is the strength coming from in the September quarter?
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Steve, we're not going to get into products or product transition. However, we've taken what we've learned from last quarter, and we did see a number of encouraging signs. Luca talked about the number of countries that we saw double-digit growth in during the quarter, from Japan to Brazil to India, some even stronger numbers than that in Russia. So there's a number of countries that we saw strong signals from that perspective. We also are very happy with the switcher rate that we saw, our highest ever recorded. And the number of switchers through the nine months are the highest absolute numbers that we've ever had. And so when we look at that and then we look at the things going on, on our other products and services, and we think Services will continue to grow very briskly. We've made our best estimate of where we think we'll come in, and that's $45.5 billion to $47.5 billion.
Steven M. Milunovich - UBS Securities LLC:
Okay, fair enough. And as a follow-up, I wanted to ask you about your platform strategy. You talk about the four operating systems essentially as platforms, which I agree with. And it's just interesting to me because Apple has such a control over the vertical integration of your products, and yet you've somehow been able to grasp the openness that's required for platforms. And I think that's reflected in WWDC, as you pointed out, opening up APIs and so forth on messaging. And you made the case there for apps versus messaging and the anti-bot argument. I'm just curious. Is that the way – am I characterizing this roughly correctly in terms about how you think about the business? And how are you managing that internally in terms of having this vertically integrated somewhat closed view of the hardware and yet this pretty open platform where the value is created externally?
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
We think to have a great platform you have to have a really healthy ecosystem. And so we're really proud of the developer community and the fact that developers are earning a lot more money in writing for iOS than other apps. We think that the best experience for users include apps, and so we want to do everything that we can do to continue building that. We now have over 2 million apps in the App Store and are more focused these days on discovery and other things to bring more great apps to the service because there are so many out there. And so that's what we're doing. The TV, and you didn't mention CarPlay, but these are trying to provide our users a seamless experience across all the different things that they do in their lives. And so that's the rationale for CarPlay. It's the rationale for why we're putting a huge investment in the home, making – really bringing home automation to life for people in a very simple and elegant way. It's the reason for Apple TV and what we're doing in the living room. And so all these things, all these things together are all about the user experience and making people's daily lives better.
Steven M. Milunovich - UBS Securities LLC:
Thank you.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Steve. Could we have the next question please?
Operator:
We'll go to Katy Huberty with Morgan Stanley.
Kathryn Lynn Huberty - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC:
Thank you. Luca, as it relates to gross margin, the guidance today is very similar to what you've provided over the last five years in terms of gross margin guidance in September versus June. And the variances that you walked through in response to Shannon's questions are very similar to the dynamics that you see in any September quarter. But there's an added factor this time around, which is you don't have the 4 million units of high-ASP, high-margin inventory drain in September like you did in the June quarter. So I guess I'd just push back and ask why gross margin guidance wouldn't be even better? Is it the more balanced NAND environment that Tim spoke to, or is there something else impacting the guidance?
Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.:
Katy, I've talked about these elements at a broad level. Of course, there are degrees of positive impact. We for example on the mix front, every cycle is slightly different on our product mix, and so that clearly has an impact on gross margins. And the other thing that we need to keep in mind as we step back for a second and now we've gone through a couple of cycles where the U.S. dollar has strengthened. And as you know, we work with our hedging program where we get protection from FX fluctuations in the short term. When these hedges roll off over time, we end up replacing them with new hedging contracts at spot rates. And so versus September of 2014, for example, the U.S. dollar has now strengthened on average against international currencies by about 15%. And I think we need to accept that now we're living in this stronger U.S. dollar environment. We've taken a lot of actions on the cost side, on the pricing side, and obviously with hedges. But we need to deal with this situation, and that's where we are right now. We feel that 37.5% to 38% given the new FX environment I think says a lot about all the work that we've done on the cost side to get there. Just to give you a sense, on a year-over-year basis, when I look at foreign exchange, that has an impact of almost 300 basis points on our margins.
Kathryn Lynn Huberty - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC:
Okay, thank you. And, Tim, can you speak to how you envision the upgrade rate of the iPhone installed base to play out over the next quarter or the next year? Somebody mentioned that U.S. carriers have reported really weak upgrade rates, not necessarily for iPhone, but across their installed base. The press is discussing only modest technology upgrades in your next iPhone cycle. And so those data points would lead investors to believe that the upgrade rate will be low, but curious if you have a different view. Thank you.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
I don't want to talk about phones that aren't announced. And so that aside, what we have seen in the past tense or current tense on the upgrade rate is that the iPhone upgrade rate for the iPhone 6S is very similar to the iPhone 5S. And I guess in retrospect, maybe that was a predictable thing, although we didn't predict it in the beginning. It took us a little time to realize that. The iPhone 6 was significantly higher than that, and so it likely accelerated upgrades that would have been in the current year ahead of those. And so what the future holds, we'll see. But I'm very optimistic about the future because I see so many signs that are positive. I see an installed base that has gotten incredibly large. I see a switcher rate that is the highest ever. I see the smartphone itself, led by iPhone, becoming even more instrumental and important to people's lives. It's becoming essential. And all of the things that are coming both in the fall, the things that we've announced that you can see with iOS 10, hopefully you're running by now with the beta, those and other things make it even more instrumental. And AI even makes it even more and more. As the phone becomes more and more your assistant, it's one of those that you're not going to leave without it. And so I see all of those things as vectors that are incredibly positive. I also really like what I've seen with the iPhone SE and the fact that it's opening the door to customers that we weren't reaching before and likely convincing some people to upgrade that wanted a smaller form factor but wanted to stay with iPhone, and so they were waiting for the iPhone SE. And so I see lots of positive things, and so that's how I look at it.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Katy. Could we have the next question please?
Operator:
We'll go to Toni Sacconaghi with Bernstein.
Toni Sacconaghi - Bernstein Research:
Yes, thank you. You commented about the significant inventory drawdown in the quarter, $3.6 billion on the revenue side. So sell-through was $46 billion effectively, over 4 million iPhones, suggesting that sell-through iPhone sales were 45 million. When I look to your guidance for Q4, I actually have the opposite question of a previous question, which is in light of the true sell-through rate, which seems to reflect better than normal seasonality in Q3, likely some contribution and elasticity from the SE, when I look at Q4, it looks like you're guiding for iPhone unit on a sell-through basis to be flat or potentially down and for total company revenues to be only fractionally up and below the seasonality we see in Q4. So I guess my question is, are you expecting any drawdowns in channel inventory in fiscal Q4? Are my inferences around sell-through rate incorrect? Or given the business momentum that you spoke about in response to an earlier question and the hopefulness that you expressed in your prepared remarks, Tim, I'm actually surprised that the guidance isn't a bit stronger on the top line.
Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.:
Toni, let me take it. Starting with your comments on the June quarter, I just want to point out that when we talk about a $3.6 billion channel inventory reduction, that is not entirely related to iPhone. iPhone is the vast majority of that, but we did reduce channel inventory on all other products as well. So that probably leads you to different conclusions to the math that you have just expressed. On the September quarter, when I look at the sequential increase for iPhone units that we are expecting, I would say that it is, even with the sell-through adjustments that you've talked about, it's still pretty much in line with what we've seen in the past. As you know, we do not provide guidance for channel inventory. But I would say, in general, I think it's important to keep in mind that if we look around the world, we do see a lot of positive signs, but we also know that the macroeconomic environment is slowing down in a number of places around the world. And that needs to be taken into account in our guidance.
Toni Sacconaghi - Bernstein Research:
Okay. Luca, I did understand the $3.6 billion, but you said over 4 million iPhones were drawn down. I added that to the 40.4 million, so that would suggest close to 45 million on a sell-through basis. So that was the basis for my observation. I was wondering if I could direct one at Tim. You talked about the upgrade cycle and how it elongated relative to the iPhone 6 and that it's similar to what you saw with the iPhone 5S. And my belief is that one of the bigger longer-term concerns for Apple is that the replacement cycle could just structurally elongate over time, particularly as your installed base of customers becomes less affluent and more international. So I guess my question is, you have a mechanism, which is the Apple Upgrade Program, which takes replacement cycle out of the equation and puts people on buying the phone as a service. And so I'd welcome any comments on how that program is doing. And then just more broadly, is Apple thinking about ways to sell not only the iPhone, but more of its products on a monthly type subscription basis, perhaps in a more bundled fashion so that you can add more predictability to what is now largely a transactional revenue model?
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
The iPhone demand is made up, as you know, of upgraders, switchers and new to smartphone. And so if you take it in reverse order for a minute and look at a new smartphone, smartphone penetration right now around the world at the end of December was 42%. And so there's quite a bit of room there. It is true that a lot of those are in emerging markets, but we have done – we've had reasonable business success in several emerging markets. And so we don't enter into those with no experience, although we will enter into them humbly. On the switcher side, we really like what we're seeing. And we think that from a user point of view, as the smartphone itself becomes more and more essential to people's daily lives, which is a part of what I had talked about before, a part of bringing it into the home in a bigger way and in the car and at work and so forth, we think people will put more and more focus on what they're buying and the thing that Apple does best, which is provide this killer experience. A killer user experience that's integrated across their lives I think becomes more important and I think that really plays to our advantage. I also think that the deployment of AI technology is something that we will excel at because of our focus on user experience, and so I like that. From an upgrade point of view, there are pluses and minuses as I see it. A plus is that more and more people have already joined upgrade programs. Some of these programs, like the one that you referenced that we've done, replaces the iPhone every year. There are also carriers that have similar kind of plans, where they also replace or change out the iPhone every year. Others have an 18-month clock. Some have a 24-month clock, and there are even some that have a 30-month clock. And so there's various time schedules there. And so, as of today, there are obviously a lot more people on those programs than ever before because they just started. It really got underway in a big way last year, in a smaller way two years ago. And so we'll see more of those this coming fall. The minus side is that the bifurcation of the smartphone from the service itself has a plus and a minus into it. The subsidy, the lack of that – and this is more of a U.S. phenomenon than the rest of the world, some of that can be a shock for people that were used to paying $199 for their smartphone. They come back in and they pay less for the service but they pay more for their smartphone. And so there's lots of pluses and minuses on this. But overall, as I look at this for Apple, and this is not a statement on the industry itself, but for Apple, I'm very optimistic.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Toni. Could we have the next question, please?
Operator:
From Goldman Sachs, Simona Jankowski.
Simona K. Jankowski - Goldman Sachs & Co.:
Thank you. Tim, as you mentioned, you traveled to China during the quarter. And while you certainly sound encouraged on China and highlighted the Didi investment, there are some of the key services for Apple like iBooks and iTunes Movies that are still banned, and some of the local vendors appear to be gaining share. So can you just give us your perspective on the market, your expectations around getting those services back up, and also regaining share?
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Yes, for books and movies, we currently have those stores off, as you mentioned. To put this in some context, those two stores for the months that we had them operational, which was several months, the revenue was less than $1 million. And so it's not a revenue-related issue. From our point of view, this is a service we want to provide our customers. And so we're working very closely with the appropriate government agencies, and we hope to make books and movies available again to our customers there. And so we'll see how that goes, but we're optimistic there.
Simona K. Jankowski - Goldman Sachs & Co.:
And in terms of just regaining share in that market more broadly?
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
I think we've always had – if you look at our share over time, our share in China tends to peak during launch windows. There's a higher high and a lower low there. There's a bigger difference between those two. And so what we have to do and what we're doing is innovating like crazy and delivering the best smartphone to our customers there. And if we do a really great job of that, which we will, then I'm confident that we'll do well.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Simona. Could we have the next question, please?
Operator:
Gene Munster with Piper Jaffray.
Gene Munster - Piper Jaffray & Co.:
Good afternoon. Tim, you gave some nice data points around Apple Pay. Can you remind us? Is this a business that ultimately impacts the Services line in any measurable way, or is Apple Pay generally about selling iPhones? And separately, when you just take a step back and look at the proof point that the augmented reality [AR] theme has had with this whole Pokémon phenomenon, how does it impact how you think about the future? I assume you think about it. I'm just curious what goes on in your mind when you see all that. Thanks.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
On the Apple Pay side, the revenues from Apple Pay are in the Services line. The growth is astronomical, but the base is very small. And so for today, Apple Pay is very much about a great feature for our customers so that they can pay in a very simple, private, and secure way. In terms of AR and the Pokémon phenomenon, it's incredible what has happened there. I think it's a testament to what happens with innovative apps and the whole ecosystem and the power of being a developer being able to press a button, so to speak, and offer their product around the world. And just a certain developer has elected not to go worldwide yet because of the pressure on their servers, et cetera, because of the demand. But I'm sure that they will over time. It also does show, as you point out, that AR can be really great. And we have been and continue to invest a lot in this. We are high on AR for the long run. We think there are great things for customers and a great commercial opportunity. And so we're investing, and the number one thing is to make sure our products work well with other developers' products like Pokémon. And so that's the reason why you see so many iPhones out in the wild right now chasing Pokémons.
Gene Munster - Piper Jaffray & Co.:
Would you say there's going to be a computing shift to AR longer term?
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
I notice there are people that want to call it a new computer platform, and we'll see. I think there's a tendency in this industry to call everything new the next computer platform. However, that said, I think AR can be huge. So we'll see whether it's the next platform. But regardless, it will be huge.
Gene Munster - Piper Jaffray & Co.:
Thank you.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thanks, Gene. Can we have the next question, please?
Operator:
We'll go to Mark Moskowitz with Barclays.
Mark Moskowitz - Barclays Capital, Inc.:
Yes, thank you. Good afternoon. I just want to follow up, Tim, if I could, related to the R&D pace of growth, clearly a lot of momentum there over the last couple years. But we're just trying to figure out how much of that is dedicated to existing products and services versus what's next? Can you give us a sense in terms of when investors should think about the ROI coming back to them from the R&D perspective? And a corollary to that, is it really restricted just to products and services currently, or can we see more of a cloud services apparatus evolve over time where you do more and more in the enterprise just given the core trips with SAP and Cisco and IBM? And then my follow-up for Luca is around ASPs for the iPhone. We keep getting a lot of questions around iPhone SE in terms of how cannibalistic could it be to the core iPhone franchise. Are you seeing any moderation in terms of the ASP pressures here?
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
On R&D growth, we do continue to invest significantly in R&D. The growth rates are still large on a year-over-year basis, and Luca can share the exact ones. But I think the recent quarter was in the mid-20% for R&D. The balance of the company we're managing more flattish from a year-over-year point of view. The products that are in R&D, there is quite a bit of investment in there for products and services that are not currently shipping or derivations of what is currently shipping. And so I don't want to talk about the exact split of it. But you can look at the growth rate and conclude that there's a lot of stuff that we're doing beyond the current products.
Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.:
Mark, on the ASP question, I talked about the $595 in Q3. It's down $65 on a year-over-year basis. Keep in mind, about $20 of that $65 is foreign exchange. So during the quarter, we had this combination of starting with no iPhone SE units in channel inventory, so we had to do an at least a partial channel fill that obviously had an impact on ASPs. And then the other element was the fact that we've reduced more than 4 million units of channel inventory on the high end. So the combination of these two things obviously had an impact on ASPs. But I think as I said or Tim said during the prepared remarks, we do expect iPhone ASP to improve sequentially as we move into the September quarter because these two factors that I just mentioned are not going to repeat. On cannibalization, of course we've got limited experience because the phone has been in the market just for a few weeks. But when we look at our survey data on iPhone SE, as Tim was saying, we believe that the iPhone SE is doing exactly what it was intended, which is we are seeing a higher rate of new to iPhone customers, which is obviously very important to us because we bring new people into the iOS ecosystem. And we see a higher rate of previous iPhone owners that really prefer the four-inch form factor. We have not seen clear evidence of cannibalization from iPhone 6S or iPhone 6S Plus. Of course, there's always going to be some level of cannibalization. But really to us what is much more relevant is the much bigger opportunity to bring more people into the iOS ecosystem.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thanks, Mark. Could we have the next question, please?
Operator:
From Credit Suisse, we'll hear from Kulbinder Garcha.
Kulbinder S. Garcha - Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC (Broker):
Thanks, just a couple questions for me. Luca, I just want to clarify that last point on ASPs on iPhone because last quarter it seemed that you were quite clear that that was a negative driver to the gross margin of the company. So I understand there are other drivers going into the September quarter. But just to be clear, the phone units you didn't sell through that were depleted in channel inventory, those are relatively high gross margin as well. That's the clarification. And then for Tim, on the Services side, as Apple has spoken more and more loudly I guess in the last three or four quarters, I just think about some of the comments you've made about the TV market and how it's been stuck I think in the 1960s and the 1970s and the experience hasn't changed. I understand you've got the Apple TV box out. But in terms of driving actual video-on-demand services, is that something that Apple wants to do themselves? Do you want a partner? Could you even build content? How do you think about that as an actual business opportunity as opposed to here's an Apple box and we sell some units, but it's not that meaningful to the overall company in terms of size? I'm just curious given the installed base and users you have. Thanks.
Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.:
Kulbinder, on your question on iPhone ASP, I'm not sure if I understood it correctly. But clearly the iPhone SE has a downward impact on iPhone ASP, of course, because it comes at the low end of the range. From a gross margin perspective, it is slightly dilutive to company margins, but the impact is not particularly large.
Kulbinder S. Garcha - Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC (Broker):
Okay, okay.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
On the Apple TV question, the introduction of Apple TV and tvOS last October and the subsequent OS releases and what's coming out this fall, think of that as building the foundation for what we believe can be a broader business over time. And so I don't want to be more precise than that. But you shouldn't look at what's there today and think we've done what we want to do. We've built a foundation that we can do something bigger off of.
Kulbinder S. Garcha - Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC (Broker):
Okay, thank you.
Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you for the question.
Nancy Paxton - Apple, Inc.:
Thank you, Kulbinder. A replay of today's call will be available for two weeks as a podcast on the iTunes Store, as a webcast on Apple/investor, and via telephone. And the numbers for the telephone replay are 888-203-1112 or 719-457-0820. Please enter confirmation code 4944387. These replays will be available by approximately 5 PM Pacific Time today. And members of the press with additional questions can contact Kristin Huguet at 408-974-2414. Financial analysts can contact Joan Hoover or me with additional questions. Joan is at 408-974-4570, and I'm at 408-974-5420. Thanks again for joining us.
Operator:
Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude today's presentation. We do thank everyone for your participation.
Executives:
Nancy Paxton - Senior Director, Investor Relations and Treasury Timothy Donald Cook - Chief Executive Officer & Director Luca Maestri - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President
Analysts:
Simona K. Jankowski - Goldman Sachs & Co. Eugene Charles Munster - Piper Jaffray & Co (Broker) Kathryn Lynn Huberty - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC A.M. Sacconaghi, Jr. - Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. LLC Shannon S. Cross - Cross Research LLC Steven M. Milunovich - UBS Securities LLC Rod B. Hall - JPMorgan Securities LLC
Operator:
Good day, everyone, and welcome to the Apple Incorporated second quarter fiscal year 2016 earnings release conference call. Today's call is being recorded. At this time for opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn the call over to Nancy Paxton, Senior Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, ma'am.
Nancy Paxton - Senior Director, Investor Relations and Treasury:
Thank you. Good afternoon and thanks to everyone for joining us today. Speaking first is Apple CEO Tim Cook, and he'll be followed by CFO Luca Maestri. After that, we'll open the call to questions from analysts. Please note that some of the information you'll hear during our discussion today will consist of forward-looking statements, including without limitation those regarding revenue, gross margins, operating expenses, other income and expense, taxes, future business outlook, and plans for capital return and debt issuance. Actual results or trends could differ materially from our forecast. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in Apple's Form 10-K for 2015, the Form 10-Q for the first quarter of fiscal 2016, and the Form 8-K filed with the SEC today along with the associated press release. Apple assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements or information, which speak as of their respective dates. In addition, today's comments will refer to a metric we describe as the purchase value of services tied to our installed base. This is a non-GAAP measure, and a reconciliation to the corresponding GAAP measure can be found on our Investor Relations website at Apple.com/investor. I'd now like to turn the call over to Tim for introductory remarks.
Timothy Donald Cook - Chief Executive Officer & Director:
Thanks, Nancy. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Today we're reporting the results of a very busy and challenging quarter, and we're also announcing an update to our capital return program. Revenue for the quarter was $50.6 billion, which was within our guidance range. Despite the pause in our growth, our results reflect excellent execution by our team in the face of ongoing macroeconomic headwinds in much of the world and difficult year-over-year comparisons. We saw continued currency weakness in the vast majority of our international markets. In constant currency, our revenue declined by 9% from last year, 400 basis points less than the reported decline of 13%. For the first half of the fiscal year, our revenue in constant currency was up 1% year on year. Despite challenges, there were a number of encouraging signs during the quarter. Our installed base of over 1 billion active devices continued to grow strongly. We added a huge number of Android switchers and new-to-Mac customers, and we generated very strong growth from Services. We sold 51.2 million iPhones in the quarter, consistent with the range of our own expectations but lower than the exceptional year-ago quarter when we saw an acceleration in iPhone upgrades and 40% iPhone sales growth over the previous year. To provide some additional color, iPhone sales come from three sources
Luca Maestri - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President:
Thank you, Tim, and good afternoon, everyone. Let me start with the March quarter results. Revenue for the quarter landed within our guidance range of $50.6 billion compared to $58 billion in the year-ago quarter, a decline of 13%. As we had expected, our comparisons to last year were influenced by the continued strength of the U.S. dollar against foreign currencies. As Tim said, in constant currency, our revenue declined by 9%. On a geographic basis, in Asia, our revenue grew strongly in Japan, but it declined in greater China and the rest of Asia-Pacific. However, our business in these two regions is faring better than the numbers might suggest. We had significant channel inventory reductions and currency weakness, which affected our reported revenue for both these segments. In Mainland China, revenue was down 11%, and the decline was 7% in constant currency terms. Keep in mind that we were up against an extremely difficult year-ago compare when our Mainland China revenue grew 81%. We remain very optimistic about the China market over the long term, and we are committed to investing there for the long run. Gross margin was 39.4%, near the high end of our guidance range, thanks to strong cost performance. Operating margin was 27.7% of revenue, and net income was $10.5 billion. Diluted earnings per share were $1.90, and cash flow from operations was strong at $11.6 billion. For details by product, I'll start with iPhone. We sold 51.2 million iPhones in the quarter compared to 61.2 million in the year-ago quarter, a decline of 16%. It was a particularly challenging comparison to the record quarter a year ago, when iPhone sales grew 40%, as we entered last March quarter in supply/demand imbalance, which was recovered during the quarter. Also, this year we reduced channel inventory by 450,000 units while we increased inventory by 1 million units a year ago. We have exited the quarter within our five-week to seven-week target range for channel inventory. iPhone ASP was $642 compared to $659 in the year-ago quarter, with weak international currencies and very popular mid-tier and entry offerings contributing to the difference year over year. iPhone's momentum in business markets continues to be very impressive. A recent survey by 451 Research, formerly known as ChangeWave, found that among U.S. corporate buyers planning to purchase smartphones in the June quarter, 78% plan to purchase iPhones. That's the highest June quarter iPhone purchase intent ever measured by the survey and five points higher than a year ago. Turning to Services, we generated $6 billion in revenue, an increase of 20% over the March quarter last year, thanks primarily to the continued strong performance of the App Store, with revenue growing 35% to a new all-time high. According to App Annie, the App Store generated 90% more global revenue than Google Play in the March quarter, up from a 75% lead in 2015. Among our customers who purchased apps and content from our iTunes Store's, the average amount spent per customer reached a new all-time record in the March quarter. Next, I'd like to talk about the Mac. We sold 4 million Macs compared to 4.6 million last year, a decline of 12%. It was a challenging quarter for personal computer sales across the industry, but we believe we gained market share. Despite the overall market slowdown, we generated double-digit Mac growth in a number of markets, including Russia, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and the UAE. And just last week we updated the MacBook, our thinnest and lightest Mac, with the latest processors, faster graphics, faster flash storage, and longer battery life. We think our customers are going to love this update. We ended the quarter within our four-week to five-week target range for Mac channel inventory. Turning to iPad, we sold 10.3 million units compared to 12.6 million units in the year-ago quarter. We also reduced channel inventory by about 200,000 units, and we exited the quarter within our five-week to seven-week target range. In the segments of the tablet market where we compete, we continue to be highly successful. Recent data from NPD indicates that iPad has 78% share of the U.S. market for tablets priced above $200. And the latest data published by IDC indicates that iPad accounts for 72% of the U.S. commercial tablet market, comprising business, government, and education. iPad customer metrics are also extremely positive. In February, 451 Research measured a 97% consumer satisfaction rate for iPad Air 2. And among consumers planning to purchase a tablet within the next six months, 59% plan to purchase an iPad, more than three times the purchase intention rate of the next highest brand measured. Corporate buyers reported a 94% satisfaction rate for iPad, and the June quarter purchase intent of 71%. Revenue from other products grew 30% over last year thanks to Apple Watch. We have expanded distribution to 60 countries and introduced bands in beautiful new colors for spring, so customers can personalize their watches in more ways with a range of colors, styles, and materials. Our customers are very happy with Apple Watch, with 451 Research measuring 94% customer satisfaction. We're also making great progress with our enterprise initiatives. IBM now has engagements for more than 200 deployments of native iOS apps for large enterprise customers to accelerate mobile transformation. Our Mobility Partner program also continues to grow, with 108 partners across 20 countries. We see continued broad industry adoption of native iOS apps to transform how professionals do their work and serve their customers. For example, retail bankers are using iOS apps on iPads to greet and onboard customers, reduce queue times, and improve the customer experience. And in hospitals, doctors and nurses are using iOS apps on iPhone and iPad to share and communicate more effectively so that they can spend more time with patients and less time on administrative tasks. Let me now turn to our cash position. We ended the quarter with $232.9 billion in cash plus marketable securities, a sequential increase of $17.2 billion. $208.9 billion of this cash, or 90% of the total, was outside the United States. We issued $15.5 billion in U.S. dollar denominated notes during the quarter, including our first green bond tranche to fund initiatives such as renewable energy and environmental design projects. We exited the March quarter with $72 billion in term debt. We returned $10 billion to investors during the quarter, including $2.9 billion in dividends and equivalents and $7 billion on repurchases of 71.8 million Apple shares through open market transactions. We have now completed over $163 billion of the current $200 billion capital return program, including $117 billion in share repurchases. As Tim mentioned, today we are announcing the latest update to our program, which we are increasing to a total of $250 billion. Once again, we're allocating the majority of the expansion of the program to share repurchases. Given our strong confidence in Apple's future and the value we see in our stock, the board has increased the share repurchase authorization by $35 billion, raising it from the current $140 billion level to $175 billion. We will also continue to net share settle vesting employee restricted stock units. We also know that the dividend is very important to many of our investors who value income, and we are raising it for the fourth time in less than four years. The quarterly dividend will grow from $0.52 per share to $0.57 per share, an increase of about 10%. This is effective with our next dividend, which the board has declared today and is payable on May 12, 2016 to shareholders of record as of May 9, 2016. We continue to plan for annual dividend increases going forward. With $12 billion in annual dividend payments, we are proud to be one of the largest dividend payers in the world. In total, with this updated program, during the next eight quarters we expect to return $87 billion to our investors, which represents about 15% of our market cap at the current stock price. As in the past, we expect to fund our capital return program with U.S. cash, future U.S. cash flow generation, and borrowing from both domestic and international debt markets. We will continue to review capital allocation regularly and solicit input on our program from a broad base of shareholders. This allows us to be thoughtful about the size, the mix, and the pace of the program. As we move ahead into the June quarter, I'd like to review our outlook, which includes the types of forward-looking information that Nancy referred to at the beginning of the call. We expect revenue to be between $41 billion and $43 billion. The revenue guidance implies a year-over-year decline as we lap an incredibly strong June quarter last year where revenue grew 33%, due in part to accelerated iPhone upgrade purchases. This tough compare is compounded by the continued weak macro environment this year and the strong U.S. dollar, which affects our revenue growth in international markets. Embedded in this guidance is a planned channel inventory reduction worth over $2 billion, as we have elected to be prudent about our channel inventory position given the current macro environment. The guidance also reflects a range of possible scenarios related to how quickly we can get into supply/demand balance for iPhone SE. Due to these factors, our expected demand is greater than the revenue range implies. Sequentially, our guidance implies a revenue decline of 15% to 19%, which is comparable to the 17% sequential decline that we've averaged from the March to June quarter for the last three years, despite the anticipated channel inventory adjustments I just described. We expect seasonal sequential declines in iPhone and iPad sales and a sequential increase in Mac sales. We also expect iPhone ASPs to decline sequentially as we get farther from the launch of iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus and as iPhone SE enters the mix. We know that our revenue guidance falls short of market estimates for the third quarter. We believe the difference comes primarily from three areas
Nancy Paxton - Senior Director, Investor Relations and Treasury:
Thank you, Luca. And we ask that you limit yourself to one one-part question and one follow-up. Operator, may we have the first question, please?
Operator:
First we'll hear with Simona Jankowski with Goldman Sachs.
Simona K. Jankowski - Goldman Sachs & Co.:
Hi, thank you so much. My first question was actually just a clarification in terms of putting in context that $2 billion in channel inventory reduction. What was that last year, just to help us make the comparison on a year-over-year basis? And then the bigger question, Tim, was with the smartphone market now reaching a pretty mature growth phase, how does Apple think of itself going forward? Is it as a growth company, or is it a more mature tech company? And if it's still the former, how does that change how you think about M&A, especially given the position you're in with your balance sheet strategically?
Luca Maestri - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President:
Simona, let me give you the data points on the sell-through, and then I'll let Tim answer the strategic question. We had a channel inventory reduction that was worth a bit less than $800 million a year ago.
Timothy Donald Cook - Chief Executive Officer & Director:
Simona, hi, it's Tim. In terms of do I think the smartphone market is mature, I think that the market, as you know, is currently not growing. However, my view of that is that's an overhang of the macroeconomic environment in many different places in the world. And we're very optimistic that this too shall pass and that the market and particularly us will grow again. The reason that we're optimistic is we look at the three places that iPhone sales come from. And from an upgrade point of view as I mentioned in my comments, we compare favorably, slightly better than the upgrade cycle that we saw on the iPhone 5s. We're lower than the iPhone 6, but I think all of us know that that was an extraordinary cycle that accelerated upgrades from 2016 into 2015. And so that comparable will be tough for this year, but that's a transitory thing. As we look at switchers, we're extremely excited that for the first half we set a record from switchers from other platforms, the largest we've ever seen in any six-month period before, so we've got traction there. And then on emerging markets, if you take a look at India, we grew by 56%, and we're placing increasing emphasis in these areas, where it's clear there will be disproportionate growth versus the more developed areas. The next thing is with the iPhone SE, we have seen our ability to attract even more customers into the platform with an incredible product that is at a new price point for us with the latest technology, and so we're optimistic about attracting even more customers with that. We also look at our pipeline, and we're very excited about what's in our pipeline. And so all of those things make me optimistic. Your other question was on M&A. Regardless of the first, we're always looking in the market about things that could complement things that we do today, become features in something we do, or allow us to accelerate entry into a category that we're excited about. And so as I said before, our test is not on the size. We would definitely buy something larger than we've bought thus far. It's more about the strategic fit and whether it's a great technology and great people. And so we continue to look and we stay very active in the M&A market.
Simona K. Jankowski - Goldman Sachs & Co.:
Thank you.
Nancy Paxton - Senior Director, Investor Relations and Treasury:
Thank you, Simona. Can we have the next question, please?
Operator:
From Piper Jaffray, we'll hear from Gene Munster.
Eugene Charles Munster - Piper Jaffray & Co (Broker):
Good afternoon. Tim, could you talk a little bit about the iPhone ASP trends? And specifically, you mentioned that the iPhone SE is going to impact it. But how are you thinking about the aspirational market share that's out there and your actual market share and using price to close that gap? Is it just the iPhone SE, or could there be other iPhone models that will be discounted to try to be more aggressive in emerging markets? And one for Luca, can you talk a little bit about the Services segment in terms of what piece of the services is driving growth, and maybe a little bit about the profitability on a net basis versus a gross basis that you've referred to in the past? Thanks.
Timothy Donald Cook - Chief Executive Officer & Director:
Gene, I think the iPhone SE is attracting two types of customers. One is customers that wanted the latest technology but wanted it in a more compact package, and we clearly see even more people than we thought in that category. And then secondly, it's attracting people who aspire to own an iPhone but couldn't quite stretch to the entry price of the iPhone, and we've established a new entry. And so I think both of these markets are very, very important to us, and we're really excited about where it can take us. I do think that we will be really happy with the new-to-iPhone customers that we see from here because of the early returns we've had. We are currently supply constrained, but we'll be able to work our way out of this at some point. But it's great to see the overwhelming demand for it. I'll let Luca comment on the ASPs.
Luca Maestri - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President:
So on the ASPs, Gene, we mentioned that we're going to be down sequentially. And this is really the combination of two factors when we go from the March quarter to the June quarter. It's the fact that we are having the iPhone SE entering the mix, and that obviously is going to have a downward pressure on ASP. And also this channel inventory reduction that we've talked about, obviously the channel inventory reduction will come from higher-end models, and that is also affecting the sequential trend on ASPs. The question on Services, when we look at our Services business, it's obviously growing very well across the board. The biggest element and the part of the Services business that is growing very well, we mentioned 35%, is the App Store. It's interesting for us that our Music business, which had been declining for a number of quarters, now that we have both a download model and a streaming model, we have now hit an inflection point. And we really believe that this will be the bottom and we can start growing from there over time. We have many other Services businesses that are doing very well. We have an iCloud business that is growing very quickly, faster than the App Store from a much lower base, but I think it's important for us as we continue to develop these businesses. Tim has talked about Apple Pay. It doesn't provide a meaningful financial contribution at this point, but as we look at the amount of transactions that are going through Apple Pay right now and we think ahead for the long term, that could be an interesting business for us as well. From a profitability standpoint, we had mentioned last time that when you look at it on a gross basis, so in terms of purchase value of these services, the profitability of the business is similar to company average. Of course, when you net out the amount that is paid to developers and you look at it in terms of what is reported in our P&L, obviously that business has a profitability that is higher than company average. We don't get into the specifics of specific products or services, but it's very clear it's significantly higher than company average.
Eugene Charles Munster - Piper Jaffray & Co (Broker):
Thank you.
Nancy Paxton - Senior Director, Investor Relations and Treasury:
Thanks, Gene. Can we have the next question, please?
Operator:
Katy Huberty with Morgan Stanley.
Kathryn Lynn Huberty - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC:
Yes, thank you. First for Luca, this is the worst gross margin guide in a year and a half or so. And over the last couple of quarters, you've talked about a number of tailwinds, including component cost, the lower accounting deferrals that went into effect in September. You just mentioned the Services margins are above corporate average. So the question is, are some of those tailwinds winding down, or is the significant guide down in gross margins for the June quarter entirely related to volume and the iPhone 5 SE? And then I have a follow-up for Tim.
Luca Maestri - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President:
Katy, clearly the commodity environment remains quite favorable, and we continue to expect cost improvements. The other dynamics that you've mentioned are still there. Obviously, what is different and particularly as we look at it on a sequential basis coming out of the March quarter, we will have lots of leverage, and that obviously is going to have a negative impact on margins. And the other factor that's important to keep in mind is this different mix of products. And particularly when you look at iPhone, what I was mentioning to Gene earlier, I think we've got a couple of things that are affecting not only ASPs, but obviously they also affect margins. And it's the fact that we had a channel inventory reduction at the top end of the range, and we've got the introduction of the iPhone SE at the entry level of the range. And so when you take into account those factors, those are the big elements that drive our guidance range right now.
Kathryn Lynn Huberty - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC:
Okay, thank you, and then a question for Tim. I appreciate the optimism around longer-term iPhone unit growth, but with developed market penetration in the – anywhere from 60% to 80%, the growth is going to have to come from new markets. You've talked about India. Can you just spend a little bit more time on that market? What are some of the hurdles you have to overcome for that to be a larger part of the business? When should we expect Apple to have more distribution and specifically your own stores in that country? Thanks.
Timothy Donald Cook - Chief Executive Officer & Director:
Katy, in the short term, let me just make a couple of comments on the developed markets just to make sure this is clear. If you look at our installed base of iPhone today versus two years ago, it's increased by 80%. And so when you think about upgrade cycles, upgrade cycles would have varying rates on it. As I talked about it in the comments, the iPhone 6s upgrade rate is slightly higher than the iPhone 5s but lower than the iPhone 6. But the other multiplier in that equation is obviously the size of the installed base. And so the nut of the idea is that I think there's still really, really good business in the developed markets, so I wouldn't want to write those off. And it's our jobs to come up with great products that people desire, and also to continue to attract over Android switchers. With our worldwide share, there's still quite a bit of room in the developed markets as well. And from an India point of view, if you look at India, and each country has a different story a bit, but the things that have held not only us back perhaps but some others as well is that the LTE rollout with India just really began this year, and so we'll begin to see some really good networks coming on in India. That will unleash the power and capability of the iPhone in a way that an older network, a 2.5G or even some 3G networks, would not do. And so the infrastructure is one key. The second one is building the channel out. Unlike the U.S., as an example, where the carriers in the U.S. sell the vast majority of phones that are sold in the United States, in India the carriers in general sell virtually no phones. And so it's out in retail, and retail is many, many different small shops. And so we've been in the process – it's not something that we just started in the last few weeks. We've been working in India now for a couple of years or more, but we've been working with great energy over the last 18 months or so, and I'm encouraged by the results that we're beginning to see there, and believe there's a lot, lot more there. It is already the third largest smartphone market in the world. But because the smartphones that are working there are low end, primarily because of the network and the economics, the market potential has not been as great there. But I view India as where China was maybe seven to ten years ago from that point of view, and I think there's a really great opportunity there.
Nancy Paxton - Senior Director, Investor Relations and Treasury:
Thank you, Katy. Can we have the next question, please?
Operator:
We'll go to Toni Sacconaghi with Bernstein.
A.M. Sacconaghi, Jr. - Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. LLC:
Yes, thank you. I have one and then a follow-up as well. My sense is that you talked about adjusting for the changes in channel inventory, that you're guiding for relatively normal sequential growth. And I think if you do the math, it's probably the same or perhaps a touch worse in terms of iPhone unit growth sequentially relative to normal seasonality between fiscal Q2 and Q3. I guess the question is, given that you should be entering new markets and you should see pronounced elasticity from the iPhone SE device, why wouldn't we be seeing something that was dramatically above normal seasonal in terms of iPhone revenues and units for this quarter? Maybe you could push back on me, but I can't help thinking that when Apple introduced the iPad mini in a similar move to move down-market, there was great growth for one quarter, and the iPad never grew again, and margins and ASPs went down. And it looks like you're introducing the SE, and at least on a sequential basis, you're not calling for any uplift even adjusting for channel inventory. And ASPs I presume will go down and certainly it's impacting gross margins, as you've guided to. So could you respond to, A), why you're not seeing the elasticity? And, B), is the analogy with the iPad mini completely misplaced?
Timothy Donald Cook - Chief Executive Officer & Director:
Toni, it's Tim. Let me see if I can address your question. The channel inventory reduction that Luca referred to, the vast, vast majority of that is in iPhone, and so that would affect the unit compare that you may be thinking about. The iPhone SE, we are thrilled with the response that we've seen on it. It is clear that there is a demand there even much beyond what we thought. And so that is really why we have the constraint that we have. And so do I think it will be like the iPad mini? No, I don't think so. I don't see that. I think that the tablet market in general, one of the challenges with the tablet market is that the replacement cycle is materially different than in the smartphone market. And so as you probably know, we haven't had an issue in customer satisfaction on the iPad. It's incredibly high. And we haven't had an issue with usage of the iPad. The usage is incredibly high. But the consumer behavior there is you tend to hold on for a very long period of time before an upgrade. We continue to be very optimistic on the iPad business. And as I had said in my remarks, we believe we're going to have the best compare for iPad revenue this quarter that we have had in quite some time. And so we'll report back in July on that one. But I think iPhone has a particularly different kind of cycle to it than the tablet market.
A.M. Sacconaghi, Jr. - Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. LLC:
Okay. And if I can follow up, Tim, you alluded to replacement cycles and differences between the iPad and the iPhone. My sense was when you were going through the iPhone 6 cycle was that you had commented that the upgrade cycle was not materially different. I think your characterization was that it accelerated a bit in the U.S. but international had grown to be a bigger part of your business, and replacement cycles there were typically a little bit longer. And so I'm wondering. If there was only a modest difference between the iPhone 5s and the iPhone 6, how big a difference are we really seeing in terms of replacement cycles across the last three generations? And maybe you can help us. If the replacement cycle was flat this year relative to what you saw last year, how different would your results have been this quarter and the first half?
Timothy Donald Cook - Chief Executive Officer & Director:
There's a lot there. Let me just say I don't recall saying the things that you said I said about the upgrade cycle. Let me get that out of the way. Now let me describe without the specific numbers. The iPhone 6s upgrade cycle that we've measured for the first half of this year, so the first six months of our fiscal year to be precise, is slightly better than the rate that we saw with the iPhone 5s two years ago, but it's lower than the iPhone 6. I don't mean just a hair lower. It's a lot lower. And so without giving you exact numbers, if we would have the same rate on iPhone 6s that we did iPhone 6, it would be time for a huge party. It would be a huge difference. Now the good news is – the great news from my point of view is I think we're strategically positioned very well because we've announced the iPhone SE. We are attracting customers that we previously didn't attract. That's really great. And this tough compare eventually isn't the benchmark. And the installed base is up 80% over the last two years. And so all of those I think bode well. And the switcher comments I made earlier, I wouldn't underestimate that because that's very important for us in every geography. So thanks for the question.
A.M. Sacconaghi, Jr. - Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. LLC:
Thank you.
Nancy Paxton - Senior Director, Investor Relations and Treasury:
Thanks, Toni. Can we have the next question, please?
Operator:
From Cross Research Group, we'll hear from Shannon Cross.
Shannon S. Cross - Cross Research LLC:
Thank you very much. I have a couple questions. One, Tim, can you talk a bit about what's going on in China? I know the Greater China revenue I think was down 26%. You did talk about Mainland China. But just if you could, talk about some of the trends you're seeing there and how you think it's playing out, and maybe your thoughts on iPhone SE adoption within China as well.
Timothy Donald Cook - Chief Executive Officer & Director:
Shannon, thanks for the question. If you take Greater China, we include Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Mainland China in the Greater China segment that you see reported on your data sheet. The vast majority of the weakness in the Greater China region sits in Hong Kong. And our perspective on that is it's a combination of the Hong Kong dollar being pegged to the U.S. dollar, and therefore it carries the burden of the strength of the U.S. dollar. And that has driven tourism, international shopping, and trading down significantly compared to what it was in the year ago. If you look at Mainland China, which is one that I am personally very focused on, we are down 11% in Mainland China on a reported basis. On a constant currency basis, we're only down 7%. And the way that we really look at the health or underlying demand is look at sell-through. And if you look at it there, we were down 5%. And keep in mind that that's down 5% on a comp a year ago that was up 81%. And so as I back up from this and look at the larger picture, I think China is not weak as has been talked about. I see China as may not have the wind at our backs that we once did, but it's a lot more stable than what I think is the common view of it. And so we remain really optimistic on China. We opened seven stores there during the quarter. We now are at 35. We'll open five more this quarter to achieve 40, which we had talked about before. And the LTE adoption continues to rise there, but it's got a long way ahead of it. And so we continue to be really optimistic about it and just would ask folks to look underneath the numbers at the details of them before concluding anything. Thanks for the question.
Shannon S. Cross - Cross Research LLC:
Okay, thanks. And then my second question is with regard to OpEx leverage or thinking about when I look at the revenue, your revenue is below our expectations, but OpEx is pretty much in line. So how are you thinking about potential for leverage, I don't know, cost containment maybe when macro is bad and revenue is under pressure? And how are you juggling that versus the required investment you need to go forward?
Luca Maestri - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President:
Shannon, it's Luca. Of course we think about it. We think about it a lot. And so when you look at our results, for example, our OpEx for the quarter, for the March quarter was up 10%, which is the lowest rate that you've seen in years. And when you look within OpEx, you actually see two different dynamics. You see continued significant investments in research and development because we really believe that's the future of the company. We continue to invest in initiatives and projects ahead of revenue. We have a much broader portfolio than we used to have. We do much more in-house technology development than we used to do a few years ago, which we think is a great investment for us to make. And so that part we really need to protect and we want to continue to invest in the business. And then when you look at our SG&A portion of OpEx for the March quarter, it was actually down slightly. So obviously, we think about it, and of course we look at our revenue trend and we take measures accordingly. And when you look at the guidance that we provided for the June quarter, that 10% year-over-year increase that I mentioned to you for the March quarter goes down to a range of 7% to 9% up. And again, the focus is on making investments in R&D and continuing to run SG&A extremely tightly and in a very disciplined way. As you know, our E-to-R, expense-to-revenue ratio, is around 10%. It's something that we're very proud of. It's a number that is incredibly competitive in our industry, and we want to continue to keep it that way. At the same time, we don't want to underinvest in the business.
Shannon S. Cross - Cross Research LLC:
Thank you.
Nancy Paxton - Senior Director, Investor Relations and Treasury:
Than you, Shannon. Could we have the next question, please?
Operator:
From UBS, we'll hear from Steve Milunovich.
Steven M. Milunovich - UBS Securities LLC:
Thank you. Tim, I first wanted to ask you about Services, and how do you view Services? You've obviously highlighted it the last two quarters. Do you view it going forward as a primary driver of earnings, or do you view it – you mentioned platforms in terms of your operating systems, which I would agree with. And in that scenario, I would argue it's more a supporter of the ecosystem and a supporter of the hardware margins over time and therefore somewhat subservient to hardware. So it's great that it's growing, but longer term, I would view its role as more creating ecosystem that supports the high margins on hardware as opposed to independently driving earnings. How do you think about it?
Timothy Donald Cook - Chief Executive Officer & Director:
The most important thing for us, Steve, is that we want to have a great customer experience. So overwhelmingly, the thing that drives us are to embark on services that help that and become a part of the ecosystem. The reality is that in doing so, we have developed a very large and profitable business in the Services area. And so we felt last quarter and working up to that that we should pull back the curtain so that people could – our investors could see the Services business both in terms of the scale of it and the growth of it. As we said earlier, the purchase value of the installed base services grew by 27% during the quarter, which was an acceleration over the previous quarter. And the value of it hit just – or was just shy of $10 billion. And so it's huge, and we felt it was important to spell that out.
Steven M. Milunovich - UBS Securities LLC:
Okay. And then going back to the upgrades of the installed base, you clearly mentioned that you've pulled forward some demand, which makes sense. But there does seem to be a lengthening of the upgrade cycle, particularly in the U.S. AT&T and Verizon have talked about that. Investors I think perceive that maybe the marginal improvements on the phone might be less currently and could be less going forward. At the same time, I think you just announced that you can get the upgrade program online, which I guess potentially could shorten it. Do you believe that upgrade cycles are currently lengthening and can continue to do so?
Timothy Donald Cook - Chief Executive Officer & Director:
What we've seen is that it depends on what you compare it to. If you compare to the iPhone 5s, what we're seeing is the upgrade rate today is slightly higher or that there are more people upgrading, if you will, in a similar time period in terms of rate than the iPhone 5s. But if you compare to iPhone 6, you would clearly arrive at the opposite conclusion. And so I think it depends on people's reference points. And we thought it very important in this call to be very clear and transparent about what we are seeing. And so I think in retrospect, you can look at it and say, well maybe the appropriate measure is more to the iPhone 5s, and I think everybody intuitively thought that the upgrades were accelerated with the iPhone 6. In retrospect, when you look at the periods, they clearly were.
Steven M. Milunovich - UBS Securities LLC:
Thank you.
Nancy Paxton - Senior Director, Investor Relations and Treasury:
Thanks, Steve. Can we have the next question, please?
Operator:
We'll go to Rod Hall with JPMorgan.
Rod B. Hall - JPMorgan Securities LLC:
Thanks, guys, for fitting me in. I wanted to start with a more general question. I guess. Tim, this one is aimed at you. As you think about where you thought things were going to head last quarter when you reported to us and how it's changed this quarter, obviously this kind of a disappointing demand environment. Can you just help us understand what maybe the top two or three things are that have changed, so as we walk away from this we understand what the differences are and what the direction of change is? And I've got a follow up.
Timothy Donald Cook - Chief Executive Officer & Director:
I think, Rod, you're probably indirectly asking about our trough comment, if you will, from last quarter. And when we made that, we did not contemplate or comprehend that we were going to make a $2 billion-plus reduction in channel inventory during this quarter. And so if you factor that in and look at true customer demand, which is the way that we look at it internally, I think you'll find a much more reasonable comparison.
Rod B. Hall - JPMorgan Securities LLC:
Okay, great. Thank you. And then for my follow-up, I wanted to ask you about the tax situation a little bit. Treasury obviously has made some rule changes, and I wonder maybe if, Luca, you could comment on what the impact to Apple from those is, if anything; and, Tim, maybe more broadly, how you guys see the tax situation for Apple looking forward? Thanks.
Luca Maestri - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President:
Yes. Rod, these are new regulations. We are in the process of assessing them. Frankly, from first read, we don't anticipate that they're going to have any material impact on our tax situation. Some of them relate to inversion transactions, so obviously that's not an issue for us. Some of them are around internal debt financing, which is not something that we use, so we don't expect any issue there. As you know, we are the largest U.S. taxpayer by a wide margin, and we already pay full U.S. tax on all the profits from the sales that we make in the United States. So we don't expect them to have any impact on us. On tax reform, maybe I can continue, and I'll let Tim provide more color, but we've been strong advocates for comprehensive corporate tax reform in this country. We continue to do that. We think a reform of the tax code would have significant benefits for the entire U.S. economy, and we remain optimistic that we're going to get to a point where we can see that tax reform enacted. At that point in time, of course, we would have much more flexibility around optimizing our capital structure and around providing more return of capital to our investors.
Timothy Donald Cook - Chief Executive Officer & Director:
The only thing I would add, Rod, is I think there are a growing number of people in both parties that would like to see comprehensive reform, and so I'm optimistic that it will occur. It's just a matter of when. And that's difficult to say, but I think most people do recognize that it's in the U.S.'s interest to do this.
Rod B. Hall - JPMorgan Securities LLC:
Great. Thanks, guys.
Nancy Paxton - Senior Director, Investor Relations and Treasury:
Thank you, Rod. A replay of today's call will be available for two weeks as a podcast on the iTunes Store and webcast on Apple.com/investor and via telephone. The numbers for the telephone replay are 888-203-1112 or 719-457-0820, and please enter confirmation code 7495552. And these replays will be available by approximately 5:00 PM Pacific time today. Members of the press with additional questions can contact Kristen Huguet at 408-974-2414, and financial analysts can contact Joan Hoover or me with additional questions. Joan is at 408-974-4570, and I'm at 408-974-5420. Thanks again for joining us.
Operator:
Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude today's presentation. We do thank everyone for your participation.
Executives:
Nancy Paxton - Senior Director, IR Tim Cook - CEO Luca Maestri - CFO
Analysts:
Simona Jankowski - Goldman Sachs Gene Munster - Piper Jaffray Katy Huberty - Morgan Stanley Toni Sacconaghi - Sanford C. Bernstein Shannon Cross - Cross Research Brian White - Drexel Hamilton Kulbinder Garcha - Credit Suisse Mark Moskowitz - JPMorgan Jim Suva - Citi
Operator:
Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to this Apple Incorporated First Quarter Fiscal Year 2016 Earnings Release Conference Call. Today's call is being recorded. At this time, for opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn the call over to Nancy Paxton, Senior Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, ma'am.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you. Good afternoon and thanks for joining us. Before we begin, we want you to know that in addition to our press release and summary data schedule, we've published some supplemental material that we'll be referring to in our remarks today and you can find a link to this supplemental material on our Investor Relations' website, at apple.com/investor. And it's also included as an exhibit in the Form 8-K we filed with the SEC earlier today. Speaking first today is Apple CEO, Tim Cook, and he will be followed by CFO, Luca Maestri and after that, we'll open the call to questions from analysts. Please note that some of the information you'll hear during our discussion today will consist of forward-looking statements, including, without limitation, those regarding revenue, gross margin, operating expenses, other income and expense, taxes and future business outlook. Actual results or trends could differ materially from our forecasts. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in Apple's Form 10-K for 2015 and the Form 8-K filed with the SEC today that I mentioned earlier, along with today's press release. Apple assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements or information which speaks as of their respective dates. I'd now like to turn the call over to Tim for introductory remarks.
Tim Cook:
Thanks, Nancy, and good afternoon, everyone, and thank you very much for joining us. Today, we're reporting Apple's strongest financial results ever. We generated all-time record quarterly revenue of $75.9 billion in the December quarter, in line with our expectations and up 2% over last year's blockbuster results. This is a huge accomplishment for our company, especially given the turbulent world around us. In constant currency, our growth rate would have been 8%. Our record revenue and continued strong operating performance also led to an all-time record quarterly net income of $18.4 billion. We sold 74.8 million iPhones in the December quarter, an all-time high. To put that volume into perspective, it's an average of over 34,000 iPhones an hour, 24 hours a day, seven days a week for 13 straight weeks. It's almost 50% more than our Q1 volume just two years ago and more than four times our volume five years ago. 74.8 million iPhones is an incredible number and it speaks to both the immense popularity of iPhone and the phenomenal execution of our teams to deliver a massive number of devices in such a short period of time. Our results are particularly impressive, given the challenging global macroeconomic environment. We're seeing extreme conditions unlike anything we've experienced before just about everywhere we look. Major markets, including Brazil, Russia, Japan, Canada, Southeast Asia, Australia, Turkey and the eurozone, have been impacted by slowing economic growth, falling commodity prices and weakening currencies. Since the end of fiscal 2014, for instance, the euro and British pound are down double-digits, and major currencies such as the Canadian dollar, Australian dollar, Mexican peso, and Turkish lira have declined 20% or more. The Brazilian real is down more than 40% and the Russian ruble has declined more than 50%. 66% of Apple's revenue is now generated outside the United States, so foreign currency fluctuations have a very meaningful impact on our results. Page one of our supplemental material illustrates this point. $100 of Apple's non-U.S. dollar revenue in Q4 of 2014 translated to only $85 last quarter due to the weakening currencies in our international markets. As you can see, the movement has been dramatic. Last quarter alone, the currency impact has been very large. Page two of our supplemental material illustrates our Q1 revenue and growth rates expressed in constant currency. The 8% growth rate I spoke about earlier translates to $80.8 billion in constant currency revenue, which is $5 billion more than our reported revenue. For perspective, that difference is about the size of the annual revenue of a Fortune 500 company. We know the conditions in China have been a source of concern for many investors. Last summer, while many companies were experiencing weakness in their China-based results, we were seeing just the opposite, with incredible momentum for iPhone, Mac and the App Store, in particular. In the December quarter, despite the turbulent environment, we produced our best results ever in Greater China, with revenue growing 14% over last year, 47% sequentially, and 17% year-over-year in constant currency. These great results were fueled by our highest ever quarterly iPhone sales and record App Store performance. Notwithstanding these record results, we began to see some signs of economic softness in Greater China earlier this month, most notably in Hong Kong. Beyond the short-term volatility, we remain very confident about the long-term potential of the China market and the large opportunities ahead of us and we are maintaining our investment plans. Despite the economic challenges all over the world, Apple remains incredibly strong. We have a very satisfied and loyal customer base. We saw a greater number of switchers from Android to iPhone than ever in Q1, and we are very optimistic about our business over the long-term. Innovation has always been the reason behind our success and we remain committed to making the best products in the world and expanding the Apple experience to change our customer's lives in better and more meaningful ways. We've invested through economic uncertainty in the past and we've always come out stronger on the other side. In fact, some of the most important breakthrough products in Apple's history were born as a result of investing through the downturn. We've also seen these times as opportunities to invest in new markets, just as we're doing now in areas such as India and other emerging markets. Getting back to our record Q1 performance, let me give you some highlights of what we've accomplished since our last quarterly call together. We shipped the amazing new iPad Pro, which has been extremely well received by customers along with a new smart keyboard and revolutionary Apple Pencil. We launched the all-new Apple TV with its own App Store, laying the foundation for the future of television. We had our best quarter by far for Apple TV sales and the number of apps developed for Apple TV is growing rapidly. Today there are over 3,600 apps delivering everything from games to entertainment to educational programming. We expanded distribution of Apple Watch to almost 12,000 locations in 48 countries during the quarter. As we expected, we set a new quarterly record for Apple Watch sales, with especially strong sales in the month of December. We released OS X El Capitan, refining the experience and improving performance for our Mac customers. We also updated the entire iMac family with stunning new retina displays and introduced a new line up of wireless accessories. We launched Apple Pay in Canada and Australia with American Express and announced plans to bring this amazingly convenient, private, and secure mobile payment experience to China, Hong Kong, Spain and Singapore in the coming year. Consumers have spent billions of dollars with Apple Pay. In the second half of 2015, we saw a significant acceleration in usage, with a growth rate 10 times higher than in the first half of the year. There are now over 5 million contactless payment ready locations in the countries where Apple Pay is live today and it's soon to be accepted at thousands of Exxon and Mobil branded stations across the U.S. via their Speedpass+ app. Finally, we also shared the incredible Apple Music experience with even more listeners, with over 10 million paying subscribers less than four months since customers began paying for the service. Our financial position has never been stronger. We had the mother of all balance sheets, with almost $216 billion in cash, which translates to nearly $39 per diluted share of Apple stock. We continue to invest confidently in our future and we also continue to return capital to our shareholders at a rapid pace. Our investors have been asking for a while about the recurring nature of our business. Especially during a period of economic uncertainty, we believe it is important to appreciate that a significant portion of Apple's revenue recurs over time. First and foremost, our customer satisfaction and retention rates are second to none and provide us with a long lasting foundation. For example, recent consumer surveys by 451 Research, formerly known as ChangeWave, measured an incredible 99% customer satisfaction rate for iPhone 6S and 6S Plus and an equally impressive 97% rate for the iPad Air 2. They also indicate that our iPhone loyalty rate is almost twice as strong as the next highest brand. In addition, a growing portion of our revenue is directly driven by our existing install base. Because our customers are very satisfied and engaged, they spend a lot of time on their devices and purchase apps, content, and other services. They also are very likely to buy other Apple products or replace the one that they own. And because of the enduring value of the device, their replacing is likely higher to be given or sold to someone who will also love and use it often. So, as a result, our install base has been growing very fast and has recently reached a major milestone, crossing 1 billion active devices for the first time. This is an unbelievable asset for us. Because our install base has grown quickly, we have also seen an acceleration in the growth of our services business, another large and important source of recurring revenues. Now that we have reached this milestone of 1 billion active devices, we felt this would be a great opportunity to share more information on what has become one of the largest service businesses in the world. So now, I'd like to turn the call to Luca, who will provide more insight into how our platform has grown, followed by details on our record quarterly results.
Luca Maestri:
Thank you, Tim, and good afternoon, everyone. Each quarter, we report results for our Services category, which includes revenue from iTunes, the App Store, AppleCare, iCloud, Apple Pay, licensing, and some other items. Today, we would like to highlight the major drivers of growth in this category, which we have summarized on page three of our supplemental material. The vast majority of the services we provide to our customers, for instance, apps, movies and TV shows, are tied to our installed base of devices, rather than to current quarter sales. For some of these services, such as content, we recognize revenue based on transaction value. For some of the services, such as the App Store, we share a portion of the value of each transaction with the app developer and only recognize revenue on the portion that we keep. To fully comprehend the scale of the services that we are delivering to our installed base and how fast this business is growing, we look at purchases in addition to revenue. When we aggregate the purchase value of services tied to our installed base during fiscal 2015, it adds up to more than $31 billion. That's an increase of 23% over fiscal 2014. In the recent December quarter, purchases of installed base services reached $8.9 billion, which is a growth rate of 24% year-over-year. The size and growth of these services tied to our installed base compare favorably to other services companies you're familiar with. Our installed base services are also quite profitable, with gross margins that, on a purchase value basis, are similar to our company average. Also, we're very excited by the scale and growth of our active installed base, as we indicate on page four. We define an active device as one that has been engaged with our services within the past 90 days. Our active installed base has recently past 1 billion devices with year-over-year growth of more than 25%. Apple is in a unique position of strength. We have world class scales in hardware, software and services all under one roof, which lets us innovate in ways that other companies can't. We have built a huge installed base around four platforms, iOS, Mac OS, watchOS and tvOS. We have tremendously satisfied and loyal customers who are engaged with our services at a fast growing rate. All of this provides us with an unparalleled foundation for the future of Apple business. Let me now turn to the details of our record breaking December quarter. As Tim said, revenue was $75.9 billion, an increase of $1.3 billion or 2% year-over-year. Our growth was driven by all-time record iPhone sales, all-time record revenue from services, the expanded availability of Apple Watch, and the successful launch of the new Apple TV. We achieved this record revenue performance despite a very large negative impact from the weakness of foreign currency and in constant currency; our revenue growth rate was 8%. We once again achieved very impressive results in Greater China, with revenue growing 14% year-over-year and 47% sequentially to an all-time record of $18.4 billion. Emerging markets performance was strong overall, up 11% year-over-year and representing 34% of total company revenue for the quarter. Company gross margin was 40.1%, up sequentially and better than our expectations, mainly due to favorable commodity costs and product mix. Operating margin was 31.9% of revenue and net income was $18.4 billion, a new all-time record. Diluted earnings per share was $3.28, a 7% year-over-year increase over our previous all-time record and cash flow from operations was very strong, at $27.5 billion. For details by product, I will start with iPhone. We sold 74.8 million iPhones in the quarter, an increase of 300,000 compared to last December quarter's sensational results. Total iPhone sales grew 76% in India and more than 45% in Korea, Middle East and Africa. Sales were also up 20% or more in many western European countries and grew 18% in Mainland China. iPhone ASP was $691 compared to $687 in the year ago quarter, in spite of a very unfavorable foreign exchange impact. We continue to see very strong interest in iPhone not only with consumers but also with business users. Among corporate buyers planning to purchase smartphones in the March quarter, 451 Research found that 79% planned to purchase iPhones. That is the highest iPhone purchase intent in the eight-year history of the survey. We started the quarter below our channel inventory target range and thanks to an extremely successful manufacturing ramp; we were able to exit the quarter slightly above the low end of our target range of five to seven weeks of iPhone channel inventory. Next, I'd like to talk about the Mac. We sold 5.3 million Macs compared to 5.5 million last year, a decline of 4%. We continued our long running trend of PC market share gains, based on IDC's latest estimate of an 11% global market contraction, and we were especially happy with 27% year-over-year Mac sales growth in Mainland China. We ended the quarter within our four to five-week target range for Mac channel inventory. Turning to iPad, we sold 16.1 million, compared to 21.4 million in the year ago quarter, and we exited the quarter within our five to seven-week target range of iPad channel inventory. In the segments of the tablet market where we compete, we continue to be highly successful. Recent data from NPD indicates that iPad has 85% share of the U.S. market for tablets priced above $200. And the latest data published by IDC indicates that iPad accounts for 67% of the U.S. commercial tablet market comprising enterprise, government, and education. iPad customer metrics are also extremely positive. In November, 451 Research measured a 97% consumer satisfaction rate for iPad Air 2 and among consumers planning to purchase a tablet within the next six months, 65% plan to purchase an iPad. Corporate buyers reported a 95% satisfaction rate for iPad and a March quarter purchase intent of 73%. Our enterprise initiatives continue to expand. IBM released 48 new IBM MobileFirst for iOS apps in the December quarter and there are now over 100 apps in the IBM MobileFirst for iOS catalog for iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch. Our partnership with Cisco has gained significant momentum since we announced it at the end of August. Our engineering teams are on track to deliver exciting new capabilities that create a fast lane for iOS business users by optimizing Cisco networks for iOS devices and apps, integrate iPhone with Cisco enterprise environments and provide unique collaboration opportunities on iPhone and iPad. We are also continuing to grow our mobility partner program. We added more than 25 partners in the December quarter, bringing the total to over 90. One great example of our progress in the enterprise is Eli Lilly, who boosted sales productivity by equipping 15,000 field based personnel across the world with iPad. A leader in mobile technology, Lilly has eliminated laptops in the field and is upgrading its U.S. field sales teams to iPad Pro. Turning to services, we generated almost $6.1 billion in revenue, including $548 million we received from a patent infringement dispute. Excluding that amount, our services revenue was $5.5 billion, a new all-time record and an increase of 15% over last year, thanks in large part to strong growth from apps. Revenue from the App Store increased 27% and the number of transacting customers grew 18%, also setting an all-time record. Among our customers who purchased apps and content from our iTunes stores, the average amount spent per customer reached an all-time high in the December quarter. Revenue from other products grew strongly, up 62% over last year, thanks to the growing contribution from Apple Watch, as well as the successful launch of the new Apple TV, both of which established new all-time quarterly records. We expanded Apple Watch distribution significantly over the course of the quarter and we experienced especially strong results during the holiday buying season. Let me now turn to our cash position. We ended the quarter with $215.7 billion in cash plus marketable securities, a sequential increase of $10.1 billion. $200 billion of this cash or 93% of the total was outside the United States. We returned over $9 billion to investors during the quarter. We paid $3 billion in dividends and equivalents and we spent $3 billion to repurchase 26 million Apple shares through open market transactions. We also launched our sixth accelerated share repurchase program, spending $3 billion and receiving an initial delivery of 20.4 million shares. We have now completed over $153 billion of our $200 billion program, including $110 billion in share repurchases. As we have done in the past, we plan to provide an update on our capital return program when we report our second quarter results in April. We also plan to be very active in the U.S. and international debt markets in 2016, in order to fund our capital return activities. Also today, our Board of Directors has declared a cash dividend of $0.52 per share of common stock payable on February 11, 2016, to shareholders of record as of February 8, 2016. As we move ahead into the March quarter, I'd like to review our outlook, which includes the types of forward-looking information that Nancy referred to at the beginning of the call. We expect revenue to be between $50 billion and $53 billion. We are providing a wider range for revenue than usual for the second quarter because of the volatility we are seeing in the economy and in the financial and currency markets. We expect gross margin to be between 39% and 39.5%. We believe these are extremely strong margins in light of the headwinds we face from foreign exchange and the sequential loss of leverage. We expect OpEx to be between $6 billion and $6.1 billion, we expect OI&E to be about $325 million, and we expect the tax rate to be about 25.5%. As you know, we don't provide guidance beyond the current quarter and it's difficult for us to forecast economic and foreign exchange factors; however, at this point, we believe the March quarter faces the most difficult year-over-year compare relative to the rest of the year. With that, I'd like to open the call to questions.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Luca. And we ask that you limit yourself to one one-part question and one follow-up. May we have the first question please?
Operator:
[Operator Instructions] Your first question will come from Simona Jankowski with Goldman Sachs.
Simona Jankowski:
Hi, thank you very much. Just in terms of your March quarter guidance, it does imply a double-digit decline at the midpoint. Maybe if you can just clarify, first of all, what FX headwind is embedded in that? And then just going to the fundamental underpinning reasons for that, how much of it do you think has to do with international markets in terms of weakening demand and how much of that do you think is comps versus any other factors you might identify, such as a response to higher prices for the iPhone in certain overseas markets?
Luca Maestri:
Thank you, Simona. Let me take this one. In constant currency, when you look at it for the March quarter, revenue would be down between 5% and 10%. So, we are looking at a 400 basis point impact from foreign exchange for the March quarter. You talked about a number of issues that are, in fact, included in this guidance. In addition to lapping, of course, a very strong year ago quarter -- just remind you that revenue growth a year ago was up 27%, there's a number of things that we're facing. The macroeconomic environment is weakening. When you think about all the -- particularly all the commodity-driven economies, Brazil and Russia and emerging markets, but also Canada, Australia in developed markets, clearly the economy is significantly weaker than a year ago. We talked about the unfavorable FX, which again is 400 basis points. One of the things that we've done to respond to the foreign exchange situation has been to increase the price of some of our products in certain international markets. That has had the effect of protecting our margins, which you've seen have been very strong, both in the December quarter and in the guidance that we provide for the March quarter. But inevitably over time, higher prices affect demand and so we're capturing that in our guidance. So, I would say these are the major reasons and the drivers for the guidance on revenue.
Simona Jankowski:
Thank you.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Simona. Could we have the next question please?
Operator:
And next from Piper Jaffray, we'll hear from Gene Munster.
Gene Munster:
Good afternoon. Tim, could you talk a little bit about the iPhone upgrade program and the theme of iPhone as a subscription? In particular, do you believe that this could have a measurable impact on the December quarter once we anniversary this? And then any thoughts on rolled outside the U.S. when that program would. And I guess my follow-up question would be I know you can't talk about new products, but any high level thoughts on the virtual reality theme. Do you think this is more of a geeky niche or something that could go mainstream?
Tim Cook:
On your first question about iPhone, I think the most important thing, Gene, as you know for us, will always be the product and the experience. And so that's first and foremost. Secondly, I would say we were blown away by the level of Android switchers that we had last quarter. It was the highest ever by far. And so we see that as a huge opportunity. Thirdly, the markets, sort of the emerging markets broader than BRIC, but including all of emerging, when I look at our share in these markets and the LTE penetration, I see huge opportunities. In terms of the upgrade program itself, I think over time, it will be meaningful as customers get into a different pattern. How much of that plays out in the Q1 of 2017 range is difficult to say. My own sense would be that the other items I've mentioned are probably more important but I am optimistic about the upgrade program as well.
Gene Munster:
And then virtual reality?
Tim Cook:
Yeah. In terms of virtual reality, no, I don't think it's a niche. I think it can be -- it's really cool and has some interesting applications.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Gene.
Gene Munster:
Thank you.
Nancy Paxton:
Could we have the next question please?
Operator:
From Morgan Stanley, Katy Huberty.
Katy Huberty:
Yes, thanks. I appreciate the macro comments as it relates to guidance, but can you talk a little bit about how you're thinking consumers might react from an ASP perspective? Do you expect consumers to move down the product line, given the macro environment? And then also, how is channel inventory influencing guidance? Do you feel like channel inventory needs to come down, given the demand trends? And then I have a follow-up.
Luca Maestri:
Couple of points here, Katy. Our iPhone ASP was $691 during the December quarter. We couldn't be happier with the level of ASP that we generated in the December quarter. Keep in mind that the foreign exchange impact on that number was $49. So, obviously, the mix of products was very strong. We had great reception for the new iPhones that we launched at the end of September. Of course, we have a very strong mid-tier this year in the portfolio, with 6 and 6 Plus. But overall, when you look at the outcome during the December quarter, it was very, very strong. So, we feel very good about that and we feel that we have a very, very strong portfolio for iPhone. On the question around channel inventory, we entered the quarter, the December quarter -- and we mentioned it back in October below our target range of five to seven weeks. We have built a bit of inventory during the course of the December quarter. But we have exited at the low end of the five to seven weeks. So, we feel that we are in good shape there. And we've exited the quarter also on iPad and Mac well within the ranges that we want to have.
Katy Huberty:
And then as a follow-up, back in October you guided fiscal 2016 CapEx up over 30%. What's driving that growth? Can you sort of rank it between equipment purchases, data center, and real estate? And given the slowdown that you started to see in December, are you still comfortable with that level of investment growth? Thanks.
Luca Maestri:
Yes. So that is kind of the ranking, Katy. It starts always for us with our tooling and manufacturing process equipment and that is up a bit year-over-year. Then we've got data centers and data centers is a growing expenditure for us, because, as we mentioned in our prepared remarks, our installed base of customers and devices is growing, and is growing very significantly. And the data center capacity that we put in place is to provide the services that are tied to the installed base. So, that type of expenditure goes together with the installed base. And then around facilities, you probably know that we are nearing completion of our new campus here in Cupertino, and so this is the year where we've got our peak requirements in terms of capital.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Katy. Could we have the next question please?
Operator:
From Bernstein, we'll hear from Toni Sacconaghi.
Toni Sacconaghi:
Yes. Thank you. I have a question, a follow-up, please. To start, just on iPhones, it looks like your guidance implies about a 15% to 20% unit decline in iPhones for fiscal Q2, which I think, unless you really see a change in demand profile in the second half, suggests that iPhone units will decline year-over-year for fiscal 2016. And I'd like you to address that question, because the obvious follow-up questions are is that because you believe the smartphone market won't grow or because Apple may be reaching saturation in the market? Is that because Apple's replacement cycle accelerated last year and is decelerating this year and that's why we'll see a decline in units? Or is there something about Apple's ability to gain share in a market where the market is moving to much lower price points? But I'm wondering, and Tim, maybe you're best to answer it, if you can address what appears likely to be a decline in iPhone units and how we put that in the context of how we should think about that, given some healthy data around switchers that you highlighted.
Tim Cook:
Toni, we do think that iPhone units will decline in the quarter. We don't think that they will decline to the levels that you're talking about. We aren't projecting beyond the quarter, as Luca mentioned earlier. But at this point in time, we see that Q2 is the toughest compare. We believe it's the toughest compare because of the year ago quarter also had catch up in it from Q1. If you recall, we were heavily supply constrained throughout the whole of Q1 and so some of that demand moved into Q2. Plus we're in an environment now that is dramatically different from a macroeconomic point of view than last Q2, from a currency point of view, from the level of which we've had to adjust pricing in several of these markets, and sort pf the overall [Indiscernible] in virtually every country in the world. And so it's really all of those factors that play in there and it's difficult to sort out how much is due to which one.
Toni Sacconaghi:
Right. I mean can you speak to any of the points around your expectation for the smartphone market or whether you think your replacement cycle has changed or whether your ability to gain share has changed?
Tim Cook:
The market itself, we don't spend a lot of time on predicting. Our view has always been that if we do -- if we make a great product and have a great experience that we ought to be able to convince enough people to move over. And so as I look at sort of your -- maybe your broader umbrella point about a question on saturation, the metrics I see would strongly suggest otherwise. For example, almost half of the iPhones that we sold in China last quarter were to people who were buying their first iPhone. And certainly if you go outside of China into the other emerging markets, our share is much lower and the LTE penetration is so low, I mean in some cases, it's zero, that it indicates to me that there's still a lot of people, a tremendous number of people in the world, that will buy smartphones and we ought to be able to win over our fair share of those.
Toni Sacconaghi:
Okay. And I just have clarifications; I don't really have a follow-up question. Luca you had talked about channel inventory increasing, it was 18.4 million for iPhone last quarter. Can you tell us how many more units you had this quarter? And then I'm not sure if I misheard you, but I think you said your total installed base grew 25% year-over-year. Can you confirm that? Because if services grew at 13% and your installed base grew at 25%, it almost implies your penetration of your installed base, in terms of your ability to sell services, is going down.
Luca Maestri:
So, -- maybe I'm going to start with services, Toni. The reason why we added this -- I think it's page three of our supplemental material, is to try and explain that a couple of steps. The first one is that of the services that we report, there's a portion, about 85% of all of the services that we report is directly tied to the installed base. There is a smaller portion of our services business that is not related to installed base and more related to when we sell a device. A perfect example would be an Apple Care agreement that you purchase at the time of the sale of the device. And then we are showing that on that portion of installed base driven services business, there is a part that is related to -- where we recognize revenue in terms of the full transaction value. And then there are transactions, like for example, App Store sales, where a portion of the transaction does not get recognized by Apple, but it goes to the developer. So, when you look at it from a purchase value standpoint, actually in the December quarter, we grew 24%, and for the fiscal 2015, we grew at 23%. So, we are growing at very, very healthy levels okay. And to reconfirm the growth of the installed base, yes, it was over 25%. To the question around the channel inventory for iPhone, we grew channel inventory by 3.3 million units during the course of the December quarter. Keep in mind; we started in acquisition where we were below our targeted range. We were significantly short at the beginning of the quarter.
Toni Sacconaghi:
Thank you.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Toni. Could we have the next question please?
Operator:
From Cross Research, Shannon Cross.
Shannon Cross:
Thank you very much. I had a question about gross margin. Luca, you got gross margins of 39% to 39.5% in your guidance and that includes hedging. So, I'm curious about the puts or takes in there. And then can you clarify if within the gross margin this quarter that had the IP licensing contribution, as well? Any color you can give, both on this quarter's gross margin puts and takes, and then also the March quarter. And then I have a follow-up.
Luca Maestri:
Yes. So, -- certainly Shannon, let me start with Q1. I think when you say IP licensing; you mean this patent dispute that was resolved. Yes, it was included in the gross margins and it was worth 40 basis points in the 40.1% that we reported for Q1. For the second quarter, the puts and takes are actually quite simple. From an FX standpoint, the negative impact on a sequential basis from the December quarter is 50 basis points. Then of course, I would say by far the largest impact on margins for the quarter is the loss of leverage, because that's part of our seasonal pattern, which gets offset by a favorable commodity environment that we've seen for a number of quarters now. And in a way, it's the other side of the coin of the foreign exchange situation.
Shannon Cross:
Okay. Thanks. And then Tim, can you talk a bit about -- and I apologize, I sort of lost my voice here. Can you talk a bit about leverage within the model? I know you said you want to invest while there's great opportunity in China and all of that. But given some of the pressures you're seeing, how do you think about where you spend that incremental SG&A dollar and that R&D dollar? And how should we think about it, given you're running $6 billion a quarter?
Tim Cook:
Yeah, on the R&D, Shannon, we're continuing to invest without pause. We have some great things in the pipeline and we very much believe strongly in investing through downturns, such as the one that everyone is going through. In terms of SG&A, we obviously seek to throttle expenditures in SG&A to the business level, with the exception of where we're investing in new stores and, for example, our expansion plans in China have not changed. We are maintaining our investment profile and plans there. We are also continuing to invest in markets where we believe they are great places for Apple for the long-term, like India, as an example of that one. And finally, even in the markets where today, grandly, it looks fairly bleak, from Russia and Brazil and some of the other economies that are very much tied to our oil-based economies. We do believe that this, too, shall pass and that these countries will be great places and we want to serve customers in there and so we're not retrenching. That's not -- we don't believe in that. We fortunately are strong enough to continue investing and we think it's in Apple's best long-term interest to do so. Obviously, from a cost point of view, the downside of economic stress is that some asset prices get cheaper, commodity prices get cheaper, and that sort of thing. And so I think this is exactly the period that you want to invest and do so confidently.
Shannon Cross:
Thank you.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Shannon. Could we have the next question please?
Operator:
We'll hear from Steve Milunovich with UBS.
Nancy Paxton:
Steve, are you there?
Tim Cook:
Steve?
Nancy Paxton:
Let's go on to the next question please.
Operator:
And we'll hear from Brian White with Drexel.
Brian White:
Tim, could you talk a little bit about the next leg of growth in China? Obviously, Apple has done a phenomenal job there, but where do we see the next leg coming from? And also, you mentioned investing in India. Where do you see that over the next two to three years? I think there's 1 billion mobile subscribers there, almost the size of China. Thank you.
Tim Cook:
Yeah. Brian, good question. In terms of China, the LTE penetration as of the end of last October, which is the last data I've got, was in the mid-20s. And so there's an enormous upgrade cycle there for people that are still running on 3G handsets. Also, I've talked about this before, but I think it's worth mentioning again, because it's easy to lose perspective with some of the things you read every day, is that the middle-class in China was less than 50 million people in 2010, and by 2020, it's projected to be about half a billion. And so there's just an enormous number of people moving into the middle-class. And we think this provides us a great opportunity to win over some of those customers into the Apple ecosystem. And so I think the demographics are great. We're continuing to invest in retail stores. Angela and her team have been on this very aggressive rollout plan. We now have 28 stores in Greater China and we're on target to have 40 in the summertime of this year. And so we're continuing on distribution. Obviously, we've got product things in mind and are crafting our products and services with China heavily in mind. We remain very bullish on China and don't subscribe to the doom and gloom kind of predictions frankly. In India, India is also incredibly exciting. India's growth, as you know, is very good. It's quickly becoming the fastest growing BRIC country. It's the third largest smartphone market in the world, behind China and the United States. The population of India is incredibly young. The median age there is 27. I think of the China age being young, at 36, 37 and so 27 is unbelievable. Almost half the people in India are below 25. And so I see the demographics there also being incredibly great for a consumer brand and for people that really want the best products. And as you know, we've been putting increasingly more energy in India. India revenue for us in Q1 was up 38%. We also had currency issues in India, as everybody else did. Constant currency growth was 48%. And so it's a very rapidly expanding country. And I think the government there is very interested economic reforms and so forth that I think all speak to a really good business environment for the future.
Brian White:
Okay, great. Thank you.
Tim Cook:
Yeah.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Brian. Could we have the next question please?
Operator:
We'll hear from Kulbinder Garcha with Credit Suisse.
Kulbinder Garcha:
Thank you. My question's for Tim on the iPhone business. You talk a lot about the macroeconomic weakness weighing on units, but is some of the issue just that last year replacement got accelerated and this year it's kind of normalizing, and that's kind of a one-time headwind in terms of the unit growth that you see in that business. Is any of that going on, or is that not material, in your view? And the other follow-up I had was that you've mentioned in recent calls, helpfully, the percent of the base, prior to when the 6 came out, that were now on the larger screen phones. Can you give us an update on what that number is? I think the last time it was in the low 30s. Thanks.
Tim Cook:
Yeah. So, last question first. The number of people who had an iPhone prior to the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus announcements -- and so this was in September of 2014 that have not yet upgraded to a 6, 6 Plus or 6s or 6s Plus is now 60%. So, another way to think about that is 40% have, 60% have not. In terms of your initial question about is there some of the compare issue that are people that ran out quickly to buy a 6 and 6 Plus and sort of accelerated? There is no doubt that we had a unbelievable year last year and the Q2 was particularly really, really strong because of the pent-up demand that left from Q1 in addition to Q2. And so there's no doubt about that. However, I think you can tell from the numbers that Luca is talking about just on the currency side and that's before thinking through the affect that price increases can sometimes have on the business over a period of time, it's clear that the economic piece is large.
Kulbinder Garcha:
Thank you.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Kulbinder. Could we have the next question please?
Operator:
And next we'll hear from Steve Milunovich with UBS. Mr. Milunovich, you may want to check your mute button.
Tim Cook:
Steve, are you there?
Nancy Paxton:
Okay. Let's try the next question please.
Operator:
And we'll hear from Mark Moskowitz with Barclays.
Mark Moskowitz:
Yes. Thank you. Good afternoon. A question and a follow-up. As far as the question, Tim, I wanted to get a better sense from you in terms of what is the overarching message of introducing a little more details here around services. Is this really to just reinforce the power of the franchise or the platform at Apple in terms of to really navigate tougher macro times in terms of the higher level recurring revenue, or is it a stepping stone to much more in terms of Apple service, i.e. I think of all the stuff you do on the data center side. Could we eventually have seen, with the help of IBM and Cisco that you eventually move more into the cloud services for the enterprise?
Tim Cook:
So, good question. We started breaking out services, as you know, in the beginning of fiscal year 2015. And as that business has grown and as it became clear to us that the investors wanted -- investors and analysts wanted more visibility into that business, we've now elected to break it out and show the full size, scope, growth, and make comments on the profitability of it from a transparency point of view. I do think that the assets that we have in this area are huge and I do think that it's probably something that the investment community would want to and should focus more on. In terms of our future plans, I wouldn't want to comment about any particular thing, but obviously, with breaking this out, we wouldn't be breaking it out if it wasn't an area that was very important to us in the future.
Mark Moskowitz:
Okay. Thank you.
Tim Cook:
Thank you.
Mark Moskowitz:
And I wanted to follow-up on the upgrade advance program dynamics. Can you talk a little more about what you're seeing in terms of in-store at the Apple Stores? Are you seeing any sort of dislocation in terms of folks who are moving to the upgrade or finance program, are they moving more toward Apple versus maybe the in-store percentage that used to be related to the carriers? In other words, are folks just going with Apple now, instead of the carriers, when they buy their phone, as part of these upgrade programs?
Tim Cook:
No, I don't -- honestly, this has nothing to do with wanting to move customers from one person to another. This has to do with wanting to provide customers a very simple way to upgrade. Because we serve a significant number of customers in the Apple Store who want the iPhone when it's new and when it comes out, and so we've designed a program that made it simple and easy to do that. I have no idea over time how the percentage of the sales will vary between carriers and the Apple retail store, but that's not our overriding objective.
Mark Moskowitz:
Okay. Thank you. Good afternoon.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Mark. We have time for one more question.
Operator:
And your final question will come from Jim Suva with Citi.
Jim Suva:
Thank you very much. A question for Tim and then a detail follow-up for Luca. Tim, with the macro situation changing, a lot of CEOs view that and their strategy is very different go-to-market strategy, some change the way they go to market, some change their products. In the past, Apple's been very known in always having a premium product. With the slowdown in the macro FX and also GDP revision, is Apple's strategy go-to-market still always at premium product, or is there a need to go to more also a middle market or lower price point to attract more customers? Just because it seems like growing that installed base and services, as you pointed out, really economically could really help out Apple in the long-term. And then the financial question for Luca is on that patent litigation, Luca, when you gave guidance three months ago, did you have a view that that was coming in? And if so, was that included in the guidance or not, or was that post the quarter guidance? And I assume it's all one-time this quarter you recorded it, it's all gross margin, and then we don't cause that to reoccur again going forward. Thank you very much.
Tim Cook:
Our strategy is always to make the best products. And that -- for the smartphone market, that we are able to provide though several different price points for our customers. We have the premium part of our line is the 6s and the 6s Plus. We also have a mid-price point, with the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus. And we continue to offer the iPhone 5s in the market and it continues to do quite well. And so we offer all of those and I don't see us deviating from that approach. We always want to offer somebody the -- not -- we don't design to a certain price point. We design a great product and we make it priced at a great value. And today, we're able to offer all three of those different iPhone options.
Luca Maestri:
And Jim, on the patent question, yes, obviously this is a one-off item that affected the December quarter. As I said earlier, it's worth 40 basis points. So, without it, our gross margin would have been 39.7%. It will not repeat going forward. To your question around was it included in the guidance, yes, the probability of receiving the amount was incorporated in the development of the guidance range. If you remember, we guided to 39% to 40%, and that number was included within the range.
Jim Suva:
Thank you very much gentlemen.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Jim. A replay of today's call will be available for two weeks, podcast on the iTunes store, webcast on apple.com/investor, and via telephone. And the numbers for the telephone replay are 888-203-1112 or 719-457-0820 and please enter confirmation code 7349088. These replays will be available by approximately 5:00 PM Pacific Time today. And members of the press with additional questions can contact Kristin Huguet at 408-974-2414. Financial analysts can contact Joan Hoover or me with additional questions. Joan is at 408-974-4570, and I'm at 408-974-5420. Thanks again for joining us.
Operator:
Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude today's presentation. We do thank everyone for your participation.
Executives:
Nancy Paxton - Senior Director, Investor Relations Tim Cook - Chief Executive Officer Luca Maestri – SVP and Chief Financial Officer
Analysts:
Katy Huberty - Morgan Stanley Gene Munster - Piper Jaffray Toni Sacconaghi - Bernstein Shannon Cross - Cross Research Steve Milunovich - UBS Simona Jankowski - Goldman Sachs Amit Daryanani - RBC Capital Markets Rod Hall - JPMorgan
Operator:
Good day ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Apple Incorporated Fourth Quarter Fiscal Year 2015 Earnings Release Conference Call. Today's call is being recorded. At this time for opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn the call over to Nancy Paxton, Senior Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, ma'am.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you. Good afternoon, and thanks to everyone for joining us. Speaking first is Apple CEO Tim Cook, and he'll be followed by CFO Luca Maestri, after that we'll open the call to questions from analysts. Please note that some of the information you'll hear during our discussion today will consist of forward-looking statements, including without limitation those regarding revenue, gross margin, operating expenses, other income and expense, taxes and future business outlook. Actual results or trends could differ materially from our forecast. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in Apple's Form 10-K for 2014, the Form 10-Q for the first three quarters of fiscal 2015 and the form 8-K filed with the SEC today along with the associated press release. Apple assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements or information which speaks as of their respective dates. I'd now like to turn the call over to Tim for introductory remarks.
Tim Cook:
Thanks, Nancy. Good afternoon everyone, and thanks for joining us. Today, we are reporting a very strong finish to a record breaking year and I’d like to reflect on some of the highlights. We completed our fiscal year in September, and we are proud to report revenue of $234 billion, an increase of 28% and $51 billion over 2014. This is our largest absolute revenue growth ever. To put that into some context, our growth in one year was greater than the full year revenue of almost 90% of the companies in the Fortune 500. We made huge inroads into emerging markets generating over $79 billion in revenue and growing 63% despite very strong headwinds from foreign exchange rates. These results are made possible by Apple’s commitment to innovation and creating the best products on earth. In the past 12 months around the world we’ve sold over 300 million devices including 231 million iPhones, 55 million iPads and 21 million Macs setting new unit records and increasing our global market share for both iPhone and Mac. We crossed 100 billion cumulative downloads from the App Store and we added powerful new services to our ecosystem, including Apple Pay in the United States, in the United Kingdom, Apple Music in over a 100 countries, and Apple News in the U.S. We also entered an entirely new category with Apple Watch and we are in the very early innings of this promising new part of our business. We generated over $53 billion dollars in net income and grew earnings per share by 43%. We returned almost $50 billion to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases while continuing to invest confidently in research and development, marketing and distribution, our retail and online stores, our supply chain and our infrastructure. We also completed 15 acquisitions to enhance and accelerate our roadmap for products and services. We accomplished all of these things while intensifying our efforts to protect the environment to promote equality and human rights and to ensure the security and privacy we know our customers deserve. We are ending the year on a high note with a record breaking September quarter including sales of 48 million iPhones beating our expectations and up 22% year-over-year. Momentum for iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus remained very strong across the quarter and we established a new launch record for iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus near the end of the quarter. We are seeing strong interest around the world and we’ve been getting great feedback from customers who love the iPhone’s new features including 3D touch, live photos, the new iSight camera, and the powerful new A-9 processor in the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus. We exited the quarter with demand for our new iPhones exceeding supply but we’ve made good progress with our manufacturing ramp in the initial weeks of October. We sold an all time record 5.7 million Macs continuing to defy the negative trend in the global personal computer market which IDC estimates contracted by 11%. The App Store set new all-time quarterly records for both the number of transacting customers and overall revenue. The strong performance of the App Store helped fuel $5.1 billion in services revenue also an all-time record. Sales of Apple Watch were also up sequentially and were ahead of our expectations. This quarter we introduced beautiful new Apple Watch cases and bands including new Gold and Rose Gold aluminum Apple Watch Sport models. We released Watch OS 2 in September paving the way for a whole new class of native apps that are faster and can take advantage of the hardware capabilities of Apple Watch such as the microphone, speaker and the heart rate sensor. Today, there are over 13,000 apps in the Watch App Store including over 1300 native apps such as Facebook messenger, MLB At Bat and Runkeeper and the number is growing rapidly. Apple Watch has already had a tremendous effect on customers’ health and fitness and the stories we’re hearing about its impact are truly inspirational. I personally heard from people who credit Apple Watch with saving their lives and customers are finding new applications all the time in their day to day activities. Revenue in Greater China nearly doubled year-over-year and we continue to focus and invest heavily there. I just returned from a four day visit to Hangzhou and Beijing where we announced major new initiatives to provide renewable energy for our supply chain. I also visited our retail stores in China which are among the busiest in the world. On Saturday we opened a new store, our 25th in Greater China to a very enthusiastic crowd and we are on track to achieve our goal of 40 stores by the middle of next year. Yesterday, we started taking orders for the all new Apple TV and it was a huge first day for this exciting new product. We want to provide the same innovation in the living room that we delivered in our iOS devices. People are already watching more TV through apps today and we think apps represent the future of TV. We’ve built a new foundation around this vision with a new operating system called tvOS innovative ways to connect with your screen and a smart use of Siri to search for what to watch. Next month, we’ll begin shipping iPad Pro, the most powerful iPad we’ve ever made. iPad Pro will enable a new generation of apps for entertainment and productivity, design and illustration, engineering and medical and much more, and with the Apple Pencil and Smart keyboards users can customize their experience making iPad Pro an even more powerful tool for everyone from students to artists, to business professionals. iOS 9 has hit the ground running on track to be downloaded by more users than any software release in Apple’s history with 61% of active iOS devices already running at less than six weeks after its September the 16th release. In late September, we also launched OS X El Capitan which has made the world most advanced desktop operating system more refined and powerful than ever before. Apple Music has set a completely new standard, redefining and combining the best ways to enjoy music in a single immersive app. Over 15 million individual and family accounts are experiencing Apple music including over 6.5 million paying customers. We are thrilled to bring Apple Music to China beginning this quarter along with iTunes, movies and iBooks and we are especially happy to offer such great new and diverse content to our large highly engaged and rapidly growing customer base in China. We are also looking forward to bringing Apple Music to the new Apple TV beginning this week. Apple Pay is seeing double digit growth in transaction month after month and we continue to add major businesses including Starbucks which will roll out Apple Pay support to all its U.S. stores in 2016. Apple Pay now supports merchant rewards programs as well and popular retailers that will be coming online in the next few weeks. We are thrilled to announce today that we are partnering with American Express to bring Apple Pay to eligible customers in key global markets so even more people can experience the easy, secure and private way to pay. Apple Pay will be available to eligible American Express customers in Australia, in Canada this year and is expected to expand to Spain, Singapore and Hong Kong in 2016. The reach of our ecosystem continues to grow and iOS is changing more and more aspects of our customer’s lives in very meaningful ways from their health, to their homes, to their cars. In Health, there are now more than 1,600 health kit enabled solutions that are helping us live a healthier day. In the home there are over 50 brands working on home kit enabled accessories that can be privately and securely controlled from your iPad and iPhone, and in the car more than 50 automobile models have been announced with CarPlay support which provides a smarter, safer and more fun way to use iPhone in the car. And we will continue to work to make the iOS experience even more meaningful across more touch points of our daily lives. The impact of research kit also continues to build. We recently announced new studies on autism, epilepsy and melanoma adding to the important studies already underway on conditions from asthma to diabetes to Parkinson’s disease. Our iOS news app is off to a great start. Nearly 40 million people are reading Apple news and we’ve been getting very positive feedback from the publishers. We have now signed more than 70 publishers representing hundreds of titles and we’re happy to announce that news just launched in the United Kingdom and Australia with partners such as the BBC, NewsCorp, The Telegraph, The Guardian, Financial Times, Daily Mail and the Australian Broadcasting Service. And finally, we are making great strides in the enterprise market, announcing a new strategic partnership with Cisco in September while furthering our progress with IBM in building our mobility partners program. We estimate that enterprise markets accounted for about $25 billion in annual Apple revenue in the last 12 months, up 40% over the prior year and they represent a major growth vector for the future. I’d like to thank our talented and incredibly hardworking employees, our developers and our business partners around the world and of course our very loyal customers for making 2015 Apples’ most successful year yet. With that, I’ll turn the call over to Luca to go over the September quarter results in more detail.
Luca Maestri:
Thank you, Tim. Good afternoon, everyone. It’s great to conclude our record fiscal 2015 with our strongest September quarter ever. Revenue for the quarter was $51.5 billion, an increase of $9.4 billion or 22% year over year. Our growth was driven by the tremendous performance of iPhone, the expanded availability of Apple Watch and all time high services revenue and Mac sales. We achieved these outstanding results despite severe and persisting weakness in foreign exchange rates around the world that affected all our geographic segments and this makes our year-over-year growth rates even more remarkable. In constant currency, our growth during the fourth quarter would have been 800 basis points higher. We once again reported very strong numbers in Greater China with revenue growing 99% year-over-year to $12.5 billion. Emerging markets performance was strong overall up 65% year-over-year and representing 31% of total company revenue for the quarter. Company gross margin was 39.9%, up sequentially better than our expectations, mainly due to lower than expected costs. Operating margin was 28.4% of revenue and net income was $11.1 billion, a new September quarter record. Diluted earnings per share were $1.96, a 38% year-over-year increase and cash flow from operations was $13.5 billion, also a new fourth quarter record. For details by product I'll start with iPhone. We sold 48 million iPhones in the quarter, up 22% year over year with strong performance around the world throughout the quarter. Total iPhone sales were up 120% in Mainland China and grew over 35% in South Asia and increased by over 20% in several markets around the world including Germany and Italy. iPhone ASP was $670, an increase of $67 year-over-year, thanks to more favorable mix and in spite of the very significant negative impact from foreign exchange that I referred to earlier. We increased iPhone channel inventory by less than 2 million units in order to support our new product launch at the very end of September quarter. We exited the quarter with demand exceeding supply and channel inventory below our target range of 5 to 7 weeks. Next I'd like to talk about the Mac. We sold 5.7 million Macs, which is an all time quarterly record and represents 3% year-over-year growth. We extended our very long running trend of PC market share gains based on IDC's latest estimate of a 11% global market contraction. Mac growth was driven primarily by the great customer response to our new MacBook and sales of MacBook Pro also remained strong. We ended the quarter below our 4 to 5 week target range for Mac channel inventory. Turning to iPad. We sold 9.9 million compared to 12.3 million in the year-ago quarter. iPad sell-through was 10.4 million as we reduced channel inventory by about 500,000 units. We exited the quarter below our 5 to 7 week target range of iPad channel inventory. iPad customer metrics remain extremely positive. In August, ChangeWave measured a 97% consumer satisfaction rate for iPad Air 2 and among consumers planning to purchase a tablet within 90 days, 70% planned to purchase an iPad. Corporate buyers reported a 95% satisfaction rate for iPad and a 90 day purchase intent of 73%. In the segments of the tablet market where we compete, we continue to be very successful. Recent data from NPD indicates that iPad has 73% share of the U.S. market for tablets priced above $200. And the latest data published by IDC indicates that iPad has 74% share of the U.S. Commercial Tablet market. As Tim mentioned our enterprise initiatives continue to expand. In September we announced a new strategic partnership with Cisco to optimize their networks for iOS devices with a goal of providing iOS mobile users with great performance advantage over other mobile platforms. Also, during the September quarter, IBM released new mobile first for iOS apps in healthcare, financial services, travel and transportation and industrial sectors, including new apps leveraging iOS 9 and Watch OS 2. There are now 55 apps in the IBM mobile first for iOS catalogue and the list of projects signings is growing rapidly. Inside IBM, Macs are gaining tremendous traction. There are currently over 30,000 Macs deployed within the company with 1,900 more being added each week. IBM tells us that each Mac is saving $270 compared to a traditional PC, thanks to the much reduced support cost and better residual value. This is a terrific example of the kind of opportunity our devices offer to improve user experience and create value in the enterprise world. Our mobility partner program also continues to grow with more than 25 new partners added in the September quarter bringing the total to over 65 and we are already seeing some great success stories with this program. We are also very excited about the potential of iPad Pro and the enterprise. For example, with the Bloomberg professional app, more than 325,000 financial professionals will be able to use iPad Pro to gain instant global access to finance and business news, market data and portfolio tracking and trading tools. Turning to services. We generated $5.1 billion in revenue, a new all-time record, and an increase of 10% over last year mainly due to strong growth from apps. The revenue from the App Store increased 25% and the number of transacting customers grew 18%, also setting an all-time record. Services growth was particularly impressive in China, where Apple App Store revenue grew by 127% year-over-year. The momentum behind the App Store in China has been tremendous with huge interest from developers and customers alike. Our developer program in China has grown dramatically in the last year with over 1 million members in our program today. Revenue from other products grew strongly up 61% over last year, thanks to the growing contribution from Apple Watch. We expanded Apple Watch distribution significantly over the course of the quarter and it was available at almost 5000 locations in 32 countries at quarter end. Our retail and online stores had a very busy quarter. We opened 7 new stores, including our first store in Belgium. That brought us to a global store count of 463 of which 195 are in 15 countries outside the United States. In fiscal 2016, we expect to open or replace between 40 and 50 stores and we continue to place particular emphasis on Greater China where we plan to have 40 stores opened by the middle of next year. Customers have been very interested in the iPhone upgrade program offered in our U.S. retail stores. The iPhone upgrade program gives customer purchasing a connected device an easy convenient way to get a new phone every year with low monthly payments to a third party lender along with the security and protection of AppleCare Plus. After making 12 or more installment payments, customers can upgrade to a new iPhone. Let me also quickly discuss three accounting matters. First, relative to the iPhone upgrade program that I just mentioned, we will be reducing revenue at the time of sale for the cost associated with the program and deferring the portion of revenue related to AppleCare software upgrade rights and non software services for each iPhone sold. Second, in September based on an analysis of market offerings we reduced the estimated selling price of future software upgrade rights and non software services that we defer for each iOS device and Mac sold, the reduction is between $5 and $10 per unit. Third, also in September we lengthened the time period over which the deferred revenue associated to iPads will be recognized from two years to three years. Let me now turn to our cash position. We ended the quarter with $205.7 billion in cash plus marketable securities, a sequential increase of $2.8 billion. $187 billion of this cash, or 91% of the total, was outside of the United States. In the September quarter, we issued a total of $5.8 billion of term debt, consisting of 1.25 billion British pound denominated notes, 2.25 billion Australian dollar denominated notes and 2 billion euro denominated notes. This left us with $56 billion of term debt outstanding at the end of the quarter. We were very active in the market during the quarter and returned over $17 billion to our investors. We paid $3 billion in dividends and equivalents and we spent $14 billion to repurchase almost 122 million Apple shares through open market transactions. We also completed our fifth accelerated share repurchase program in July and retired an additional 10 million shares at settlement. We have now completed over $143 billion of our $200 billion program including $104 billion in share repurchases of which $36 billion was repurchased in fiscal 2015 alone. Now, as we move ahead into December quarter, I like to review our outlook which includes the types of forward looking information that Nancy referred to at the beginning of the call. We expect revenue to be between $75.5 and $77.5 billion compared to $74.6 billion in the year ago quarter. We expect gross margin to be between 39% and 40%. We expect OpEx to be between $6.3 billion and $6.4 billion. We expect OI&E to be about $400 million and we expect the tax rate to be about 26.2%. Also today our Board of Directors has declared a cash dividend of $0.52 per share of common stock payable on November 12, 2015 to shareholders of record as of November 09, 2015. With that, let's open the call to questions.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Luca. And we ask that you limit yourself to one, one-part question and one follow-up. May we have the first question, please?
Operator:
[Operation Instructions] Your first question will come from Katy Huberty with Morgan Stanley.
Katy Huberty:
Yes, thanks, good afternoon. In light of December quarter revenue guidance, firmly low single digit revenue growth and what looks like increasingly tough comps heading into the March quarter, how do you get comfortable that Apple isn’t on the verge of [ex] [ph] growth for the first time in a decade? And then I have a follow up.
Tim Cook:
Katy, it’s Tim. You have to consider the constant currency growth rates. And so if you do that, our guidance is actually 8% to 11% because we have about a 700 basis point FX headwind in Q1. And so the growth is actually quite good underneath that and that’s obviously a problem with everyone struggling with it. Zooming out to the more macro question about growth, here’s what I see currently. We believe that iPhone will grow in Q1 and we base that on what we are seeing from a switcher point of view, we recorded the highest rate on record for Android switches last quarter at 30%. We also look at the number of people that have upgraded, that were in the installed base prior to iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. And that number is in the low 30 percentages. So we feel like we have a very open field in front of us. Our performance in emerging markets although it’s quite good and our revenue was good our market share is low and the LTE penetration in these markets is quite low. Also, if I zoom out and look at China, as I have said before and just to make the point once again is we see an enormous change in China over the next several years. The latest study I have seen from Mackenzie indicates if you look back five years China’s middle class had about 50 million people in it. If you look ahead five years, it will have ten times that number in it. And so -- and I feel like we are reasonably well positioned in China, I’m sure we can do better, but I think we are doing fairly well there. It’s not the only market that we are working on obviously. I was really impressed last quarter with our progress in Vietnam and Indonesia and India among others. Also, from the currency point of view and the weak global economies, we don’t overly focus on this. It’s - my view is that it’s sort of a transitional kind of thing and we invest for the long term, so we are continuing to invest for Apple’s future. In addition to those Apple TV is off to a great start. Apple Watch is just getting going. The app store hit a new record again last quarter and the growth seems to be really great there. I’m really happy with the early days of Apple Music and the people moving from the free trial to the music business. And finally, the enterprise business is not to be underestimated, I doubt very many people knew that we had $25 billion enterprise business that we quietly built in not too many years, but our penetration is low, but we have significant actions going on to really deepen that. So sort of everywhere I look I see significant opportunity. Long answer but I thought you might be interested.
Katy Huberty:
No. I appreciate that. Just as a follow-up on growth, if you look at large services companies, Facebook, Amazon, Google, they're all growing over 20% and it's largely driven by activity of Apple users on iOS devices. Do you feel like there is more that Apple can do to participate in that services growth or you relegated to fundamentals that are tied to device upgrade cycles?
Tim Cook:
Well, the App Store is growing over 20%, it grew 25% last quarter, and so we feel very good about that. That's become a sizeable business. I would also point out that some of these upgrade programs that are in the market, they sort of began to look more like a subscription business in terms of the way they operate. And so we think that in the aggregate that they may reduce upgrade cycles and also the iPhone that has been sold to someone else hits the price point that we're not hitting today largely which could help further fuel the services revenue which we did quite well on last quarter.
Katy Huberty:
Thank you very much.
Tim Cook:
Yep.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Katy. May we have the next question, please?
Operator:
From Piper Jaffray, we'll hear from Gene Munster.
Gene Munster:
Good afternoon and congratulations. Tim, you just briefly touched on as reducing the time between upgrades, but how do you think about the iPhone upgrade cycle compressing over the next few years, obviously the impact from carrier’s changes in the iPhone upgrade program. Can you talk a little bit about when that's going to be rolled out internationally? And then lastly, Luca you mentioned some of the accounting changes related to the iPhone upgrade program. Any sense in terms of what percentage of the Plus – the s upgrades were associated with the upgrade program? Thanks.
Tim Cook:
Gene, in terms of the upgrade program it's early, but here's what we believe our current view is that we do think that the broader upgrade program, so I'm not just talking about our program that in retail, I mean, that is relatively small compared to our total iPhone sales of the company, but the broader thing obviously is that many of the carriers are offering these plans. And that, if you look at them in the aggregate, we think that it would have a positive impact in replacement cycles. We do like the fact that it creates a market for an iPhone at a different price point as well that is a better product than that customer maybe currently buying which would further help from an ecosystem point of view and that's not to be underestimated. It also seems like that from a rollout point of view there's a -- you will see these plans offered in a significant way in the United States already, but in fact these plans are being offered in some derivation in over dozen countries in the world. They're not as pervasive as they are in the U.S. but it seems like we’re on the front end of fairly major trends in the industry.
Luca Maestri:
From a financial perspective, Gene, the transaction on our iPhone upgrade program is a purchase, it’s not a lease and so we recognize our revenue upfront, of course we deduct also upfront the cost associated with the program essentially to provide interest free financing and we need to estimate deferred value of the upgrade option for the customer, but as Tim said, it’s a popular program in our U.S store, in the scheme of things, it’s a small percentage of our worldwide iPhone sales and so we'll have really a negligible impact for example, on ASPs for the phone.
Gene Munster:
And Tim, if we put it all together is it something that has more measurable impact on the business two, three quarters down the road, is that the right way to generally think about it?
Tim Cook:
Yes, we think about it as being – there were some clearly that were offered in the market prior to this cycle. But they became much more pervasive and much communicated, I think much wider with the September announcements. And so, I would sort of expect to begin seeing this somewhere around a year from now.
Gene Munster:
Thank you.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Gene. May we have the next question, please?
Operator:
Moving on, we'll hear from Toni Sacconaghi with Bernstein.
Toni Sacconaghi:
Yes. Thank you. Tim, I appreciated the color that you provided on the drivers of iPhone growth in Q1. I think the investor concern is that Q1 will benefit at least on a year over year basis from three extra weeks of availability in China. And it will also benefit from more of those initial launch days that only two of them were in the September quarter and the remainder will be in the December quarter. And so I guess the investor concern is December is a structurally advantaged quarter in the sense of benefiting from both of those tailwinds on a year-over-year basis. But if we look out beyond December, wouldn't that point to notably lower seasonal growth than the March quarter. And how do we think about the factors affecting unit growth beyond the December quarter? And then I have a follow-up, please.
Tim Cook:
We don't guide beyond December, as you know Toni. I do think that the sort of the macro things that I spoke about earlier, the upgrade programs, the Android Switcher rate, the iPhone momentum in the emerging markets and the LTE penetration in these markets these trends are not one quarter things. These are longer term things. The same – my same response applies and I think we'll do quite good in iPhone. I do believe we'll grow this quarter as we put in our guidance that when you start with a number in the low 30s in terms of the percentage of the installed base that’s upgraded that had a phone pre the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, that number still likely to leave a lot of headroom beyond December. So that's how I look at that. In terms of your first comment, you didn't asked me to comment on that, but just to be clear, our forecasting doesn't work like you articulated it. I recognize that people can have their own models and so forth, but just to make it clear that I'm not agreeing with your point.
Toni Sacconaghi:
Okay. And then just on the follow-up, the reported gains from currency hedging in fiscal year 2015 were significant, several billion dollar contribution to the company. And again, this is not an Apple's specific issue, Luca as you pointed out several times, but how do we think about this notion of currency hedges effectively rolling off and being replaced with hedges that are likely have less of an impact. How do we think about that impact the P&L on a go forward basis, perhaps starting with Q1, but then qualitatively or directionally over the course of the year? And what is some of kinds of things that you've undertaken or planning to undertake that could mitigate some of those concerns?
Luca Maestri:
Yes. I think, Toni, it’s a very good point, I mean, what's going to happen in practice is that we got this portfolio of hedge comp such that over time provides protection to our margins and to our results, but that protection diminishes as we go through the year and so we should expect that in over time during the course of fiscal 2016 that protection will come off assuming that the dollar stays at current levels. Keep in mind, there are some currencies around the world that where we cannot economically hedge and so those currencies are bit excluded from what we're talking about right now. I think my conclusion is that the guidance that we're providing for the first quarter that 39% to 40% it actually an incredible level of guidance given the foreign exchange headwinds that we're dealing with. How do we deal with that? We continue to hedge, so our program continues on an ongoing basis and we will continue to provide some level of protection to foreign exchange movement. In some cases we have realign prices particularly when we launch new products. We tend to do that in a number of countries where the foreign exchange moves have been particularly extreme, and so we tend to recover that through pricing. And then finally, of course we are putting in place a number of cost initiatives that would allow us to deal with the foreign exchange situation. So, overall we feel very strong guidance for the first quarter. And beyond the first quarter as you know we're not guiding and so we'll see over the course of the year.
Toni Sacconaghi:
Thank you.
Nancy Paxton:
Thanks, Toni. Could we have the next question, please?
Operator:
We'll go to Shannon Cross with Cross Research.
Shannon Cross:
Thank you very much. Tim, I wanted to go back to your commentary on the enterprise business, $25 billion I think you said, it was up 40% year-over-year. I know you have a relatively small sales force internally and obviously you utilizing the joint ventures, but as you noted you see that's an important driver of growth. So, how do you attack that market going forward? Will there be changes? Is there something that you need to shift or focus product in a little bit of different directions to make sure you can adequately attack it. Just in general how you're thinking about it?
Tim Cook:
From a product point of view, we'd actually been continuing to change and improve IOS for some time. With every release they are more enterprise features and so, I would describe it as sort of continuation of that cadence perhaps with little more intensity. From a go to market point of view, we will be working with or are working with IBM. With Cisco. We're already working with 75 mobility partners that are principally in the U.S. but that's expanding quickly to international as well. And so, many of these companies have -- in some cases very large sales forces, in many cases the reasonable seize sales force. And in addition to a direct sales force there is a huge worldwide indirect channel that many customers buy from and count on buying some services from. And so I do not envision Apple's having a large enterprise sales force will certainly make – we continue adding some people more on the engineering side, but I don't envision having a large direct sales force.
Shannon Cross:
Okay, great. Thank you. And can you give us some more color on China, 120% year-over-year growth in iPhones, but can you talk in general about what you're seeing in the marketplace and perhaps where you think you in terms of penetration from a smartphone standpoint especially with a China Mobile which has a substantial opportunity to grow given the LTE penetration?
Tim Cook:
Yes. If you look at China, we grew from an iPhone point of view, Greater China, we grew 87% the market grew for. If you take iPhone out of the market number, the certain market x iPhone actually contracted slightly. And so, we've been able to grow without the market growing. iPhone 6 was the number one selling smartphone in Mainland, China last quarter and iPhone 6 Plus was number three. And so, we did fairly well. The sort of the economic question which I know there's a bit lot of attention on, frankly, if I were to shut off my web and shut off the TV and just look how many customers are coming in our stores regardless to whether they're buying, how many people are coming online, and in addition looking at our sales trend, I wouldn't know if there was any economic issue at all in China. And so I don't know how unusual we are with that. I think that there's a misunderstanding probably particularly in the Western world about China's economy, which contributes to the confusion. That said, I don't think it’s growing as fast as it was, but I also don't think that Apple's results are largely dependent on minor changes than growth. I think it’s much more of contributing – I think other things contribute to that much more. That does say, you'll never had problem there, because the economy, I'm not saying, I'm dumb enough to think that. But I just think that the area that it's currently operating within, it's hard to tell the difference of the consumer level for us. I mean, you really can't tell the difference, if you look at sort of our daily and weekly numbers. So, we're very bullish on it, and I would point out that we're investing in China not for next or the quarter after, or the quarter after, we're investing for the decades ahead and as we look at it our own views is that China will be Apple's top market in the world. And that's not just for sales, that's also developer community is growing faster than any other country in the world. And so, the ecosystem there is very, very strong. I was very impressed with the number the developers I met last week and of course, the customers in stores are enthusiastically contagious.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Shannon. Can we have next question, please?
Operator:
We'll go to Steve Milunovich with UBS
Steve Milunovich:
Thank you. Tim, I wanted to talk about the two sources of your iPhone demand selling to current customers and selling to new customers. In terms of selling to current customers you indicated about a third of the base is moved to the sixth line. As much as people talk about that been a huge upgrade cycle and what is the six has have incrementally, 33% not that a bigger number, I would have thought it would be bigger than that. Does this suggest that there is maybe more of a consistency to upgrading than the street perceives. And then on the other side in terms of new customers, just wanted clarity on the switcher number, are you saying that 30% of iPhone shipments in the quarter went to android switchers to IOS. And do you believe that you could actually have more new customers to Apple in fiscal 2016 than you had fiscal 2015.
Tim Cook:
There's a lot there. Let me start with the Android Switcher. What this means is that for customers to purchase an iPhone last quarter and replace the smartphone that 30% of those switched from an android device. And so there would have been some switchers on top of that from other operating systems, but obviously android is the largest one by far. And so that's what that means, and that number is the largest that we've ever recorded since we began measuring it three or so years ago. And so, it’s a huge number, we're very, very proud of that number. In terms of 2016 versus 2015 new customers, it's hard to predict. I'm very happy with how we're doing. We're doing better than we've ever been doing. People -- I know there's a fixation on the upgrade rate. When I look at the upgrade rate, Steve, what I see is I feel good that it’s a low number because that's low number means that there is 69% of the people that are out there prior to the iPhone 6 and 6 plus that haven't bother to upgrade this year. That's a large number. And so, I'd see that is opportunity. Do I think it has anything, does to length to consistency? I think part of it is and I believe that the iPhone upgrade plans that are out there as I've mentioned before it seems to me on the future. We'll tell it’s true or not, but it seems to me it’s going to act as a catalyst to accelerate some of this upgrades. And I think that's not something that we're going to see this quarter or next quarter, but it seems like it’s going to happen beginning a year for now or so. It have begins to be – you've seen the plan. They look more and active like a subscription than they do like a purchase. And that's great for the customer because many of them want to upgrade on a frequent basis and they can do this very, very simply. In terms of new, I don't know, whether we'll more new or not. I can tell you that that's always our objective. We want to add a lot more people to the ecosystem and certainly if you look in the emerging markets, even like, nobody is asking about iPad on the call. But if you look at iPad as just an example, in China, 68% of the people that purchased an iPad it was the first tablet they've owned and 40% of those have never owned any Apple product. Just to go through one product with one set of number. I don't want to get through a bunch of numbers because it does contain the data than I don't want to share. But these are things that we're very focused on. And the first time buyer number is surprisingly strong. And keep in mind that we have a good history of bunch of people buy one Apple product, they have a great experience. They begin to look at other Apple products. And of course we makes they all work well together.
Steve Milunovich:
Thank you.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Steve. Could we have next question, please?
Operator:
From Goldman Sachs, we'll go to Simona Jankowski.
Simona Jankowski:
Hi. Thank you very much. Just is a follow-up to that last question and to put that in context, roughly what percent of the iPhone shipments come from shipments for the installed based versus from your user shipment?
Tim Cook:
I don't know the answer of your question.
Simona Jankowski:
Okay. And then just a follow-up, as Luca mentioned, you had to make some adjustments to the pricing in various regions given the currency move we've had. What had been the response in terms of demand, I guess both in terms of units and revenues in some of these regions like Japan or India, parts of Europe where the local prices has to go up?
Luca Maestri:
Simona, we've made a number of price changes during the course of fiscal 2015. What we've seen in a normal of these markets, we've seen that iPhone sales have been very resilient and that shown in our growth rates. Most recently we've adjusted some prices around the world for the launch of iPhone 6s and 6s Plus. We are very positive about the safest trends around the world. It’s a bit early to tell, because the phones have out there just for four weeks, so its bit early to tell there. Obviously when we increase prices around the world, it's normal to see some impact on sales rates, but so far we were encouraged by the response.
Tim Cook:
Let me go back to your question. And this is an exactly what you're asking that what your view, I think some color is. The reason I can't answer this is, we don't look at any aggregate, we actually look at the detailed because it's much more important for to us to look at, buy iPhone model by country, what percentage going to our first iPhone buyers. Somebody that's never owned an iPhone before. And so if you look at China as an example, it's over 50% of people that bought 6 and 6 Plus were buying their first iPhone. As you move down the line, that numbers goes up. And so a 5s generally speaking is higher in most countries. And so, that gives a feel for very important market and we cannot where the numbers are.
Simona Jankowski:
Great. Thank you very much.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Simona. Can we have the next question, please?
Operator:
Next we'll go to Amit Daryanani with RBC Capital Markets.
Amit Daryanani:
Thanks a lot. Good afternoon guys. Two questions from me as well. I guess, first could you talk about the gross margin dynamic as you go from September to December, the midpoint implies on 20 basis points. I think the last five years that's only happen once the gross margin is going down in fiscal Q1. Can you just talk about what the FX dynamic or what area the other headwinds that you think that implies gross margins being done in December?
Tim Cook:
Yes. Let me give you puts and takes for margins for the December quarter. On the positive side, of course as you mentioned that we would have positive leverage from the higher seasonal volumes. Also what we've seen over the last several quarters is a commodity environment that has been quite favorable and we expect it to remain favorable during the December quarter. On the other hand, of course we are launching a lot of new products. We’ve launched some during September. We are launching some now and everything we launch new products, we make them better. We had features and new technology and these products when we launch and tend to have higher cost structures than the products what they replaced. We have a very good track record overtime to reduce those cost structures, but every time we introduce a new product that is a headwind at the beginning of the cycle for gross margin. While it’s different from a year ago very significantly with the foreign exchange impact that we have mentioned before it remains a very significant headwind as I mentioned earlier to Tony I believe we are dealing with that to a combination of hedging, price realignments [ph] cost initiatives, but on a net basis foreign exchange we will clearly by a sequential headwind.
Amit Daryanani:
Got it. And then Tim when you talk about seeing iPhone growth in fiscal Q1, I’m curious is that statement more reflective of iPhone units or iPhone revenues so that the ASPs could hardly get growth even if units are not there. And then would you expect to exit within the 5 to 7 week optimal inventory range in fiscal Q1?
Tim Cook:
I don’t know that we will exit. We make that call late in the quarter as we see what the demand is because we are actually trying to position the inventory for the following quarter instead of the current quarter. And it’s very difficult to predict. What was your other question?
Amit Daryanani:
I was just curious to your statement on iPhone growth in fiscal Q1, is that a reflection of….
Tim Cook:
Is it revenue? I was making a revenue statement but units are also, yes we expect units to be up as well.
Amit Daryanani:
Thank you.
Tim Cook:
Yes.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Amit. Can we have the next question please?
Operator:
From JPMorgan we’ll go to Rod Hall.
Rod Hall:
Yes thanks for taking my question. I just wanted to ask Tim maybe if you could comment on the mix between iPhone 6 and iPhone 6s. And whether the mix of demand is any different than what you say for instance that the iPhone 5, 5s point whether there is more say iPhone 6, I know you highlighted that the iPhone 6 is a number one phone in China for example and then I have a follow up?
Tim Cook:
The statement I made in China was about Q4 and the 6s was only available in China for two days last quarter. The iPhone 6s is the most popular iPhone that we currently sell. In terms of has there been a change. If you look at iPhone 6 today, and add iPhone 6 Plus and compare that to last year’s 5s we are doing better, at that price point than we were previously.
Rod Hall:
Okay, thank you. And then there’s follow up for what you were doing on the upgrade program. I am wondering if can you envision a time ever made in the U.S. or elsewhere where you would not have to come into an Apple store to activate it or to take advantage of the upgrade you might be able to do that somewhere else, do you start now what your….
Tim Cook:
That’s a really good question. We actually solved that problem back in 2007. But then quickly had to change it in order to scale in a major way. And so that is something that we would always -- sort of always in our mind that one day from a customer experience point of view we would like to make things as easy as possible for the customer. And to some degree you can already do that with buying online. But there are many different plans and search what the people buy, that they have to come in for several times we would love to have that automated and working with our partners, with service providers.
Rod Hall:
Great. Thank you very much.
Tim Cook:
Yes.
A - Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Rod. A replay of today's call will be available for two weeks as a podcast on the iTunes store, as a webcast on apple.com/investor, and via telephone. And the numbers for the telephone replay are 888-203-1112 or 719-457-0820 and please enter confirmation code 795707. And these replays will be available by approximately 5:00 p.m. Pacific Time today. Members of the press with additional questions can contact Kristin Huguet at 408-974-2414 and financial analysts can contact Joan Hoover or me with additional questions. Joan is at 408-974-4570 and at 408-974-5420. Thanks again for joining us.
Operator:
Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude today's presentation. We do thank everyone for your participation.
Executives:
Nancy Paxton - Senior Director, Investor Relations and Treasury Timothy D. Cook - Chief Executive Officer & Director Luca Maestri - Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Analysts:
Kathryn L. Huberty - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC William C. Shope - Goldman Sachs & Co. Eugene C. Munster - Piper Jaffray & Co (Broker) Antonio M. Sacconaghi - Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. LLC James D. Suva - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc. (Broker) Steven M. Milunovich - UBS Securities LLC Shannon S. Cross - Cross Research LLC
Operator:
Good day everyone, and welcome to the Apple Incorporated Third Quarter Fiscal Year 2015 Earnings Release Conference Call. Today's call is being recorded. At this time for opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn the call over to Nancy Paxton, Senior Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, ma'am.
Nancy Paxton - Senior Director, Investor Relations and Treasury:
Thank you. Good afternoon, and thanks to everyone for joining us. Speaking first today is Apple CEO Tim Cook, and he'll be followed by CFO Luca Maestri, and after that we'll open the call to questions from analysts. Please note that some of the information you'll hear during our discussion today will consist of forward-looking statements, including without limitation those regarding revenue, gross margin, operating expenses, other income and expense, taxes and future business outlook. Actual results or trends could differ materially from our forecast. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in Apple's Form 10-K for 2014, the Form 10-Q for the first two quarters of fiscal 2015 and the form 8-K filed with the SEC today along with the associated press release. Apple assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements or information which speak as of their respective dates. I'd now like to turn the call over to Tim for introductory remarks.
Timothy D. Cook - Chief Executive Officer & Director:
Thanks, Nancy. Good afternoon everyone, and thanks for joining us. It's been a busy and exciting quarter and I'm delighted to talk to you about the highlights. Today, we're proud to report record June quarter results with revenues of $49.6 billion and earnings of $10.7 billion. Our year-over-year growth rate in the fiscal third quarter accelerated over the first half of fiscal 2015. Revenues were up 33%, our fastest growth rate in over three years, and earnings per share were up 45%. We achieved these incredibly strong results despite reducing channel inventories across our product lines by over 1 million units and despite the challenging FX environment. Revenue exceeded the high end of our guidance by $1.6 billion as we topped our internal expectations for sales of iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch. We had another stellar quarter for iPhone, establishing a new June quarter record. iPhone unit sales grew 35%, which is almost three times the rate of growth of the smartphone market overall and we gained share in all of our geographic segments. iPhone revenue grew even more strongly, up 59%. The strong iPhone results were broad-based in both developed and emerging markets and we experienced the highest switcher rate from Android that we've ever measured. Most importantly, iPhone customer metrics are tremendous. ChangeWave's most recent survey of US customers found that iPhone has the highest customer satisfaction rate of any smartphone brand by a wide margin, and that among iPhone owners planning to purchase a new phone, 86% plan to purchase another iPhone. That compares to 50% repurchase intent for the next highest brand measured. We also had a tremendous record quarter for Mac, continuing to defy the industry trend with unit growth of 9% in a market that IDC estimates contracted by 12%. Growth was fueled by great response to our new MacBook and we're working hard to catch up with customer demand. We generated over $5 billion in services revenue, setting a new all-time record. Within services, the App Store produced its best quarter ever with revenue growing 24%. Our results from Greater China were outstanding with revenue growth of 112% and iPhone unit growth of 87%. This is particularly impressive given IDC's estimate of only 5% growth for the Greater China smartphone market. We also achieved our highest ever PC market share in the segment with Mac sales growing 33% over last year. And our ecosystem in China continues to grow at a very fast pace, with App Store revenue more than doubling in the quarter. Luca will go into more detail on our product and financial results in a moment. A major highlight of the past quarter for all of us here at Apple was the launch of Apple Watch in April. As you know, we've been very excited to get this revolutionary product to customers. We started taking preorders in nine countries on April 10, and demand immediately exceeded supply by a wide margin. To prioritize those first orders and to deliver the best experience for our customers, we delayed the availability of Apple Watch in our own retail stores until mid June. We made huge progress with the production ramp across the quarter and near the end of the quarter expanded into six additional countries. And in just the past few days, we've been able to catch up with demand, enabling us to expand Apple Watch availability to a total of 19 countries currently with three more countries to be added at the end of this month. The feedback from Apple Watch customers is incredibly positive and we've been very happy with customer satisfaction and usage statistics. Market research from Wristly measured a 97% customer satisfaction rate for Apple Watch and we hear from people every day about the impact it's having on their health, their daily routines, and how they communicate. Our own market research shows that 94% of Apple Watch owners wear and use it regularly, if not every day. Messaging and activity features are among the most popular and social networking apps including Twitter, WeChat and LINE are seeing the most usage among third party apps. We believe that the possibilities for Apple Watch are enormous and that's been reinforced in just the first few weeks since it became available to customers. For example, doctors and researchers at leading hospitals in the US and Europe are already putting Apple Watch to work in improving patients' lives. Nebraska Medicine, the latest hospital to adopt Apple Watch, has rolled out new apps that facilitate communication between patients and doctors and provide quick access to important chart and dosage information. Ochsner Health System of Louisiana is using Apple Watch with hypertension patients to gather important information like daily activity and blood pressure level, and leading cancer centers like London King's College Hospital are incorporating Apple Watch into trials for ongoing care and monitoring of cancer patients. Great Apple Watch solutions go well beyond healthcare. Users are tracking their fitness, getting breaking news alerts, following their investments, connecting with friends, and living a healthier day. The user experience for Apple Pay and Siri is nothing short of incredible and customers are enjoying countless other features through the over 8,500 third-party apps available for Apple Watch. This is just the beginning of what this new platform can deliver. With Apple watchOS 2, developers now have the ability to build richer and more powerful native apps for Apple Watch, taking advantage of the heart rate sensor, the Digital Crown, accelerometer and more, ushering in a whole new class of apps designed specifically for the wrist. It's a rare and special privilege to launch a new platform with such promise and potential, and I know I speak for everyone at Apple when I say that we can't wait to see what our developers and customers do with it. We hosted a fantastic developers' conference in June with thousands of attendees from 70 countries coming together with Apple engineers to share in the excitement of our three operating systems, OS X, iOS, and watchOS. We've been working hard to make our products even more intelligent, more powerful and more meaningful in all aspects of our customers' lives, while adding new continuity features to make the experience across our devices more seamless than ever and preserving the security and privacy that our customers deserve. Public betas of OS X El Capitan and iOS 9 are available now and customer versions of all three updated OSs are on schedule and will be delivered in the fall. We're very excited about our news app coming to iPhone and iPad with iOS 9. We believe it will be the best news reading experience on any mobile device, combining a beautiful magazine layout with real-time customized digital media content. News will follow over a million topics and pull relevant stories based on the user's specific interests without compromising their privacy. We've already signed 25 leading publishers, representing more than 75 of the world's most influential news, sports, business and magazine titles, including CNN, the New York Times, the Financial Times, ESPN, Bloomberg Business, Condé Nast, Hearst, Reuters, Time, Inc. and The Daily Telegraph. The September quarter is off to an exciting start. We're thrilled by the response to Apple Music, which launched in over 100 countries on June 30. Apple Music is a single immersive app that combines the best ways to enjoy music all in one place. It's an incredible streaming music service, a pioneering worldwide live radio station broadcasting 24 hours a day, and a great place for music fans to connect with their favorite artist. Customers and reviewers love the human curation features of Apple Music and the way it's helping people discover new music. Millions and millions of customers are already experiencing the new service using the three-month trial period, and the numbers are growing substantially every day. Over 15,000 artists have signed up to post on Connect, where we are already seeing great original content, including a world premiere video by Drake. Millions of listeners around the world are tuning in to Beats 1, the first of its kind worldwide radio station featuring some of the most talented and passionate music lovers on the planet. This all adds up to a renewed sense of excitement around music, which we love and expect to continue as Apple Music gets traction with customers. Last week we launched Apple Pay in the UK, bringing customers our easy, secure and private way to pay. On day one, we had an incredible roster of over 250,000 locations and major credit and debit cards from many of the UK's most established banks supporting Apple Pay. Customers are using Apple Pay to ride the London Underground as well as the over ground systems of Transport for London and we hope this will be a model for other public transportation systems around the world. In the US, we've seen fantastic support from merchants of all sizes. We are excited to see this momentum continue with the new Square reader coming this fall. It will bring Apple Pay to even more neighborhood businesses where you pay every day, from your corner coffee shop to your local farmer's market, bolstering the 80,000 small- and medium-size businesses we're already adding every month. American Express will add Apple Pay support for its robust portfolio of corporate cards next month, offering businesses and their employees a new way to make easy and secure payments. And as we head into the school year, 700 universities and colleges across the US will accept Apple Pay such as Auburn University, the University of California Irvine, Colorado State University, the University of Kentucky and the University of Oklahoma, among many others. We're on track for Apple Pay acceptance at over 1.5 million US locations by the end of 2015. I'd like to thank our customers, developers, business partners and employees for another record breaking quarter. We're very hard at work on our exciting pipeline of new hardware, software and services, and we're continuing to expand our global reach into new markets. And we're passionately committed to leaving the world better than we found it. With that, I'll turn the call over to Luca.
Luca Maestri - Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer:
Thank you, Tim. Good afternoon, everyone. As we have done for the first half of our fiscal 2015, we are reporting another record quarter today. Revenue for the June quarter was $49.6 billion, an increase of $12.2 billion or 33% year over year. Our growth was driven by the tremendous performance of iPhone, the introduction of Apple Watch and the continued strength of Mac and App Store sales. We achieved these great results in the context of a very challenging foreign exchange environment around the world and a reduction in channel inventory of over 1 million units across our product lines, which makes our growth performance even more remarkable. As Tim mentioned, our results were especially impressive in Greater China, where revenue more than doubled year over year to over $13 billion. Emerging markets overall grew 79% to almost $18 billion and represented 35% of our total company revenue. Company gross margin was 39.7%, better than our expectations, mainly due to strong iPhone sales. Operating margin was 28.4% of revenue and net income was $10.7 billion, a new June quarter record. Diluted earnings per share were $1.85, a 45% year-over-year increase and cash flow from operations was $15 billion, also a new third quarter record. For details by product I'll start with iPhone. We sold 47.5 million iPhones in the quarter, representing 35% year over year growth and demand for iPhone 6 and 6 Plus has continued to be terrific all around the world. iPhone sales more than doubled in Germany, Korea, Malaysia, and Vietnam. We're up over 85% in Greater China and in India, and increased more than 45% in several countries including Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and Turkey. The strong mix of iPhone 6 and 6 Plus led to an iPhone ASP of $660, an increase of $99 year over year, despite the significant negative foreign exchange impact I referred to earlier. We reduced iPhone channel inventory by about 600,000 units during the quarter, which left us at the low end of our target range of 5 to 7 weeks of channel inventory. Next I'd like to talk about the Mac. We sold 4.8 million Macs, representing 9% year-over-year growth. As we have done for several years in a row, we continued to gain significant market share based on IDC's latest estimate of a 12% global PC market contraction. Mac growth was driven by portables and we are delighted with the very strong customer reception of our new MacBook. We ended the quarter slightly below our 4 to 5 week target range for Mac channel inventory. Turning to iPad. We sold 10.9 million compared to 13.3 million in the year-ago quarter. iPad sell-through was 11.2 million as we reduced channel inventory by about 300,000 units. This left us within our 5 to 7 week target range of iPad channel inventory. iPad customer metrics continue to be extremely positive. ChangeWave recently measured a 97% customer satisfaction rate for iPad Air 2 and among consumers planning to purchase a tablet within 90 days, over half plan to purchase an iPad. For corporate buyers, the purchase intent was even stronger at over 70%. We do not participate in the low end of the tablet market, but we are extremely successful where we do compete. NPD recently indicated that iPad has 76% share of the US market for tablets priced above $200. We're very excited about the advances in the iPad experience coming in iOS 9 in the fall, including the slide over and split view features for retail multitasking, picture-in-picture for FaceTime and video, and enhanced QuickType for composing text even faster. We're also seeing great momentum in the enterprise market. For instance, riding on the success of iPad use by its pilots, United Airlines has not only renewed its iPad program with more than 10,000 iPad Air 2s, but has also made a strategic decision to provide iPhones to over 20,000 flight attendants. In the near future, United plans to introduce new apps to transform the customer experience and improve integration with flight operations. We're also very happy with the progress of our IBM partnership. IBM released 13 new MobileFirst for iOS apps in the June quarter, including new apps in retail banking and healthcare, as well as new horizontal apps for HR and sales. There are now 35 apps in IBM's MobileFirst for iOS catalog that connect users to big data and analytics right on their iPads or iPhones. And we expect a total of 100 apps to be available by the end of 2015. Active customer engagements have also grown to over 500 and recent notable customer wins include Air Canada, National Grid in the UK and Banorte in Mexico. In April, Apple, IBM and Japan Post announced a joint initiative to deliver iPads with IBM developed apps and analytics to connect Japanese senior citizens with services, healthcare, community and family. Japan Post hopes to reach 4 million to 5 million Japanese customers with these solutions by 2020. Since announcing this initiative less than three months ago, we've already seen strong interest from other countries looking for innovative ways to support an aging population. Importantly, we also continue to work closely with leading business software and solution providers to help businesses of all sizes transform work with iPad and iPhone. The number of these mobility partners has expanded rapidly to over 40. They're developing new and differentiated solutions on iOS across many industries, and attracting very significant customer interest. Turning to services. We generated over $5 billion in revenue, a new all-time record, and an increase of 12% over last year thanks primarily to strong growth from apps. The revenue from the App Store increased 24% and the number of transacting customers grew 19%, also setting an all-time record. Services growth was particularly strong in China, where the App Store revenue more than doubled year over year. China based developers have created 250,000 apps for our China App Store and the response from our customers has been tremendous. The revenue from other products grew sharply, up 49% over last year. The contribution from Apple Watch accounted for well over 100% of the growth of the category, and more than offset the decline of iPod and accessory sales. As we've said in the past, we do not plan to disclose Apple Watch metrics because we don't intend to provide insight that could help our competitors. Our retail and online stores had a very busy quarter, with customer visits up 49% year-over-year, driven especially by the very strong interest in Apple Watch. Thanks to our very popular Apple Store app, mobile traffic to our online stores during the quarter equaled desktop traffic for the first time ever. We opened three new stores, our second store in Brazil, our sixth store in Manhattan, and our twenty-second store in Greater China. That brought us to a global store count of 456, of which 190 are outside the United States, and we are on track to have 40 stores open in Greater China by the middle of next year. Let me now turn to our cash position. We ended the quarter with $202.8 billion in cash plus marketable securities, a sequential increase of $9.3 billion. $181 billion of this cash, or 89% of the total, was offshore. In the June quarter, we issued a total of $10 billion of term debt, consisting of $8 billion US dollar denominated notes and ¥250 billion denominated notes as we continue to diversify our global debt investor base. This left us with $50 billion of term debt outstanding at the end of the quarter. During the quarter, we turned over $13 billion to our investors. We paid $3.1 billion in dividends and equivalents and we spent $4 billion to repurchase 31.2 million Apple shares to open market transactions. We also launched a $6 billion accelerated share repurchase program in May and received an initial delivery of 38.3 million shares. The purchase period for the new ASR will end in or before November of 2015. We have continued to execute our capital return program at a fast pace and we now take an action on over $126 billion of our $200 billion program, including $90 billion in share repurchases. The weighted average price for all open market purchases and completed ASR programs to date is $86. Now as we move ahead into the September quarter, I'd like to review our outlook, which includes the types of forward-looking information that Nancy referred to at the beginning of the call. We expect revenue to be between $49 billion and $51 billion compared to $42.1 billion in the year-ago quarter. We expect gross margin to be between 38.5% and 39.5%. We expect OpEx to be between $5.850 billion and $5.950 billion. We expect OI&E to be about $400 million and we expect the tax rate to be about 26.3%. Also today our Board of Directors has declared a cash dividend of $0.52 per share of common stock payable on August 15, 2015 to shareholders of record as of August 10, 2015. With that, let's open the call to questions.
Nancy Paxton - Senior Director, Investor Relations and Treasury:
We ask that you limit yourself to one, one-part question and one follow-up. Operator, may we have the first question, please?
Operator:
[Operation Instructions] First we will hear from Katy Huberty with Morgan Stanley.
Kathryn L. Huberty - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC:
Yes, thanks. Good afternoon. While the year on year iPhone growth was very attractive, the sequential unit decline in the June quarter was worse than the past two years. Why do you think that was, and in particular, why drain channel inventory when iPhone 6 is selling so well? And then I have a follow-up.
Timothy D. Cook - Chief Executive Officer & Director:
Katy, it's Tim. As Luca mentioned, the channel inventory did go down by 600,000. We sold more units than we thought we would and so that was a part of that. The other part of it is that we always run with just the amount of inventory that we think we need. And so to the degree that sales are distributed in the countries with disproportionally with shorter supply chains, or the standard deviation demand is less, we would always choose to have less. And so in this particular quarter, we were able to end basically right at the bottom end of our range and we view that as a good thing, not a bad thing. Obviously the revenues could have been much higher if we would have expanded the channel, but if you don't need to do that, that's not how we think about the business. We run the business for the long term, not the 90-day clock. In terms of what's going on with iPhone, the 35% growth is almost three times the market. And if you look at it at a little narrower regional level, Western Europe grew 30% versus a market of 7%, so four times market. Japan grew over five times market. We doubled in Korea versus a market that was shrinking. And India we grew at 93% and this is on top of the Greater China numbers that we've already covered that grew 87% during the quarter against a market of 5%. And so we did exceptionally well I think in any way that you look at it. In terms of the percentage of customers that have upgraded to a 6 and 6 Plus versus that have not upgraded, it's 73%, or meaning that 27% of the installed base of customers prior to the launch of 6 and 6 Plus have now upgraded. And so we view that as a very bullish sign on the future, that there's a lot of headroom left for upgraders. We also are incredibly happy to see the highest Android switcher rate that we've observed. And so from our point of view, the iPhone is doing outstanding.
Kathryn L. Huberty - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC:
So Tim, just to extend that conversation to the longer term, as I'm sure you're aware, you're lapping some pretty significant comps as it relates to the upgrades that you're talking about as well as significant growth in China. What is the framework that you use to convince yourselves that iPhone units can continue to grow over the longer term?
Timothy D. Cook - Chief Executive Officer & Director:
Well you know, Katy, we purposely just give guidance for the current quarter and we've done that. And obviously the kind of numbers that we have indicated growth in the revenue means that iPhone would have another stellar quarter. And so we're very confident that this quarter is going to be great. How the future looks, we'll take it one quarter at a time. But as I back up from it and look at it more from a macro point of view, the things that makes me very bullish is the 27% number I just quoted, the fact that we are seeing the highest Android switcher rate, the customer satisfaction that we have on the iPhone versus the competition. It's a huge margin. The loyalty rate that we have versus competition, an enormous gap there. I also look at the first time iPhone buyers and we're still seeing very, very large numbers in the countries that you would want to see those in, like China and Russia and Brazil and so forth. I also see a market that over a five-year horizon, if you look at the IDC numbers, is projected to grow from 1.3 million in 2014 to over 1.9 billion – this is billion, rather, billion in 2019. And so it's an incredible market. I think everybody's going to own a smartphone, and I think we've proven that we can compete for a fair number of those, as you can see from our results.
Kathryn L. Huberty - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC:
Great. Thank you very much.
Nancy Paxton - Senior Director, Investor Relations and Treasury:
Thank you, Katy. Could we have the next question, please?
Operator:
That will come from Bill Shope with Goldman Sachs.
William C. Shope - Goldman Sachs & Co.:
Okay, great. Thank you. Could you walk us through the key factors behind your gross margin range for the September quarter and in particular how we should think about the sequential ForEx impact this quarter and the impact of a potential product transition cost?
Luca Maestri - Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer:
Definitely. This is Luca. So we got into 38.5% to 39.5%, and so just keep in mind last year in Q4, our gross margin declined by 140 basis points sequentially. So this year we're expecting a sequential decline of 220 basis points. I would point to three main factors for the decline. First of all, to your point around foreign exchange, it continues to be a challenging environment given the strengthening of the US dollar. In our case, the impact on margin after the hedges is going to be about 30 basis points for Q4. Also, I want to point to a different mix, which is typical of our seasonality as we enter the back-to-school season during Q4. And thirdly, the transition cost that you've mentioned as we prepare for a busy fall. And so those are the three factors that will have an impact on gross margin sequentially. I would point that in general costs continue to be, particularly commodity costs continue to be favorable and so there would be a partial offset to the factors that I mentioned.
William C. Shope - Goldman Sachs & Co.:
Okay, thanks. And then could you give us a bit more color on the mix dynamics for the iPhone in the June quarter and how this compares to prior generations and your expectations? Obviously there continues to be an upward bias helping the ASPs as you mentioned, but could you give us a bit more detail on what exactly you're seeing here? Particularly I think it's interesting in the context of a continued tilt towards the emerging regions obviously.
Luca Maestri - Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer:
Yeah, so as we mentioned, the ASP for iPhone was up $99, 18% increase year-over-year and this is really driven by the mix, by the fact that we've added iPhone 6 Plus to a new price point and in general, iPhone 6 and 6 Plus are doing extremely well as a percentage of the portfolio. And keep in mind that this $99 was partially offset by $24 of unfavorable foreign exchange. So the number would have been even better. So yes, clearly 6 and 6 Plus. And I think we talked about it in prior calls, the 6 Plus is doing particularly well in the markets that you would expect, Greater China, other Asian markets. Those are markets where our growth rates are particularly strong and the 6 Plus, because of the screen size, is doing extremely well.
William C. Shope - Goldman Sachs & Co.:
All right. Thank you.
Nancy Paxton - Senior Director, Investor Relations and Treasury:
Thanks, Bill. Could we have the next question, please?
Operator:
That will come from Gene Munster with Piper Jaffray.
Eugene C. Munster - Piper Jaffray & Co (Broker):
Hi, good afternoon. Luca, you talked a little bit about gross margins in the previous question. But could you talk about how we should think about the trends in the gross margin? In other words is, should the margin trends that we've seen in other cycles continue into next year? And then a follow-up or another question for Tim here, is that the Watch has been under a lot of interest from investors and some may have wanted a little bit more. You outlined some of the opportunities and some of the progress you've had. But any thoughts that you have for investors who may say that the category is just not taking off as fast as they would have hoped?
Luca Maestri - Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer:
Okay Gene, let me start with gross margin. As Tim said before, obviously we guide to the current quarter. You know, as we look at it at a macro level. I think there are, you know every cycle is different for a variety of reasons. There are also things that are not necessarily within our control. So for example, currency markets can be very different one year to the next. We know that the next year is going to represent an additional challenge given where the dollar has moved. Commodity markets may be very different from one year to the other. There are things that remain relatively similar as we launch new products. For example, we innovate the products. We want to make them better all the time, and that typically requires additional cost and so the cost structures of our products, new products, tend to be higher than the products that they replace. Having said that, as you know we've got a very, very good track record to reduce those cost factors over the lifecycle of the products. I think this should give you a bit of color. Of course maybe the one thing that I want to point out again as we get into the following year, is that of course currency will be an issue.
Eugene C. Munster - Piper Jaffray & Co (Broker):
Okay. Thank you.
Timothy D. Cook - Chief Executive Officer & Director:
Yeah Gene, this is Tim. Let me talk about the Watch some. As you know, we made a decision back in September, quite several months ago not to disclose the shipments on the Watch and that was not a matter of not being transparent, it was a matter of not giving our competition insight that's a product that we've worked really hard on. However, let me give you some color so to avoid reaching sort of a wrong conclusion. If you look at the other products category and look at the revenue in this category, it would not be an accurate thing to just look at the sequential change or the year over year change and assume that were the total Watch revenue because the aggregate balance of that category, both sequentially and year over year, is shrinking. Obviously iPod is a part of that, but there are other things in there, accessories and so forth, that are shrinking. Secondly to provide a bit more color, sales of the Watch did exceed our expectations and they did so despite supply still trailing demand at the end of the quarter. And to give you a little additional insight, through the end of the quarter, in fact the Apple Watch sell-through was higher than the comparable launch periods of the original iPhone or the original iPad. And we were able to do that with having only 680 points of sale. And as you probably know, as I had reviewed earlier, the online sales were so great at the beginning, we were not able to feed inventory to our stores until mid-June. And so those points of sale pretty much, the overwhelming majority of the low numbers of sales were not there until the last two weeks of the quarter. And so as I look at all of these things, we feel really great about how we did. Now our objective for the quarter wasn't primarily sales. Beyond the very good news on sales, we're more excited about how the product is positioned for the long term because we're starting a new category. And as I back up and look at this, we have 8,500 apps. We've already announced the next operating system, watchOS 2. It will bring native apps which are going to be killer to the Watch. Even though the store layout was delayed, we've learned a lot about the buying experience. Based on that experience, we're now planning to expand our channel before the holiday because we're convinced that the Watch is going to be one of the top gifts of the holiday season. Now most importantly of all of this is that customer sat is off the charts because we've constantly seen if you can get the customer sat off the charts you can wind up doing fairly well over time. We've also learned a lot about managing quite an assortment and so forth. And so I sort of back up and look at this and I feel fantastic about what the team has done and delivered and I know I never go anywhere without the Watch and it's not because I'm the CEO of Apple. I'm that attached to it and I get lots of notes from a lot of people that feel the same way. And so that's how I look at the Watch.
Nancy Paxton - Senior Director, Investor Relations and Treasury:
Thanks, Gene. Could we have the next question, please?
Operator:
From Bernstein we'll hear from Toni Sacconaghi.
Antonio M. Sacconaghi - Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. LLC:
Yes, thank you. Luca, I think in your prepared remarks you talked a little bit about your market share of iPad in the US above $200 being 78%. And I'm wondering if you think about the iPhone and your market share in the premium category, how do you think about it? So I've seen market data that says 60% market share for phones above $300 or you have actually 90% market share for phones above $600. And I'm wondering if, Tim or Luca, you could maybe talk about how you think about your market share, where you play given that your ASP is comfortably above $600? What do you think your market share is above $500 or $600 in smartphones? And how do we think about that, that market share going forward?
Timothy D. Cook - Chief Executive Officer & Director:
Toni, it's Tim. We look at it a bit differently than you do. We look at it as our job is to grow our products regardless of the price, which means that we need to convince in some cases people to move from one price band to the other. And that we think if we do a great job with the product that people will be willing to spend more because they get so much more out of it. And I think you can look at the results on the iPhone and see that in action. I mean, we grew 87% in China. We grew 90%-plus in India. Emerging markets are growing 65%. These numbers are unbelievable and they're done in an environment where it's not the best of conditions. So that's how we look at. We don't do the MBA analysis of there's only X people buying in a price band and therefore we can only get X minus Y percent. That's not the way we've ever looked at it. If we did, we wouldn't be shipping any products.
Antonio M. Sacconaghi - Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. LLC:
Tim, I'm asking in part because you talked about the highest ever Android switcher. So I'm wondering if indeed your goal of expanding the category is happening or whether you are taking share and how do you measure the relative contribution of each of those in your success. So is the strength and the dramatically above market growth because you're taking share in that high-end category and how far along are you there? Or can you point to proof points that you've actually expanded the size of the market for products of your price point?
Timothy D. Cook - Chief Executive Officer & Director:
Oh, I think there's no doubt if you look at it we are expanding the market size in those areas. It's also true that there's some people that are switching from comparable price points to the iPhone, and that's great too. But I think the answer is that both of those things are happening and it's key that we do both, not just one.
Antonio M. Sacconaghi - Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. LLC:
Okay. And then if I could just ask you to comment on how you think about replacement cycles with the current iPhone 6 cycle. So when you look at replacement cycles over the last three quarters, are they similar to what you saw one and two years ago when you think about replacement? And one of the things that also sort of struck me was I think you cited market research having repurchase intention of 86% versus your competitors at 50%. Quite frankly, the 86% sounds low to me. Is that actually consistent with what you see in the marketplace, about 86% of iPhone buyers ultimately buy another iPhone? So perhaps we can think about replacement cycle.
Timothy D. Cook - Chief Executive Officer & Director:
Yes.
Antonio M. Sacconaghi - Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. LLC:
And how that's changed and the percentage number and how that jives with reality?
Timothy D. Cook - Chief Executive Officer & Director:
The 86% also seems low to me but I was quoting a third-party source and not our own data. Our own data would look better than that. But the numbers are only comparable if I quote the third-party source for both and so that's what I'm doing. On the upgrade cycle and what we're seeing, it's not remarkably different. However, there's a number of plans that people began signing up for in the last year that could change it. These are upgrade any time kind of plans. They may be one year leases that could actually help the upgrade rate. And I think it'll be interesting to see how that plays out over the next horizon. But generally speaking, I see positive vectors there, not negative, in the aggregate.
Nancy Paxton - Senior Director, Investor Relations and Treasury:
Thank you, Toni. Can we have the next question, please?
Operator:
We'll go to Jim Suva with Citi.
James D. Suva - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc. (Broker):
Thank you very much. As you look at many of your products have been absolutely fantastic and at different phases in their life, they've seen tremendous high growth, whether it's iPad, iPhone, iPod, and iPhone looks like it's facing some very challenging comps here in the next few quarters. Does this make you shift even more strategic focus into broadening the reliance on a couple products such as you mentioned Apple Radio. There's a lot more content on the Apple Watch and apps and then also Apple Pay. Are you increasingly focusing on hiring and kind of non hardware things (45:32)? Or are these kind of more peripheral activities and still the focus is kind of right now on the phone?
Timothy D. Cook - Chief Executive Officer & Director:
Jim, it's Tim. We think the phone has a lot of legs to it. I mean, many, many, many years. There's tons of innovation left at the phone. I think we're in the early innings of it, not in the late innings, and I think the market rate of growth over the long haul will also be impressive. And so there will be multiple winners here. And so that's how I see it. In terms of the other things that we're doing, we have some great capability and great teams in Apple. And so we can do more than one thing, and so we have other things that we're working on as well. But at the aggregate level, we still remain very focused because if you look at our size versus the number of projects we have going, it's much smaller compared to most. But that's how we do things and that's how we get the level of quality that we want out of each one of those. And so the other things that you named, whether it be Apple Music or Apple Pay, both of these are very important to us. And things that you didn't mention, the Mac continues to perform very well. I am still bullish on iPad. We've gotten with iOS 9, there's some incredible productivity enhancements coming in with split view and slide over and picture-in-picture. These things are incredible features. The enterprise business is clearly picking up and more and more companies are either contracting for or writing apps themselves. I think and I believe that the iPad consumer upgrade cycle will eventually occur because as we look at the usage statistics on iPad, it remains unbelievably great. I mean, the next closest usage of the next competitor, we're six times greater. And so these are extraordinary numbers. It's not like people have forgotten iPad or anything. It's a fantastic product. So I see a lot of runway. And as I look geographically, where we've been doing really good in the emerging markets, our share is still not high in any of them, and so there's a lot of headroom there as well, as there is in most developed markets as well. And so I look around, I see opportunity left and right. And that's what we're focused on.
James D. Suva - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc. (Broker):
Great. Thank you so much.
Nancy Paxton - Senior Director, Investor Relations and Treasury:
Thanks, Jim. Could we have the next question please?
Operator:
We'll hear from Steve Milunovich with UBS.
Steven M. Milunovich - UBS Securities LLC:
Thank you. Tim, there's some concern about what's going on in China with the stock market and economically. How do you think that plays out for Apple? On one hand you've got more stores, broader distribution, the 4G infrastructure is playing out. On the other hand, the economy might be weakening. Is a phone a discretionary purchase or not? How do you think about going forward in China?
Timothy D. Cook - Chief Executive Officer & Director:
Yeah, it's a very good question, and we remain extremely bullish on China and we're continuing to invest. Nothing that's happened has changed our fundamental view that China will be Apple's largest market at some point in the future. It's true, as you point out, that the equity markets have recently been volatile. This could create some speed bumps in the near term. But to put it in context, which I think is important, despite that volatility in the Chinese market, they're still up 90% over the last year, and they're up 20% year-to-date, and so these kind of numbers are numbers I think all of us would love. Also, the stock market participation among Chinese household is fairly narrow. And the stock ownership is very concentrated in a few people who put what appears to be a smaller portion of their wealth in the market than we might. And so I think generally this has been, at least as we see it, maybe it's not true for other businesses, that this worry is probably overstated. And so we're not changing anything. We have the pedal to the metal on getting to 40 stores mid next year. As we had talked about before, we're continuing to expand the indirect channel as well. As you point out, and I think this is a major point that many people miss, the LTE penetration in China is only at 12%. And China doesn't possess the level of fiber that some other countries do, and so in order to get the great video performance, et cetera, raising that penetration is really great. I think that really plays to an incredible smartphone future there. Also, and I can't underestimate – I can't overstate this. The rise of the middle class there is continuing, and it is transforming China. McKinsey, I saw a recent study from McKinsey that's projecting the upper middle class to grow from 14% to 54% of households over the ten-year period from 2012 to 2022. So we're within that period at this moment, and you can see for all of us that travel there so much, with every trip you can see this occurring. And so I think we would be foolish to change our plans. I think China is a fantastic geography with an incredible unprecedented level of opportunity there. And we're going to be there.
Steven M. Milunovich - UBS Securities LLC:
I also wanted to ask, can you give us any more detail on the switching rate, how much is it up? And I noticed in your advertising there's the shift to the, if it's not an iPhone, it's not an iPhone. And I assume that while you're not as involved as Jobs was, you're approving these ads. So it seems like you're really focused on market share gain right now.
Timothy D. Cook - Chief Executive Officer & Director:
Yeah, I'm very familiar with the ads. In certain geographies, the way that we win is to get switchers. In other geographies, the way that we win is to get people to buy their first smartphone. In other geographies, the way that we win is to get people to upgrade from their current iPhone. And all of those are very important for us. In many geographies, it's two of those or in some geographies it's all three of those. And so all of those are important. We are very focused on growing iPhone around the world, not just in one geography and getting our message out there through ads is one way to do that.
Steven M. Milunovich - UBS Securities LLC:
Thank you.
Nancy Paxton - Senior Director, Investor Relations and Treasury:
Thank you, Steve. Could we have the next question, please?
Operator:
And that'll come from Shannon Cross with Cross Research.
Shannon S. Cross - Cross Research LLC:
Thank you very much. I wanted to talk about FX but not necessarily from a direct impact. But what are you seeing in terms of demand as you've raised prices in various geographies and how are you thinking about it as you go into sort of the next iPhone cycle in terms of having to sort of normalize the pricing for what some of the currencies have done over the past year?
Luca Maestri - Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer:
Yes, Shannon. So obviously FX has been a significant hit in many ways, of course. I mean it reduces our growth rate. We would be 800 basis points higher this quarter from the 33% that we've reported if it wasn't for the movement in currencies around the world. And really when you look around the world, it's really if you exclude China, essentially every single currency has weakened against the dollar. We are pretty careful and thoughtful about where we increase prices and when and by how much during mid-cycle because it's not something that we particularly like to do. We've had circumstances around the world this year where frankly we didn't have many options because the currency movement was so large and so we've had to reprice. I have to say that it's been remarkable. Look, in the long run a strong US dollar is not a positive for our international business. It's normal to see a drop in demand when prices go up. That goes without saying. It has been remarkable so far to see that we did take prices in a few markets. But really remarkable to see how resilient iPhone sales have been, because we have increased, in spite of these price increases, we've increased sales and we've increased market share in all our geographies around the world, without exception.
Shannon S. Cross - Cross Research LLC:
Great. And then can you talk a bit about linearity during the quarter on a geographic basis? Somewhat going back to the China question, I mean did you see it slow down toward the end of the quarter? Or was it solid through it? And just any other color you can give geographically with Europe and some of the other macro events that are going on.
Timothy D. Cook - Chief Executive Officer & Director:
Yeah, Shannon, it's Tim. Maybe the best way to talk about this is sort of at the product level. On the Watch, our June sales were higher than April or May. I realize that's very different than what some of the, is being written, but the June sales were the highest. And so the Watch had a more of a back-ended kind of a skewing. The phone itself followed what I would call a normal seasonal kind of pattern. And if you look at the – it sounds like you're honing in on the Greater China results themselves. There is no obvious impact from the last quarter in the Greater China numbers. And obviously with the aggregate or the consolidated number being 112%, it's hard to find a lot of bad things in the numbers.
Nancy Paxton - Senior Director, Investor Relations and Treasury:
Thank you, Shannon.
Nancy Paxton - Senior Director, Investor Relations and Treasury:
A replay of today's call will be available for two weeks as a podcast on the iTunes store, as a webcast on apple.com/investor, and via telephone. And the numbers for the telephone replay are 888-203-1112 or 719-457-0820 and please enter confirmation code 9957771. And these replays will be available by approximately 5:00 p.m. Pacific Time today. Members of the press with additional questions can contact Kristin Huguet at 408-974-2414 and financial analysts can contact Joan Hoover or me with additional questions. Joan is at 408-974-4570 and I'm at 408-974-5420. Thanks again for joining us.
Operator:
And ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude today's presentation. We do thank everyone for your participation.
Executives:
Nancy Paxton - Senior Director, IR Tim Cook - CEO Luca Maestri - SVP and CFO
Analysts:
Bill Schultz - Goldman Sachs Katie Huberty - Morgan Stanley Gene Munster - Piper Jaffray Tony Sacconaghi - Sanford Bernstein Shannon Cross - Cross Research Steve Milunovich - UBS Kulbinder Garcha - Credit Suisse Keith Bachman - BMO Capital Markets
Operator:
Good day everyone, and welcome to this Apple Incorporated second quarter fiscal year 2015 earnings release conference call. Today’s call is being recorded. At this time for opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn the call over to Nancy Paxton, Senior Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, ma’am.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you. Good afternoon, and thanks to everyone for joining us. Speaking first today is Apple's CEO Tim Cook, and he will be followed by CFO, Luca Maestri. After that, we’ll open the call to questions from analysts. Please note that some of the information you’ll hear during our discussion today will consist of forward-looking statements including, without limitation, those regarding revenue, gross margins, operating expenses, other income and expense, taxes, future business outlook, and plans for dividends, share repurchases, and public debt issuance. Actual results or trends could differ materially from our forecast. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in Apple’s Form 10-K for 2014, the Form 10-Q for the first quarter of 2015, and the Form 8-K filed with the SEC today, along with the associated press releases. Apple assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements or information, which speak as of their respective dates. I’d now like to turn the call over to Tim for introductory remarks.
Tim Cook:
Good afternoon everyone, and thanks for joining us. We have a lot of great news to talk about, so I’ll jump right in. Today, we’re reporting our strongest March quarter ever, with 27% revenue growth and 40% earnings per share growth year over year. We’re seeing fantastic results for iPhone, with revenue growth of 55% year on year, and we’re seeing a higher rate of switchers than we’ve experienced in previous iPhone cycles. The success of iPhone has been extremely strong in emerging markets, where unit sales were up 63% year on year. The App Store had its best quarter ever, with a record number of customers making purchases, driving a new record for revenue and 29% year on year growth. We also reached an all-time quarterly record of $5 billion in total services revenue. We also continue to defy the trend of declining global PC sales, with double digit Mac unit growth in a market that IVC estimates contracted by 7%. We’re now halfway through fiscal 2015 and our year to date results have been simply staggering. We sold over 135 million iPhones, 34 million iPads, and 10 million Macs in the first six months of the year. Our revenue has grown by 28% to over $132 billion, net income has increased 36% to over $31 billion, and EPS has grown by 44%. We’re making many strategic investments in Apple’s future, in research and development, in our supply chain, and in our infrastructure, and we’ve made 27 acquisitions in the last six quarters. We’re in the very fortunate position of generating more cash than we need to run our business, and keep making these important investments. So today, we’re announcing another significant update to our capital return program, expanding its size to $200 billion through March of 2017 to reflect our strong confidence in what lies ahead for Apple. Luca will go into this in more detail in a moment. We’re also making great progress in many other areas. The Apple ecosystem continues to expand in exciting ways. We’re seeing great momentum with Apple Pay. Discover announced today that its cardmembers in the United States will be able to make contactless payments in participating stores through Apple Pay beginning this fall. And last month, we said that the number of locations accepting Apple Pay has tripled, and we continue to see great progress with merchants. Best Buy, which has been a longtime, strong partner of ours, has just announced that it’s now offering Apple Pay in-app and later this year will offer Apple Pay in all of their U.S. stores. And merchants aren’t the only ones jumping onboard. Earlier this month, a leading healthcare payment network announced acceptance of Apple Pay for its clients, so over 50 major hospitals across the country, including Stanford Healthcare and Aspen Valley, will accept Apple Pay this year for copays and bill payments at registration and check in. We’re also incredibly inspired by the momentum we’re seeing in health-related solutions. Since we released HealthKit with iOS 8 last September, over 1,000 apps have been developed to transform how people track, manage, and interact with their health and they’re now available on the App Store. Just this past weekend, Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles turned on the largest HealthKit integration to date, giving more than 87,000 patients the ability to share their health and fitness data seamlessly with their MyCS link app, which syncs with their electronic medical record. And last month we announced ResearchKit, an open source software framework that helps doctors and scientists gather data from medical research participants more efficiently and accurately using iPhone applications. The response so far has been simply amazing, far exceeding our expectations. The first research apps developed using ResearchKit study asthma, breast cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and Parkinson’s disease, and have enrolled over 60,000 iPhone users in just the first few weeks of being available on the App Store. Over 1,000 researchers have contacted us expressing interest in performing studies through ResearchKit. We think these types of solutions have the potential to revolutionize medical studies in life-changing ways, and we’re proud that Apple is helping make this possible. Last quarter, we also announced a major economic investment in Europe, where we will spend $2 billion to build data centers in Ireland and Denmark. These will be our largest data centers in the world. Apple is now responsible for creating over 670,000 jobs across the European continent. Most of them have grown out of the success of the App Store, which has generated more than $7.5 billion for European developers since just 2008. We feel great about the economic contribution we’ve been able to make in Europe. The two data centers we’re building will run on 100% renewable energy from day one. This is just part of the work we’re doing to protect the environment and leave the world better than we found it. Today, 100% of Apple’s U.S. operations and 87% of global operations are powered by renewable energy. Just before Earth Day, we announced our plan to move to renewables in China. We’re undertaking a groundbreaking partnership with several companies to build a 40 megawatt solar farm in Szechuan Province that will generate far more than the amount of energy used by all of our offices and retail stores in China combined. We also announced an innovative new partnership with the Conservation Fund to permanently protect more than 36,000 acres of working forest in Maine and North Carolina to help offset the impact our packaging has on the world’s supply of sustainable virgin fiber. Apple is deeply committed to these initiatives and will continue to make them a priority. The June quarter is off to an exciting start with great new products and services. Three of them in particular are giving our customers a glimpse of the future and we are very happy with the reception that each of them is receiving. First, the all-new MacBook began shipping just over two weeks ago, and we are very happy with the response we’re getting from customers. The new MacBook is our lightest, most compact Mac notebook ever, and you really have to see it to believe it. It features a stunning 12 inch retina display, a new force touch trackpad, all day battery life, and a revolutionary new keyboard. We believe, and I think most everyone agrees, this is the future of the notebook. Second is the new streaming service from HBO, which is available on Apple TV and iOS. We teamed up with HBO last month to help launch HBO Now, a standalone service that lets customers stream the content they love from HBO on the devices they love from Apple, all without requiring a subscription to cable. HBO now has been incredibly popular with Apple TV users since its debut, and it has been one of the top downloaded apps on the U.S. App Store as well. And third, of course, is Apple Watch. It’s been really great to see the reaction of customers since their watches began arriving on Friday morning. All around the world, we’ve seen the excitement on social networks as people start using their Apple Watch. The response has been overwhelmingly positive. Adding to the surprise and delight of Apple Watch are the more than 3,500 apps that are already available. Our developer community has already seen the potential in this new category and put some of their best thinking into what wearable technology can do. We can’t wait to see more of the inspiring apps developers dream up for Apple Watch as we head into our Worldwide Developer Conference six weeks from now. I’d like to thank all of those developers and our hundreds of millions of customers for their loyalty and support. I’d also like to thank all of the Apple employees around the world for their creativity, tireless effort, and passion for delivering the very best products in the world. With that, I’ll turn the call over to Luca.
Luca Maestri :
Thank you, Tim. Good afternoon everyone. As Tim mentioned, we just completed another outstanding quarter. Revenue for the March quarter was $58 billion, an increase of $12.4 billion or 27% year over year. Growth was driven primarily by the very strong performance of iPhone and the continued strength of the App Store and Mac sales. We achieved these terrific results despite growing foreign exchange headwinds. Our performance was particularly impressive in our Greater China and rest of Asia Pacific segments. In Greater China, we established an all-time quarterly record for revenue, which grew 71% year over year, to $16.8 billion. Gross margin was 40.8%, ahead of our expectations, mainly due to stronger than expected iPhone results. Operating margin was 31.5% of revenue and net income was $13.6 billion, a new Q2 record. Diluted earnings per share were $2.33, a 40% year over year increase, and cash flow from operations was $19.1 billion, also a new March quarter record. For details by product, I will start with iPhone. We sold 61.2 million iPhones in the quarter, representing 40% year over year growth and demand for iPhone 6 and 6 plus has remained incredibly strong. IPhone sales more than doubled in Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and Vietnam, and they were up 80% or more in several other markets including Canada, Mexico, Germany, and Turkey. The strong mix of iPhone 6 and 6 plus combined with the popularity of higher capacity offerings led to iPhone ASPs of $659, an increase of $62 year over year, despite the very significant foreign exchange headwinds I already mentioned. We increased iPhone channel inventory by 1 million units during the quarter, which allowed us to get into the low end of our target range of 5 to 7 weeks of channel inventory. Next, I’d like to talk about the Mac. We sold 4.6 million Macs, representing 10% year over year growth, which is particularly impressive in the context of IDC’s latest estimate of a 7% global PC market contraction. The growth was led by portables and spurred by the updates to MacBook Air and MacBook Pro in March. We ended the quarter within our 4 to 5 week target range for Mac channel inventory. Turning to iPad, we sold 12.6 million, compared to 16.4 million in the year ago quarter. iPad sellthrough was 13.7 million, as we reduced channel inventory by about 1.1 million units, coming off the holiday quarter. This left us within our 5 to 7 week target range of iPad channel inventory. We set a new March quarter record for iPad sales in Japan, and an all-time record for iPad sales in China, but performance in other markets was more muted during the quarter. iPad turns five years old this month, and in every year since its introduction, it has been the number one tablet in sales, in quantity and quality of tablet apps, in usage, and most importantly, in customer satisfaction. And based on the latest data from NPD, iPad maintains a very strong leadership share in all the price bands where we compete. iPad has also consistently been the number one tablet in enterprise. A recent Changewave survey found that among corporate buyers planning to buy tablets in the next six months, 77% plan to purchase iPads. In fact, we are seeing very high interest from companies who want to use iPads to transform how work gets done. The vast majority of the app opportunities that have been identified as part of the Apple and IBM partnership are specifically for iPad. In addition to IBM, we working closely with more than two dozen other leading business software and solution providers including Box, Docusign, Microstrategy, Revel, and ServiceMax to bring a broad range of innovative mobile solutions to more customers on iPad. Turning to services, revenue grew to a new all-time record of $5 billion, an increase of 9% year over year. The growth was led by the App Store, which remains incredibly popular with our customers around the world, with revenue up 29% in the March quarter. According to App Annie, the App Store generated 70% more global revenue in the March quarter than Google Play, up from a 60% lead in the September quarter. Traffic to our retail and online stores was excellent, with a 22% year over year increase in customer visits. We’re progressing well with our plans for retail store expansion in Greater China, where we added six new stores in the past quarter alone, bringing us to 21 stores in 11 cities. We’re on track to have 40 stores open in Greater China by the middle of next year. Let me now turn to our cash position. We ended the quarter with $193.5 billion in cash, plus marketable securities, a sequential increase of $15.6 billion. Over $171 billion of this cash was offshore. In the March quarter, we issued 6.5 billion U.S. dollar denominated notes and 1.3 billion Swiss franc denominated notes as we continue to diversify our global debt investor base. We’ve now raised a total of $40 billion of term debt at very attractive rates. We spent $7 billion to repurchase 56.4 million Apple shares through open market transactions, paid $2.7 billion in dividends and equivalents, and utilized about $100 million to [net share] settle vesting employee RSUs. We also retired an additional 13.3 million shares during the quarter, with the conclusion of the accelerated share repurchase program we launched last August. We have executed our capital return program aggressively, and we’ve now taken action on over $112 billion of our $130 billion program, including $80 billion in share repurchases at an average price of $85. As we’ve said consistently, creating value for shareholders by developing great products that enrich people’s lives will always be our top priority and the key factor driving our investments and our capital allocation decisions. With this framework in mind, Apple’s board and management team continue to review capital allocation regularly, and we solicit input on our program from a broad base of shareholders. This process allows us to be thoughtful about the size, the mix, and the pace of the program. We very much appreciate all the input that many shareholders have provided us. We continue to be in the fortunate position of being able to return significant capital to shareholders. We first announced our capital return program three years ago with an initial size of $45 billion, and we’ve increased it annually since then. Today, we’re announcing the third update to our program, expanding its size by the largest amount yet and extending its duration. The existing program was set to conclude at the end of this calendar year, and we’re now extending the program by five quarters to the end of March 2017. Once again, with this update we’re allocating the majority of the expansion of the program to share repurchases, given our strong confidence in the future of Apple and the value we see in our stock. The board has increased the share repurchase authorization by $50 billion, raising it from the current $90 billion to $140 billion. We will also continue to net share settle vesting employee restricted stock units. We also understand that the dividend is very important to many of our investors and we’re raising it for the third time in less than three years. The quarterly dividend will grow from $0.47 per share to $0.52 per share, an increase of 11%. This effective with our next dividend, which the board has declared today and is payable on May 14, 2015 to shareholders of record as of May 11, 2015. We believe this is a meaningful increase for those shareholders who value income, and we continue to plan for annual dividend increases going forward. With over $11 billion in annual dividend payments, we’re proud to be one of the largest dividend payers in the world. In total, the size of our revised capital return program will increase by over 50%, from approximately $130 billion to $200 billion. As we’ve done in the past, we expect to fund our capital return program with U.S. cash, future U.S. cash flow generation, and borrowing from both domestic and international debt markets. And we plan to provide the next update on our program at about this time next year. Now, as we move ahead into the June quarter, I’d like to review our outlook, which includes the types of forward-looking information that Nancy referred to at the beginning of the call. We expect revenue to be between $46 billion and $48 billion, compared to $37.4 billion in the year ago quarter. We expect gross margin to be between 38.5% and 39.5%. We expect opex to be between $5.65 billion and $5.75 billion. We expect YNE to be about $350 million and we expect the tax rate to be about 26.3%. With that, let’s open the call to questions.
Nancy Paxton :
Thank you, and we ask that you limit yourself to one one-part question and one follow up. Operator, may we have the first question, please?
Operator:
[Operator instructions.] Your first question will come from Bill Schultz, Goldman Sachs.
Q – Bill Schultz:
When we look at the effect of currency on your gross profit, which I think was far less than anyone anticipated, have you be able to reduce some of the pressure by adjusting the terms of your suppliers? Or is that something we should expect to see more of as you progress through the year?
A – Luca Maestri :
I’m gonna give you some numbers on the currency, because I know it’s a topic that is top of mind. You’re asking about gross margin, and you know, we look at this on a sequential basis. And I mentioned during the call in January that we were expecting FX to have a negative impact on a sequential basis of about 100 basis points after the effect of the hedges. And that is exactly what happened in our actual results. So that was pretty much in line with what we were anticipating. Of course, we expect this headwind to continue. And on a sequential basis, when we look into the June quarter, we expect to see another 40 basis points of negative impact from currency. We’re dealing with these headwinds. They’re part of business, and so we’re dealing with them in many ways. We are looking at, in some cases, at the potential to increase prices in certain markets. We’re looking of course at our cost structure, and we try to remain as competitive as possible. So we feel very good about the gross margins that we’ve generated in the March quarter, and we feel very good about the guidance that we provided, given the severity of the impact.
Q – Bill Schultz:
And then as a follow up, obviously, I guess one of the incremental tailwinds to gross margin continues to be the iPhone upside relative to expectations. Can you give us a bit more color on the dynamics of the customer mix for the iPhone? You had mentioned you’re very excited about the new iPhone rate so far, but if you could just give us a bit more color, as we had last quarter, on folks that are new to iPhone, Android switchers, versus replacements?
A – Tim Cook:
Bill, we continue to see a higher rate of switchers than we have seen in previous cycles, and so we’re extremely excited about that. We also continue to see a reasonable percentage of first time buyers, particularly in some of the emerging markets. And if you look at emerging markets in general, I think Luca covered some of this, the revenue from emerging markets, just for the March quarter, was up 58% year on year. And a big piece of what is driving that is iPhone. Obviously, those results would have been higher without some of the FX headwinds that Luca mentioned earlier.
Operator:
We’ll hear from Katie Huberty with Morgan Stanley.
Q – Katie Huberty:
You’ve said in the past that the watch may take longer to ramp given the new category and new interface to customers. Is that in fact playing out? Is the watch ramping slower than past product categories?
A – Tim Cook :
Katie, when you use the word “ramp,” I assume you’re talking about supply?
Q – Katie Huberty :
Yeah, preorders and first week in sales, and any other data points that you track in terms of interest versus, say, when the iPad launched in 2010.
A – Tim Cook :
Let me talk about supply and demand and sort of separate those two. Right now, demand is greater than supply. And so we’re working hard to remedy that. We’ve made progress over the last week or so, and we were able to deliver more customers an Apple Watch over the weekend than we had initially anticipated. We’re going to keep doing that, and so we’ve already sent some notes out today, moving the customers and versus what we had communicated to them previously. So I’m generally happy that we’re moving on with the ramp. It is a new product for us, and with any kind of new product, you wind up taking some time to fully ramp. Having said that, I think we’re in a good position and by sometime in late June, we currently anticipate being in a position that we could begin to sell the Apple Watch in additional countries. And so that’s our current plan. From a demand point of view, it’s hard to gauge when you don’t have product in stores and so forth. So we’re filling orders completely online at the moment. The customer response from people that have gotten theirs over the weekend have been overwhelmingly positive, and we’re far ahead of where we expected to be from an application point of view. To give you a comparison, when we launched the iPhone, we had about 500 apps that were ready. When we launched iPad, we had about a thousand. And so our internal goal was to be able to beat the thousand level, and we thought it would be great if we were able to do that by a little bit. And as I mentioned before, we now have over 3,500 apps in the App Store for the watch. And so we couldn’t be happier about how things are going from that point of view. We are learning quickly about customer preferences between the different configurations. There’s a much larger breadth of possibilities here for customers than in our other products. And in some cases, we called that well. In some cases, we’re making adjustments to get in line with demand. But I’m really confident that this is something we really understand how to do and will do. And so I’m really happy where we are currently, and happy enough that we’re looking forward to expanding into more countries in late June.
Q – Katie Huberty :
And then as a follow up, research and development spend continues to track well ahead of revenue growth. And that has happened for many quarters now. Can you talk about what’s driving that? Is there a broader set of projects that you’re working on? Are you making bigger bets, entering bigger markets? What’s driving such a long period of elevated R&D spend?
A – Luca Maestri :
Of course, we’ve said this several times now. When you look at our current product portfolio, it is much broader than it used to be. We’ve now developed two new iPhones over the year. We were not doing that a few years ago. Developed two iPads. And of course now we have the Apple Watch. We’re also developing some core foundational technologies more in house now than we were in the past. And of course we’re also spending ahead of some of the products that will generate revenues in the future. So when you combined all these factors, that is the reason why you see these research and development increases year over year. Research and development is the core of the company. Innovation is the core of the company. And we’re very proud of the fact, when you look, for example, at the last two quarters, the first half of 2015, our revenue growth has been higher than our opex growth. And when you look at our expense to revenue ratio, which, for the first half of the year, has been 8.2%, it’s lower than it was a year ago, and it’s definitely something that we consider extremely competitive, and we’re very proud of.
Operator:
From Piper Jaffray, we’ll hear from Gene Munster.
Q – Gene Munster:
Tim, you mentioned there’s more switchers versus previous cycles. Any thoughts on what that would mean or could mean for market share over the next few quarters, and kind of I guess the sustainability of the 6 cycle? And then second question, for Luca, in terms of any thoughts on what the margin impact from the watch is that ramps over the next couple of years?
Tim Cook :
Gene, if you look at the overall worldwide, we grew iPhone 40%. And IDC’s estimate of the market for last quarter is a 16%, so we grew two and a half times. And if you kind of look through at the different countries, in almost every country, we grew at a multiple of the market. And as I mentioned before, in emerging markets, we did extremely well. And so I feel really good about where we are, and you can hopefully tell with the strong guidance that we provided, that we’re very bullish on the current quarter as well. And so I think things look very, very good. We’re also pleased, in addition to the switcher number, that we’re doing fairly well with first time buyers, which is also a key metric for us. And so it’s tough to find something in the numbers not to like.
Luca Maestri :
And Gene, let me take your question on margins. I’ll talk about Q3, because you know, this is the period that we provide guidance for. And we guided to 38.5% to 39.5%, which is slightly down versus our performance in Q2. And this is driven by a number of things. First of all, it’s the loss of leverage from the sequential decline in revenue. This is typical of our seasonality. There’s a foreign exchange element, and I mentioned before the negative impact on a sequential basis about 40 basis points. And also, we’re launching the Apple Watch. Apple Watch is not only a new product, but it’s a brand new category with a lot of new features, a lot of new, innovative technologies. And Apple Watch margins will be lower than company average.
Gene Munster :
One maybe quick follow up, Tim, in terms of the base of iPhones that have upgraded. I think you provided a number last quarter on that. Is there any update to that metric?
Tim Cook :
Yeah, sure. Our current estimate is that about 20% of the active installed base has upgraded to a 6 or 6 plus. And so as I look at that number, that suggests there’s plenty of upgrade headroom in addition to we want to keep inviting over as many switchers as we can. So between both of those and the first time buyers as well, it seems really, really good right now.
Operator:
And that will come from Tony Sacconaghi with Sanford Bernstein.
Tony Sacconaghi:
I just wanted to revisit the watch. Tim, I think you’ve said, when you were talking about your new products, you said we’re “very happy with the reception” and in response to a previous answer, you said, “relative to demand, it’s hard to gauge with no product in the stores.” I would say relative to other product launches, where your commentary around demand was characterized by superlative after superlative, that assessment feels very modest. And part of the reason that I ask is A) are we reading you right in terms of that, but if we look at consensus, consensus is expecting that Apple will ship more watches in its first two quarters than it did iPad, despite, as you said, very limited distribution in terms of only selling through your store. So I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about putting those demand comments in context given that they do seem different from how you’ve characterized product demand for other products, and how, if at all, we should think about modeling demand in the context, perhaps, of the iPad, which was your most recent significant new category.
Tim Cook :
I’m thrilled with it, Tony, so I don’t want you to read anything I’m saying any way other than that. So I’m not sure how to say that any clearer than that. And in any situation, whether it’s the watch or in the past on iPad or on iPhone, when demand is much greater than supply, it’s difficult to gauge exactly what it is. And so as you know, we don’t make long term forecasts on here. We make forecasts for the current quarter. And so I don’t want to make any comment about the consensus numbers. Honestly, I haven’t even studied those. We’ve got enough to think about here. I feel really great about it. The customer response, literally, from what I’ve seen, is close to 100% positive. And so it’s hard to imagine it being better.
Tony Sacconaghi :
You talked about the watch having lower margins in the third quarter, which is surprising A) I think in the context of price points that many people thought were higher, B) in the context of what luxury watches sell for, C) I think in terms of what estimated margins might be installed on accessories like your watch band. So I’m wondering if you believe that the watch’s gross margins are being burdened by lower volumes and startup costs, and that you believe that as a category, watch margins will be, in total, including everything else that you sell with it, on a sustained basis, lower than the company average.
Tim Cook :
Tony, we’re not going to guide to or give projections of gross margin outside of the current quarter. And so what we have right now, which is a situation, it’s not surprising to us, we knew we would be here, is that the watch gross margins for the current quarter that we’ve included in the guidance that Luca’s provided in the aggregate, are lower than the company average. And so that to us is intuitive that they would be. And so I think we must be just looking at it through a different lens than you are.
Tony Sacconaghi :
I guess the question is is there anything unique about it being in its first quarter that it’s providing that margin profile?
Tim Cook :
In the first quarter with any new kind of product, you would always have learning and these sorts of things. We’ve had this with every product we’ve ever done. And so again, we’re not guiding to what it will be over time. We’re talking about what it is now. But you know, I would keep in mind that the functionality of the product that we’re making is absolutely incredible, the power of it. And I haven’t even seen this, but generally, there’s cost breakdowns that come out around our products that are much different than the reality. I’ve never seen one that is anywhere close to being accurate. And so if that’s the basis for your comment, I’d really dig on the data if I were you.
Operator:
We’ll go to Shannon Cross with Cross Research.
Shannon Cross :
Tim, can you talk a bit about what you’re seeing in China with 70% year over year growth in the Greater China revenue, and clearly very strong iPhone. If you can talk a bit about what consumers are saying, what the carriers are saying, in terms of demand and opportunity. Just any color, because clearly it’s quite strong.
Tim Cook :
Yeah, it was an incredible quarter. We were up 71% year over year. We set a record in China for revenues. We did that now in a quarter that included Chinese New Year, and so we have the help of a strong holiday season, much like the U.S. has a strong season in December. China’s is obviously in the March quarter. iPhone led the way. It was up over 70% year on year. And the current estimates from Kantar are that that would mean that we would gain more than 9 points of share on a year over year basis. And so by everything I can see, we did extremely well. The Mac also had an unbelievable quarter in China, and I’m particularly very happy with this, that Mac unit sales were up 31%. And like the rest of the world, or most of the rest of the world, IDC is projecting that PC sales in China contracted by 5% last quarter. And so once again bucking the tide. Also, in China, consistent with the company but at a much different rate, the App Store had a record quarter and grew over 100% year over year. And so you can see the iPhone, the Mac, and the App Store adding, and with the iPad in PRC, not in Greater China, but in the PRC, iPad had its best quarter ever, higher than all the others, and also grew in a market that contracted for the overall market. And so really and truly, it’s sort of everything you look at in China was extremely good. We have been working significantly on expanding our ecosystem there, and so we added Union Pay as a payment option for customers. We increased the iPhone point of sales to over 40,000 during the quarter. That’s up about 9% year on year. And more importantly than the total number, we are in many more cities than we were before. We worked significantly on our online store. Our online store revenue was up over three times year over year. As you probably heard us say before, we’ve opened several stores in China recently. We’re now at 21 in Greater China and we’re on track still to achieve 40 stores by the middle of next year. The online store will also be expanding from around 319 cities to where they can hit two day delivery to 365 cities. So adding about 50 new cities by the end of this quarter. And so the net is we’re investing a lot across the board in our infrastructure, in our products, on partnering with different companies. The Chinese developers are coming on in significant numbers. We’ve now made payments to developers in Greater China of almost $5 billion over half of which was in the last 12 months. And so you can see this enormous momentum building in the developer community there as well. And so lots of positive things, and you know, as you probably heard me say before, I’ve never seen as many people coming into the middle class as they are in China. And that’s where the bulk of our sales are going. And so we’re really proud of the results there and continue to invest in the country.
Shannon Cross :
And just sort of a follow up on the iPad side. What do you think it’s going to take to reaccelerate iPads? The sellthrough was better than the sell in this quarter, but are we seeing cannibalization from the iPhone 6 plus and how are you sort of thinking about the IBM partnership as it relates to iPad?
Tim Cook :
Number one, we have to stop having the situations where we sell through more than we sell in, where we don’t have to have an inventory correction. That was over a million units. Two, have we had cannibalization? The answer is yes. We’re clearly seeing cannibalization from iPhone and on the other side, from the Mac. And of course, as I’ve said before, we’ve never worried about that. It is what it is. That will play out, and at some point, it will stabilize. I’m not sure precisely when, but I’m pretty confident that it will. The IBM partnership, I think, is in its early stages in terms of bearing fruit here, but everything I see I like on it. I’m a big believer in the ability for iPad to play in a major way in enterprise. And so I’m looking forward to seeing that play out as we move forward. If you look at the underlying data, it makes you feel a lot better than the sales do. And so things like first time buyer rates, the latest numbers from the U.S. are somewhere around 40%. And if you look at China, they’re almost 70%. And so these numbers are not numbers that you would get if the market were saturated. And so I continue to believe, even though I’ve seen people write that, that I think that theory is not correct, and do not see that. We also see usage numbers that are off the charts, so far above competition it’s not even in the same planet. And we see customer satisfaction at or near 100%. And so these kind of numbers, along with intent to buy numbers, everything looks fantastic, the ecommerce numbers. And so my belief is that as the inventory plays out, as we make some continued investments in our product pipeline, which we’re doing, that we already have planned and have had planned for some time, between that, the inventory playing out, the enterprise starting to take over, I think still I believe the iPad is an extremely good business over the long term. When precisely it begins to grow again I wouldn’t want to predict, but I strongly believe that it will.
Operator:
From UBS, we’ll go to Steve Milunovich.
Steve Milunovich:
Luca, could you comment a bit about the factors that went into your decision on the capital return program, particularly the share repurchase part? For example, I would think you’re pretty well done in terms of taking U.S. cash down. So you are dependent upon cash flow in the U.S. as well as debt. And regarding debt, do you have a debt to EBITDA ratio in mind that you don’t want to go over? Do you want to keep your AA rating? Is that important? Just other factors like capital spending needs, just curious what your thinking was.
Luca Maestri :
The logic has not changed over the years. We look at our business plans, we look at what we want to accomplish from product perspective. We look at the capital needs that we have to run the business and to grow the business. And then we see that we’re in this great position that we can return cash to shareholders. We know Apple very well. We are very excited by the level of customer response that we’ve got for our current portfolio. We’re super confident about the pipeline of products and services that we have, and therefore, we believe that there is great value in our stock. And that is the reason why, again this year, we’re allocating the majority of the increase, which is the largest increase that we’ve ever done, we’re increasing the program by $70 billion. And the vast majority of that we’re allocating to the share repurchase, because again, we believe there’s great value in the stock. We also know, and understand, that we have several investors that value income. And so that’s important for us to increase the dividend. And as we’ve said in the past, we plan to continue to increase the dividend every year. And as we’ve said in the past, we will come back at about this time next year and give you another update to the program, because we will have better information, and we’ll be able to be very thoughtful about the size and the mix and the pace of the program. From a funding standpoint, of course we have a very strong balance sheet. We do have some cash in the U.S. We will continue to generate cash in the U.S., but definitely a good portion of the program will be funded through debt. We will raise debt both in the U.S. and outside of the United States. And you know, of course we’ve got a very, very strong balance sheet. We’ve got a very open dialog with the rating agencies. And so we feel we have a lot of room for us to fund the program. So from a balance sheet standpoint, we feel very, very comfortable with the program that we’ve announced today.
Operator:
Next we’ll go to Kulbinder Garcha with Credit Suisse.
Kulbinder Garcha:
My first question is for Tim. Tim, on the point you made about the 20% of the [unintelligible] being on 6 or 6 plus, are we right in interpreting the comment that that’s a substantially lower number than at this point in previous cycles? And that would, I guess, argue for just a longer period of growth as the [unintelligible] upgrades? And then also, linked to that, just by the points you’re making on [unintelligible] iPhone users and [unintelligible] being higher, that number year on year, in the first six months, is really growing significantly year on year. Is that the right way to interpret that comment?
Tim Cook :
I missed the second part of your question totally. Can you get a little closer to your phone?
Kulbinder Garcha :
Oh, sorry, yes. My second part of my question is, in the first six months of the 6 plus, is the gross number of new users to Apple, whether it’s new users or switches from Android, significantly growing year on year?
Tim Cook :
I don’t have the comparisons in front of me, about the answers to either one of your questions. My understanding of what you asked was is the 20% number that I’d mentioned in the question from Gene, how does it compare year over year, is it a lot different? I don’t know the answer to that off the top of my head. As I look at the number, my point from bringing it up is that there’s a lot of people that haven’t upgraded to a 6 and 6 plus. And so as I look at that, it screams that there’s significant opportunity there. And that’s before thinking about switchers and first time buyers.
Kulbinder Garcha :
Okay great, and then Luca, just on the gross margin decline from the March quarter to June, I understand the currency point. I understand the iPhone’s a little bit older. I guess of the iPhone and the watch impact, is the decline equally attributed to both those reasons, or is there something different going on?
Luca Maestri :
Let me tell you, there are a number of reasons why our guidance for gross margins is lower than the actual for the second quarter. The first one is the loss of leverage, because of the sequential decline in revenue. We got the foreign exchange, we got as you said, a lower iPhone mix. And we got the Apple Watch. I think we’ll leave it at that, and we’re not gonna get into more specifics. But those are the four reasons that drive the sequential decline.
Operator:
And next we’ll go to Keith Bachman with Bank of Montreal.
Keith Bachman:
Tim, this is for you. You mentioned something in your past comment that you thought a lot of the iPhone sales were going into the middle class in China. And I’m just wondering if you could elaborate on that and open it up more broadly speaking, to the emerging geographies. If you have demographics that you could talk about for your iPhone specifically, and where you think those phones are ending up. Because I think it does raise the question, as you look out over the next year or so, do you have the right price points for the demographic you’re hitting?
Tim Cook :
Here’s what I would share with you, Keith, is that if you look in the emerging markets, our revenues were up 58% year on year. And this accounted for just slightly less than 40% of the company’s revenue. If you look at BRIC within the emerging markets, BRIC countries were up 64% year over year. And so as I look at that, without having market research data on the demographics that you’re asking, it’s clear to me that it has to be coming from the middle class, because the upper income earners, there’s only so many of those. And you can’t grow those kind of numbers without getting significantly into the middle class. And so I think that’s where we are. I hope we’re also beyond the middle class, but I don’t have the data to suggest that that’s the case or not the case. But it’s clear to me that the middle class statement has to be true.
Keith Bachman :
My follow up, Tim, I’m gonna stay with you for a second, it sounds like HBO Now is a great opportunity today, and as you look out. If you could just speak more specifically, how we should be thinking about Apple as a conduit for something like HBO Now and other products. Is that a meaningful revenue opportunity without getting specific, and/or is it more about selling incremental devices, or is it about expanding the revenue pie as you look at opportunities like HBO Now?
Tim Cook :
First of all, I think it’s about giving the customer something they want and giving to them in Apples classic ease of use and in the product environments and the user interface that they’re used to working in, in this case Apple TV. And so I think HBO in particular has some incredibly great content. And so we’re marrying their great content, our great product and ecosystem, and it’s clear from looking at the early returns - you know, we’ve only been at this for a couple of weeks or so - that there’s a lot of traction in there. And so where could it go? I don’t want to speculate, but you can speculate probably as good as I can about where that can go. I think we’re on the early stages of just major, major changes in media that are going to be really great for consumers, and I think Apple could be a part of that.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Keith. A replay of today's call will be available for two weeks as a podcast on the iTunes Store, as a webcast on apple.com/investor, and via telephone. And the numbers for the telephone replay are 888-203-1112 or 719-457-0820, and please enter a confirmation code 8627838. And these replays will be available by approximately 5.00 PM Pacific Time today. Members of the press with additional questions can contact Josh Rosenstock at 408-974-2414. Financial analysts can contact Joan Hoover or me with additional questions. Joan is at 408-974-4570, and I am at 408-974-5420. Thanks again for joining us.
Executives:
Nancy Paxton - Senior Director, IR Tim Cook - CEO Luca Maestri - SVP and CFO
Analysts:
Shannon Cross - Cross Research Steve Milunovich - UBS Katy Huberty - Morgan Stanley Benjamin Reitzes - Barclays Toni Sacconaghi - Bernstein Gene Munster - Piper Jaffray Rod Hall - JPMorgan Amit Daryanani - RBC Capital Markets Sherri Scribner - Deutsche Bank Bill Shope - Goldman Sachs
Operator:
Good day ladies and gentlemen and welcome to this Apple Incorporated First Quarter Fiscal Year 2015 Earnings Release Conference Call. Today’s call is being recorded. At this time for opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn the call over to Nancy Paxton, Senior Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead ma’am.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you. Good afternoon, and thanks to everyone for joining us. Speaking first today is Apple's CEO, Tim Cook; and he will be followed by CFO, Luca Maestri, and after that we’ll open the call to questions from analysts. Please note that some of the information you’ll hear during our discussion today will consist of forward-looking statements, including without limitation, those regarding revenue, gross margins, operating expenses, other income and expense, taxes and future products. Actual results or trends could differ materially from our forecast. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in Apple’s Form 10-K for 2014 and the Form 8-K filed with the SEC today, along with the associated press release. Apple assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements or information, which speak as of their respective dates. And I’d also just like to remind you that as we indicated in our last quarterly call, we’re now including the results of our retail stores in the geographic segments where the stores are located and retail is no longer classified as an operating segment. We’ve also updated our product summary reporting and we’re now reflecting five categories of results; iPhone, iPad, Mac, Services and Other Products. We’ve prepared schedules showing reclassifications of historical operating segment and product results for each of the last 12 quarters to conform to these new groupings and they are available now on our Web site at apple.com/investor. So I’d now like to turn the call over to Tim for introductory remarks.
Tim Cook:
Thanks, Nancy. Good afternoon, everyone and thank you for joining us. Today we’re reporting on a historic quarter and I'm incredibly proud of everyone who contributed to the amazing results you’re about to hear. Interest in Apple products is at an all time high, with over 0.5 billion customer visits to our physical and online stores during the quarter. Demand for iPhone has been staggering, shattering our high expectations with sales of over 74 million units, driven by the unprecedented popularity of iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. This volume is hard to comprehend. On average we sold over 34,000 iPhones every hour, 24 hours a day, everyday of the quarter. The execution by all of our teams to achieve these results was spectacular. By the end of the quarter, our new iPhones were available in 130 countries around the world, making this our fastest and most successful roll out ever. Additionally, the App Store and the Mac each set new records for quarterly revenues. Mac units were up 14% to 5.5 million, while the rest of the PC market continued to decline. App Store revenues was up a remarkable 41%. Demand was strong around the world. Flurry estimated that Apple products accounted for over half of all mobile device activations globally from December 19th to December 25th. It was truly a momentous quarter for iOS. On November 22nd we shipped our 1 billionth iOS device. It was a Space Gray 64 gigabyte iPhone 6 Plus, which we’ve saved here at Apple. 1 billion devices is an almost unfathomable milestone, and we are all incredibly proud to be a part of it. Apple’s mission is to make the greatest products on earth and enrich the lives of others. Through the success of iOS we have provided hundreds and millions of people with powerful personal technology that is simple and fun to use. Our customers are using Apple products to transform education, discover new ideas for business and express their creativity in ways that no one could have imagined when we sold the first iPhone less than eight years ago. It’s amazing to watch and it reminds that people and great ideas are the reasons we make the things we make. Our strong overall performance in the December quarter resulted in total company revenue of $74.6 billion, and earnings of $18 billion. Both of these numbers are all-time records for us, with revenues up 30% and earnings up 38% over last year. And due to our very large capital return activities, earnings per share were up even more at 48% to $3.06, also an all-time quarterly record. Our results would have been even stronger, absent fierce foreign exchange volatility. We’ve also made great progress on a number of very exciting new initiatives to further strengthen our ecosystem. We’ve been blown away by the reaction to Swift, our new programing language. Inventing a new programing language is something very few companies can do, and we believe it will have a profound effect on our ecosystem. Swift became available in September as part of the Xcode tools and in the first month those tools were downloaded over 11 million times. A recent report from Redmonk showed that Swift has had unprecedented growth and is quickly climbing the list of the most popular programing languages. We’ve seen many of our developers choosing Swift as they build significant new projects, and we are seeing fantastic work with Swift going on in education. Very recently, Stanford University released their Developing iOS 8 Apps with Swift course, which was posted to iTunes University making this amazing resource available to everyone in the world. There has also been incredible interest in HealthKit with over 600 developers now integrating it into their apps. Consumers can now choose to securely share their health and wellness metrics with these apps and this has led to some great, new and innovative experiences in fitness and wellness, food and nutrition and healthcare. For example, with apps such as an American Well, users can securely share data such as blood pressure, weight or activity directly with physicians, and leading hospitals such as Duke Medicine, Stanford Children and Penn Medicine are integrating data from HealthKit into their electronic medical record so that physicians can reach out to patients proactively when they see a problem that needs attention. With HealthKit and the iOS health app, we believe we’re just at the beginning of amazing new health and wellness solutions for our customers. Our extensions of iOS in the home with HomeKit and in the car with CarPlay also continue to progress and this year we are looking forward to amazing HomeKit enabled products from several companies, and CarPlay enabled vehicles from over 30 automotive brands. Also as you know, we introduced two new categories in the fall and we’re making great progress on both of them. Apple Pay is off to a very strong start and the feedback that we are getting from both individuals and institutions is extremely positive. Today about 750 banks and credit unions have signed on to bring Apple Pay to their customers, and in just three months after launch, Apple Pay makes up more than $2 out of $3 spent on purchases using contactless payment across the three major U.S. card networks. In merchants who already accept Apple Pay, the rates are even higher. Panera Bread tells us Apple Pay represents nearly 80% of their mobile payment transactions, and since the launch of Apple Pay, Whole Foods Market had seen mobile payments increased by more than 400%. You can use Apple Pay up and down Mainstreet, to pick up a prescription at Walgreens at Duane Reade, get office or school supplies at Office Depot and Staples and shop for groceries at national and regional stores from coast-to-coast, including BI-LO, Harvey’s, Save Mart, Wegmans Food Markets, Whole Foods and Winn-Dixie among others. More merchants are excited to bring Apple Pay to their customers and adoption is strong. Just today USA Technologies announced they made Apple Pay available at about 200,000 places where everyday payments happen, including vending machines and businesses, airports and schools, commercial laundry machines and colleges, universities and laundromats and parking meters and payment kiosks in lots across the country. Point-of-sale suppliers tell us they are seeing unprecedented demand from merchants, and all of our partners and customers simply love this new service. With all of this momentum in the early days, we are more convinced than ever that 2015 will be the year of Apple Pay. Development for Apple Watch is right on schedule and we expect to begin shipping in April. Developers are hard at work on apps, notifications and information summaries that we call Glances, all designed specifically for the Watch's user interface. The creativity and software innovation going on around Apple Watch is incredibly exciting and we can’t wait for our customers to experience them when Apple Watch becomes available. We’re also making great progress in our partnership with IBM and our collaboration is winning over new customers. In December, we delivered the first 10 MobileFirst for iOS apps for banking, retail, insurance, financial services, telecommunications, governments and airlines, making iPhone and iPad even more productive for enterprises by providing [Apple] [ph] Cloud services with IBM's Big Data and analytics capabilities. Another 12 apps will be released this quarter, including three new industries, healthcare, energy and utilities, and industrial products. This will bring us to a total of 22 apps and we’re on track to have over 100 by the end of 2015. In just over a month, more than a dozen enterprise customers have signed on as foundation clients to transform their companies with iPhone, iPad and IBM MobileFirst solutions including Miami Dade County, the seventh largest county in the United States by population, and American Eagle Outfitters, which operates more than 1,000 retail stores and ships to over 80 countries worldwide. And the list of new customers is expanding rapidly. IBM is engaged with more than 130 additional companies looking to empower their employees with MobileFirst for iOS solutions and the list keeps growing. We couldn’t be more pleased with this partnership. In addition to all these initiatives, we have a robust product and services pipeline that we are very excited about, and we look forward to sharing more about them with you throughout the year. In addition to the contributions we make to humanity through our products, we made great progress on imported projects during the quarter including ConnectED and (PRODUCT)RED. With ConnectED we’re focused on making a difference for students in communities who need it the most. We recently chose 114 schools across 29 states to receive an Apple ConnectED grant. Despite their economic challenges, all of these schools share a vision of what their students' lives would be like with Apple technology and we’re proud to help them bring that to life. And in December, we undertook our largest ever initiative to help (PRODUCT)RED achieve the goal of an AIDS free generation. To commemorate World AIDS Day, we worked with some of our developer partners to create and donate the proceeds from 25 special apps and we also contributed a portion of sales at our retail and online stores on two of the year’s busiest shopping days. As a result, Apple’s donation set a new record. Delivering the results we’re reporting today reflects months and years of focus and determination from teams across Apple as well as our amazing developers and business partners. I’d like to thank all of them for their commitment and performance and I’d also like to thank our incredible customers for their ongoing loyalty and enthusiasm. With that, I’d like to turn the call over to Luca to discuss our December quarter results in more detail.
Luca Maestri:
Thank you, Tim and good afternoon everyone. In the December quarter we generated all time record revenue of $74.6 billion, an increase of $17 billion, or 30% year-over-year. We achieved this exceptional performance despite significant foreign exchange headwinds from many currencies. Our growth was broad based across the world, with revenue from developed countries up 20% and revenue from emerging countries up 58%. The performance of our Greater China segment was particularly impressive, with revenue up 70%. Sales were well ahead of our expectations in a number of areas. The unprecedented demand for iPhone 6 and 6 Plus combined with our tremendously successful production ramp allowed us to build and ship several million more iPhones than we had expected when we provided guidance back in October. And also Mac revenue and services revenue reached all-time highs. Gross margin was 39.9% above our guidance range and operating margin was $24.2 billion, representing 32.5% of revenue, and our highest operating margin percentage in 10 quarters. Net income was $18 billion, surpassing our previous all-time record by almost $5 billion. This translated to diluted earnings per share of $3.06, a 48% year-over-year increase. Cash flow from operations was exceptional at $33.7 billion, also a new all-time record. For details by product I will start with iPhone. We sold 74.5 million iPhones, an increase of 23.4 million over last year, representing 46% growth. iPhone sales grew strongly in both developed and emerging markets. Among many great results around the world, unit sales were up 44% in the U.S. and up 97% in the BRIC countries. Sales doubled year-over-year in China, our second largest iPhone market, as well as in Brazil and in Singapore. Thanks to the popularity of iPhone 6 Plus, and the increased value customers saw in our higher storage capacity offerings, iPhone ASPs were $687, an increase of $50 over the year ago quarter. This led to iPhone revenue growth of 57% year-over-year, with quarterly sales exceeding $50 billion for the first time ever. We had a 200,000 unit decline in iPhone channel inventory during December quarter this year, compared to an increase of about 1 million iPhones during the year ago period, and we were not able to reach supply demand balance until this month. This left us below our target range of five to seven weeks of channel inventory on a look forward basis. We’re now working with about 375 carriers, representing 72% of the world’s mobile phone subscriber base, and we have over 210,000 points of sale for iPhone across the globe. Our customers love their iPhones. A December ChangeWave survey measured a 97% customer satisfaction rating for iPhone. A study published by Chitika Insights last month indicated that iPhone accounts for 53% of North America smartphone web traffic, almost twice the level of the next closest brand. And in the corporate market ChangeWave found that among IT buyers planning to purchase smartphones in the March quarter this year, 77% intend to purchase iPhones. Next I’d like to talk about the Mac. We sold 5.5 million Macs, an increase of almost 700,000 units over last year, a 14% growth rate. Thanks for the popularity of our stunning new iMac with Retina 5K display, Mac ASPs increased by $58 sequentially, driving all time record revenue for Mac of 6.9 billion. We achieved double-digit year-over-year unit growth in both desktops and portables. These results are truly remarkable, given the contraction in the global PC market which IDC estimates declined by 3% in the quarter. We have now gained market share for 34 of the last 35 quarters. We ended the quarter with Mac channel inventory slightly below our four to five week target range. Turning to iPad, we sold 21.4 million units compared to 26 million in the December quarter last year. Given the introduction of new iPads in October, we increased iPad channel inventory by 1.1 million units during the quarter, compared to an increase of about 2.1 million in the December quarter last year. This left us within our five to seven week target range of channel inventory on a look forward basis. Customer experience and usage data for iPad continue to be excellent. In our November survey, ChangeWave measured a 98% customer satisfaction rate for iPad Air, and also found that among people to finding a purchase a tabled within 90 days, 60% plan to purchase an iPad. And among businesses planning to purchase tablets, the intent was even stronger at 78%. Chitika Insights' most recent report indicated that iPad users in North America generate over 70% of tablet based web traffic, more than six times the web traffic of the next closest competitor and Custora’s latest e-commerce report indicates that iPad accounts for 82% of all U.S. e-commerce transactions from tablets. All these results are consistent with usage data from the holiday shopping season. IBM’s digital analytics benchmark service found that iOS devices accounted for more than twice the online traffic and almost four times the e-commerce sales on Android devices during November and December. The Apple ecosystem continues to thrive. Combining all of our services, revenue grew to 4.8 billion in the December quarter, a new all-time high and an increase of 9% year-over-year. This record performance was driven primarily by the tremendous momentum of the App Store, with revenue growing 41% in the December quarter. Our iOS developers have earned over $25 billion from the App Store to date, and we’re thrilled with their success. Total sales of media and software from iTunes were $2.6 billion, compared to $2.4 billion in the year ago quarter. Our direct China performance was also outstanding. We welcomed more visitors than ever before and generated record revenue in both our physical and online stores. We opened 10 new retail stores during the quarter, bringing us to a total of 447, 182 of which are outside the United States. We’ve opened two new stores this month in Greater China and we’re on track towards 40 stores in Greater China by mid-2016. Let me now turn to our cash position. We ended the quarter with $178 billion in cash plus marketable securities, a sequential increase of $22.7 billion. We completed our first international debt offering, issuing 2.8 billion euro denominated notes at very attractive interest rates and greatly diversifying our debt investor base. We spent 5 billion to repurchase 45 million Apple shares through open market transactions, paid 2.8 billion in dividends and equivalents, and utilized over 500 million to net share settle vesting employee RSUs. We also retired an additional 8 million shares in connection with our accelerated share repurchase programs. We have now taken action on almost $103 billion of our $130 billion capital return program, including $73 billion in share repurchases, with four quarters remaining to its completion. In the last 12 months alone, we have returned over $57 billion to our investors. We review our capital return program on an ongoing basis. We continue to solicit feedback from a broad base of investors and we're on track to announce an update to the program in April when we report our second quarter results. Now as we move ahead into the March quarter, I’d like to review our outlook, which includes the types of forward looking information that Nancy referred to at the beginning of the call. We expect revenue to be between $52 billion and $55 billion, compared to $45.6 billion in the year ago quarter, and this represents a very significant revenue increase, despite growing foreign exchange headwinds from the continued strengthening of the U.S. dollar against most currencies. We expect gross margin to be between 38.5% and 39.5%, we expect OpEx to be between $5.4 billion and $5.5 billion and we expect OI&E to be about $350 million and we expect the tax rate to be about 26.3%. Also today our Board has declared dividend of $0.47 per common share payable on February 12, 2015 to shareholders of record as of February 9, 2015. With that let's open the call to questions.
Nancy Paxton:
And we ask that you limit yourself to one part question and one follow-up. Operator may we have the first question please.
Operator:
[Operator Instructions] First we’ll hear from Shannon Cross with Cross Research.
Shannon Cross :
Thank you very much and nice iPhone numbers. Can you talk about Luca about currency? How you are thinking about it? What it did this quarter? What it does to gross margin? And what’s it’s going to do during the year? Because that’s clearly a big topic of conversation?
Luca Maestri:
Yes, Shannon I’ll do that now. I’ll talk about Q1. I’ll talk about what we are looking for Q2 and possibly even further. Obviously, what we’ve seen during Q1 has been unprecedented movements in currencies. I would say during the course of the quarter the biggest impact came from the Japanese yen, the Russian rubel, but also from euro, Australian dollar, Canadian dollar. Our revenue growth during Q1 would have been four percentage points higher on a constant currency basis. On a profitability standpoint, our hedging program partially mitigated the impact from the volatility in currencies. As we look forward, and we look into particularly the March quarter, the foreign exchange headwinds will be stronger in Q2 than they were in Q1 for two main reasons. The first one is the fact that the U.S. dollar has continued to appreciate against foreign currencies during the last few weeks. And the other one is the fact that our existing hedges expire. They get replace by new contracts at current levels and therefore the protection that is provided to us by our hedging program diminishes over time. What that means to us going forward for the March quarter is that revenue growth on a year-over-year basis in constant currency would be five point higher than what we are guiding to, if it wasn’t for the FX movements. In terms of gross margins, and you know that we look our gross margins on a sequential basis, the gross margin percentage after the offset that we're getting from the hedging program will be impacted by over 100 basis points. Now having said that, we have factored the impact that I just described into the guidance that we provided to you. So that’s where we are right now. Of course, as you look further out, you know we do not provide guidance past the March quarter, but it goes without saying that at current levels, again those headwinds will continue to become stronger for the reason I explained earlier, that our hedges continue to expire, they get replaced by new hedging contracts at current levels and so -- and there is the impact that we would see during the course of the year. It goes without saying strong U.S. dollar has negative impact on our international business. Having said all that, we have provided what we believe is very strong guidance for the March quarter. We remain very, very confident about the portfolio of products and services that we have in the market today and we remain very, very confident in the pipeline of products and services that we have.
Shannon Cross :
And as a follow-up to that, can you talk a little bit about pricing power? Basically as you think about currency and euro movements and that -- and then the contracts you have with the carriers, can you talk about maybe the opportunities to raise prices, because I know it's something that a lot of companies are balancing right now?
Luca Maestri:
I think as you know, we prefer to adjust local pricing at the time of new product launches. That will be obviously our preference. That’s what we do in normal times. When currencies move as much as they have been in places like Russia for example, sometimes we need to take mid-cycle action to realign pricing. So we’ll see what happens. As you know currency markets tend to be very volatile. So we just want to understand a bit better what is happening.
Operator:
From UBS we’ll hear from Steve Milunovich.
Steve Milunovich:
I wonder if you could address the mix of the iPhone 6 line. Specifically, how did the 6 Plus do? I don’t know if you can give us a sense relative to total units, maybe geographic view, and also availability? Are you calling up on the 6 Plus?
Tim Cook:
Steve, its Tim. We don’t report out the precise mix. But what I can tell you is that iPhone 6 was the most popular iPhone last quarter, but I just believe to sell 74.5 million they were really all popular. And all did well. There is clearly a geographic difference where some geos would skew much higher on their preference to iPhone 6 Plus than other geos. And so it’s something that is not consistent around the world. But both did incredibly well, and we’re really proud of them, along with the iPhone 5S and 5C as well, which continues to in the lineup.
Steve Milunovich:
Okay. And then could you update us in terms of the sell through relative to the reported numbers for the Phone, the Pad and your biggest plans to increase by roughly a week of channel inventory?
Tim Cook:
From an iPhone point of view, as I think Luca covered, our channel inventory decreased from the beginning of the quarter by 200,000 units, and that left us outside of our target range on the low -- outside the low end of the range to be specific. Just recently we became in supply demand balance on the 6 and 6 Plus in January. We were not able to reach a balanced state during our fiscal Q1. On iPad, we increased channel inventory by 1.1 million units from beginning of the quarter to end of the quarter. That compares to the previous year where we're increased to 2.1 million. Obviously, that inventory was required because of all the new products that we announced on iPad with the iPad Air 2 and the iPad Mini 3 in the October timeframe during the quarter. At the end of the quarter, we were within the target range of channel inventory on iPad. In terms of growing channel inventory, in particular on iPhone where we’re outside of it, we wouldn’t expect to see a large step function increase. We would expect it to occur more gradually over time than sort of all at once type of thing. But we don’t guide to channel inventory specifically as you know.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Steve. Can we have the next question please?
Operator:
From Morgan Stanley we’ll go to Katy Huberty.
Katy Huberty:
So not to dilute the fantastic performance in December, but can you talk a little bit about how you think about the sustainability of this very strong iPhone demand into 2015, particularly given that most carriers had access to that product during the quarter? And then I have a follow up on margin?
Tim Cook:
Sure Katy. It’s Tim. You can see from the March guidance that we’ve given, that we are incredibly bullish about iPhone going forward. We believe that it’s the best smartphone in the world. Our customers are telling us that. The market is telling us that. We’re doing well in virtually every corner of the world. And so we’re very bullish that it does have legs. I would point out that only a small fraction of the installed base has upgraded. And so there is a lot more people within the installed base. But I would also point out that we had the highest number of customers new to iPhone last quarter than in any prior launch. And also that the current iPhone line up experienced the highest Android switcher rate in any of the last three launches in the three previous years. And we didn’t look back to the other years. So I don’t know about those. And so we see that we’re appealing to new customers, both new to smartphone and new to iPhone and people switching. We’re very bullish on the product and getting great feedback about the quality of the products we’re shipping. And so we’re very, very bullish. The emerging markets which has been a source to great questions over time, the growth was absolutely stunning, in Brazil and Mainland China more than doubling year-over-year which is 3x to 4x what those markets were doing according to IDC. And so we enter the quarter with quite a bit of momentum.
Katy Huberty:
And Luca as you know, you typically enjoy component cost downs and yield improvements as you move through a product cycle. Is there anything other than currency that keeps you from potentially locking the gross margins higher over the course of the year? Thank you.
Luca Maestri:
Katy, you’re right. I mean on both fronts. We certainly expect more favorable cost in the March quarter than we’ve seen in the December quarter. It goes with our product cycle. The foreign exchange headwinds as I was explaining to Shannon, they will be on a sequential basis a headwind of more than 100 basis points. So if you were to exclude that foreign exchange impact, we would actually be guiding to sequential increase in margins. The other element that is there and it’s very seasonal, it’s always there, it’s the loss of leverage that we got from Q1 to Q2. When you look at our revenue guidance, we are guiding to a sequential decline between 26% and 30%. So you obviously have that loss of leverage, but without a doubt the biggest headwind that we got right now is foreign exchange. Having said all that guiding 38.5% to 39.5%, we feel slightly very good about where we are right now in the cycle.
Nancy Paxton:
Katie could we have the next question please?
Operator:
We’ll go to Benjamin Reitzes, Barclays.
Benjamin Reitzes:
And Tim obviously a lot of good questions about the great iPhone number but I wanted to ask about the Apple Watch. Shifting in April, month or two later than I think you said originally obviously, probably not that big a deal, but what’s going on with that product in a little more detail in terms of the timing and your excitement for it and maybe a little more color on other apps that could be available at launch? And any expectations you have for it would be great.
Tim Cook:
My expectations are very high on it. I'm using it every day and love it and I can’t live without it. So I see that we’re making great progress on the development of it. The number of developers that are writing apps more for it are impressive and we’re seeing some incredible innovation coming out there. And just to clarify, what we had been saying was early 2015, and we sort of look at the year and think of early as the first four months, mid is the next four months and late is the final four months. And so to us it's sort of within the range and it’s basically when we thought. We’re going to -- but most importantly we’re going to be thrilled to start shipping it, because we got a lot of customers that are wanting to get one.
Benjamin Reitzes:
And then just a follow-up in terms of China. How do you feel the momentum there is in terms of sustainability versus some of the local competition, and as you navigate that market specifically going forward?
Tim Cook:
The local competition was obviously there this quarter and has been there for many quarters before. And so the local competition is not new. I think we did really well there. I'm very proud of how we’re doing. I was there right after the launch in October. And the excitement around the iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus were absolutely phenomenal. And you can see that in the results with Mainland China being up 100% year-on-year, despite not having a full quarter of sales since we launched in the second half of October. You can tell by that we’re a big believer in China. We’re looking at our investment. We’re growing the number of stores. We’ll hit 20 soon and we’re doubling that by mid-2016 as Angela has said earlier and Luca said in his prepared comments as well. We’re also growing the channel there. Our online store has expanded to over 350 cities now, and in fact our online revenues in China last quarter were more than the sum of the previous five years. And so it’s an incredible market. I think people love Apple products and we are going to do our best to serve the market.
Nancy Paxton:
Could we have the next question please?
Operator:
From Bernstein we’ll hear from Toni Sacconaghi.
Toni Sacconaghi:
I was wondering if you could comment on your revenue guidance. Luca you mentioned the range as down 26% to 30% sequentially. I think if you look back over the last three or four Q1 to Q2s, revenues declined more in the 15% to 20% range. As you noted, your iPhone channel inventory is below your target range as well. So if anything, that might be going up. So I'm wondering if you could just discuss a little bit what factors are contributing to this steeper than normal decline this quarter, particularly given your ongoing enthusiasm for the phone.
Luca Maestri:
First of all, it’s a 20% year-over-year growth that we’re guiding at the top end of the range. So we obviously feel good about a 20% growth. As we look at it on a sequential basis, there's a couple of things that I think is important to point out. I mentioned the foreign exchange headwinds. They are there. We need to deal with them, but they obviously are a negative to revenue. Those are headwinds that we had this year and were not there a year ago. So that’s one factor. We’ve also said the manufacturing ramp that we’ve had this year in the December quarter has been the fastest that we’ve ever had. And so that’s also a factor that impacts the sequential compare. And then there's a couple of specific events that happened last year in the March quarter which are not going to repeat this year. One of them is the fact that last year in January we launched China Mobile and we had the subsequent channel sale for China Mobile. That of course is not going to repeat this year. And we also had a very, very strong quarter in Japan in the March quarter a year ago, which was driven by very significant carrier promotional activities, and a pull forward of sales into the March quarter in anticipation of a consumption tax increase that took place on April 1, and again that is not going to repeat. So when you take those factors into account, I think that explains the sequential decline that we see this year. Again I want to point out to the 20% year-over-year growth.
Toni Sacconaghi:
Luca just to confirm, sequentially my math is saying it's about two point incremental revenue headwind. Is that the right way to think about it?
Luca Maestri:
From FX?
Toni Sacconaghi:
Yes. Currency.
Luca Maestri:
Right.
Toni Sacconaghi:
Sequentially, okay. Tim, I was wondering if I could have my -- direct my follow-up to you, which is the iPad. You’ve spoken on prior calls about your enthusiasm for the product on a go forward basis. Over the last year it's down double-digits from a unit perspective and ASP has also been declining. So I was wondering if you could comment on whether your bullishness about the iPad persists and is it really -- do you believe it's a replacement cycle, that we will ultimately see that will start to drive growth or is there really innovation in product that is both necessary and forthcoming that’s going to drive that growth?
Tim Cook:
Toni, I am still very optimistic and bullish on iPad over the long run, as I’ve indicated before. When you measure it in these 90-day clips, as we do in the short run, I don’t think you're going to see a miraculous change in the -- or an improvement in the year-over-year. But here is what I see when I look at it and the reason that I'm so optimistic. I see that the first time buyer rates are very high. And so by very high, I mean that if you look in some of the developed market like the U.S., Japan, the UK, you would find that 50% of the people are buying an iPad for the first time. If you look in China, it's over 70%. And so that -- when you have that kind of first time buyer rates, you don’t have a saturated market. When I look at the customer stat on iPad, it's literally off the charts, in some cases a 100%, which is unheard of in surveys to get these kind of customer stat ratings. When I look at the usage, the usage is six times our nearest competitor. The usage is defined as measured in web browsing is like 71% of total tablets, as I think Luca covered earlier. Also the commerce taking place across the iPad is enormous. Essentially over 80% of the commerce on tablets are taking place on iPad. And so when I back up and look at all of these, and I believe that over the long arc of time that the iPad is the great business, I also have visibility obviously of what’s in the pipeline and feel very, very good about that. That said, I'm not projecting -- to be clear with everyone, I'm not projecting something very different next quarter or the next. I'm thinking over the long run. In terms of what I think is going on, I think what you said is absolutely true, that the upgrade cycle is longer. It's longer than an iPhone, probably between an iPhone and a PC. We haven’t been in the business long enough to say that with certainty, but that’s what we think. There is probably some level of cannibalization that's going on with the Mac on one side and the Phone on the other. And so you probably have a little bit of that that is shaking out. How much, very hard to tell on the early going, particularly since we just shipped the new phones a few months ago. And so I think there's some things like that are going on. On the other side I think the partnership with IBM and the work that we have going on in the Enterprise is profound. I think we’re really going to change the way people work. I'm really excited about the apps that are coming out and how fast the partnership is getting up and running. And so I think that can move the dial there. And so I'm not predicting the 90-day clips and so forth, but over long arc of time I really believe that iPad is a great space, a great product and with -- also coupled with the product innovation we’ve got, I think there is a very, very bright future for it.
Operator:
We'll go to Gene Munster with Piper Jaffray.
Gene Munster :
A couple of questions for Tim. First, any updates on Apple TV or your broader biz in the living room? And second a high level question about Apple Pay and some of the successes at point-of-sales. Can you talk a little bit about if in app is important or how important that is? And potentially how the product could evolve over time? Could you see this becoming more consumer to consumer or more just kind of a broader payment platform? Thank you.
Tim Cook:
Gene, on Apple TV, we had a solid quarter with existing product. We’ve sold 25 million Apple TVs now which at the sake of repeating myself, it’s something that we continue to look at and work on and find a way that we can make even greater contribution than what we’re doing. On Apple Pay, both the contactless payment and the in app are both important. I think they are both huge opportunities. I think they’ll play out differently in different geographic regions as to which one is larger than the other and well likely -- the mix of those things will change over time as more and more commerce flows across apps and so forth. In terms of how it evolves, I think we're in the first inning on it. I'm not -- we haven’t even completed the first inning yet. There's tons of things on our roadmap of adding functionality to it. We’re obviously -- we're just in the U.S. right now and so there's tons of countries to go to and there is not a day that goes by that I don’t get notes from many businesses outside U.S. running Apple Pay and banks and merchants. And of course we still have a lot of merchants left in the U.S. But I have to tell you that given that we’ve launched in October, I'm actually unbelievably shocked, positively shocked at how many merchants were able to implement Apple Pay in the heart of their holiday season, because generally most people sort of lock down and don’t do very much. But we were able to get this in a lot of different merchants and I give them a lot of credit for that. But I think we’re just on the front end. And I think that this is the year of Apple Pay. And some of the things you mentioned and others are all things that we’re looking at and in many cases working on in terms of where it can take us.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Gene. Could we have the next question please?
Operator:
From JPMorgan we’ll go to Rod Hall.
Rod Hall:
So I wanted to start off Tim. You talked about the smaller of the user base who have upgraded to iPhone 6 or 6 Plus. And I wonder if you could give us a little bit more color on that, maybe even go as far as quantifying how many of the base you think have upgraded and also talk a little bit about the pattern of upgrades? Are they all tending to be over iPhones or is there are good spread? Can you give us any further color on that? Thanks.
Tim Cook:
It’s a small fraction. It’s a number that's in the mid-teens or barely in the teens. And so when I look at that I say that there is an enormous amount left. And given there are fair amount of Android units out there, there is also an enormous amount of Android customers that could switch. And I’d also remind you that there is a lot of people that have not yet bought a smartphone. And I know it doesn’t feel like that when you’re sitting in the United States, but from a worldwide point of view there's still lots of them. And so I see all three of those groups there and I'm very excited about all of them, and serving all of them.
Rod Hall:
And then my follow up I’d like to direct at Luca. Luca, I wonder, could you talk a little bit about the duration of the hedge contracts and the renewal pattern that we should expect to see this year? Just kind of remind us what your typical renewal pattern is and will you be accelerating that this year given all the currency movement?
Luca Maestri:
Yes Rod. Typically, I think, we have clearly active hedging programs of winning the market almost every day, but we tend to hedge three to 12 months out. There are cases where maybe we’ve had to go a bit longer, if we feel that we have a strong conviction about certain currencies. Otherwise again the typical period is three to 12 months. And as hedges roll off, we replace them with new hedges. We take into account the exposures that we have around the world, taking into account our most recent forecast and we hedge accordingly. We feel very good about our hedging position and the decisions that we’ve made particularly during the summer when we felt that maybe we needed to hedge a bit more than we have done historically.
Tim Cook:
It’s probably worth pointing out too that there is some markets where we can’t economically hedge.
Luca Maestri:
Yes. There are some exposures where the cost of hedging is prohibitive or the financial instruments are not there to hedge. And in those cases of course that’s where you get the full impact of the volatility.
Nancy Paxton:
Thanks Rod. Could we have the next question please?
Operator:
From RBC Capital Markets we’ll go to Amit Daryanani.
Amit Daryanani:
I just have two questions. One maybe just on the gross margin side. I want to understand, the 100 basis points of headwind that you're talking about in the March quarter, is that sort of is -- there is some still protection on the hedges or is that a raw number with no hedges in place?
Luca Maestri:
That’s correct. I think its good clarification. I was talking about the net impact after the hedges. The impact without hedges would be higher. And again this is sequentially right. Because on a year-over-year basis actually the impact is larger, given the fact that currencies have moved during the last 12 months. But the 100 basis points that I quoted includes the mitigating impact of the hedging program.
Amit Daryanani:
And just, when you think about the iPad and you talked about the IBM partnership where you're seeing some traction. Could you just talk about what sort of penetration do you guys think iPads have on an enterprise side right now and how do you see that improve over the next few quarters as you roll out the MobileFirst modules with IBM.
Tim Cook:
We think that what we know, that if you look at the Fortune 500 as an example, we’re in essentially all of the Fortune 500 companies. So the issue is not that, and it’s not a market share number, because our market share is extremely high. The issue is that enterprises, generally speaking are only deploying iPads to a small percentage of their workforce. And so the real opportunity is to bring mobility into the enterprises and change how people work. In order to do that, you obviously need apps that are written to specific jobs, not just apps that are general productivity apps like work processors and spreadsheets and presentation tools et cetera. And so that’s one of the things that working with IBM provides us, is both that and the knowledge of the verticals, which they bring a significant amount of knowledge on all of the verticals that I mentioned earlier. And so where can we take that to? I think if we can really change the way people work, I think the opportunity is enormous. We’re not hanging numbers out there to be measured on at this point, but we don’t do a lot of big partnerships as you probably know. And so when we do one, it is significant and it’s because we really believe in it, and we really believe in this one and what it can do for customers.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you Amit. Can we have the next question please?
Operator:
From Deutsche Bank we’ll hear from Sherri Scribner.
Sherri Scribner:
Luca, I was hoping you can give us some detail on your expectations for operating expenses going forward. I know you’ve been investing pretty significantly in new products, but wanted to see how we should think about those trending over the next couple of quarters?
Luca Maestri:
Sherry, as you know, we provide guidance just for the upcoming quarter. And from what you’ve seen from our guidance for the March quarter, we’re guiding to a growth in OpEx on a year-over-year basis that is similar to what we’ve experienced during the course of the December quarter. We obviously feel good about the business during the December quarter. Our revenue exceeded in terms of growth, our growth in operating expenses. There's going to be quarters where the opposite is going to happen. Our expense to revenue ratio during the December quarter was that 7.4%. It was the lowest that we’ve had in two years. It’s among the lowest ratios that we’ve ever had. But obviously we are investing in the business and we will never under invest in the business. The majority of the increase will continue to come from R&D, given the fact that we’ve expanded our product portfolio and we’re making investments all the time ahead of the revenue that would be generated in the future. We also expect to continue to invest in marketing and advertising. We’re expanding distribution all over the world. We’ve taken our brand to more places and we continue to open new retail stores around the world. And so the idea for us is to continue to invest in the business, making the right trade-offs and the results from the December quarter give us very good confidence for the future.
Nancy Paxton:
Could we have the next question please?
Operator:
We’ll go to Bill Shope with Goldman Sachs.
Bill Shope:
I wanted to follow up on your previous comments on the iPhone and the customer composition for the quarter. Considering the iPhone 6 Plus brought you into entirely new segment of smartphone market, can you give us a bit more color on that customer composition for this device? Specifically you mentioned the differences in geographic adoption, but how about on the Android switcher comments you made earlier, and first time adopters relative to the traditional iPhone 6 and your other iPhone models in the past. And I guess related to that, what do you think this tells you about your ASP and unit opportunity for growth in 2015?
Tim Cook:
Bill, at this point, just shortly after the quarter, we don’t have all of our research in from all of the people that bought last quarter. But in the aggregate, as I've mentioned before, we saw more new customers to iPhone than we had ever seen before. And we had a higher rate of Android switchers than we had in the three previous launches. And it’s not that we had more in the fourth one, and I don’t what those numbers are, and whether it's something we're looking at. And so between the switchers and the people that are just new to smartphones and selected an iPhone, and our upgrades, which we’re very happy with, but represent a small fraction of our installed base, we feel really great about what’s in front of us.
Bill Shope:
Makes sense. And then a follow up on your Apple Pay commentary. When we look at the opportunity outside of the U.S. are there unique hurdles we should consider as we think about the timing of the rollouts in Europe and Asia, or is it really just about following partnerships together?
Tim Cook:
Each has a different implementation. And so in some ways, like there is a different set of carriers in every country, there is a different set of banks. In a lot of the countries, some of the processes with the merchants are different. And so it’s an area where there is quite a bit of difference country to country to country and so there's clearly heavy lifting involved to scale. However it’s not something that scares us or that’s preventing us from viewing it as a big opportunity.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Bill. A replay of today's call will be available for two weeks as a podcast on the iTunes Store, as a webcast on apple.com/investor and via telephone and the numbers for the telephone replay are 888-203-1112 or 719-457-0820 and please enter a confirmation code 8259681. And these replays will be available by approximately 5.00 PM Pacific Time today. Members of the press with additional questions can contact Kristin Fugate at 408-974-2414 and financial analysts can contact Joan Hoover or me with additional questions. Joan’s at 408-974-4570 and I am at 408-974-5420. Thanks again for joining us.
Executives:
Nancy Paxton - Senior Director of Investor Relations Tim Cook - CEO Luca Maestri - SVP and CFO
Analysts:
Shannon Cross - Cross Research Bill Shope - Goldman Sachs Katy Huberty - Morgan Stanley Toni Sacconaghi - Sanford Bernstein Steven Milunovich - UBS Ben Reitzes - Barclays Gene Munster - Piper Jaffray Keith Buckman - Bank of Montreal
Presentation:
Operator:
Good day, everyone, and welcome to the Apple Incorporated Fourth Quarter Fiscal Year 2014 Earnings Release Conference Call. Today’s call is being recorded. At this time, for opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn the call over to Nancy Paxton, Senior Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you. Good afternoon, and thanks everyone for joining us today. Speaking first today is Apple's CEO, Tim Cook; and he will be followed by CFO, Luca Maestri, and after some final remarks we'll open the call for questions from analysts. Please note that some of the information you’ll hear during our discussion today will consist of forward-looking statements, including without limitation, those regarding revenue, gross margins, operating expenses, other income and expense, taxes and future products. Actual results or trends could differ materially from our forecast. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in Apple’s Form 10-K for 2013, the Form 10-Q for the first three quarters of fiscal 2014, and the Form 8-K filed with the SEC today, along with the associated press release. Apple assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements or information, which speak as of their respective dates. And I’d now like to turn the call over to Tim for introductory remarks.
Tim Cook:
Thanks, Nancy. Good afternoon, everyone and thanks for joining us. Since we spoke in July, it's been an exciting and very busy time, so we have lots of great things to talk about today. Just last month, we launched the biggest advancements in iPhone's history with iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. These iPhones are the best we have ever created and customers absolutely love them. Our operational team has done an extraordinary job executing the manufacturing ramp throughout the entire supply chain. Today we've launched in 32 countries including China and our new iPhones will be shifting in 69 countries and territories by the end of this month, making this our fastest and most successful iPhone launch ever. Demand for the new iPhones has been staggering and geographically broad-based markedly higher in every single country where we've launched compared to the iPhone 5s a year ago. We're working hard to fill orders as fast as possible and we're on track to be in more than 115 countries by the end of December. Last month we introduced two new categories; the first is Apple Pay, an entirely new way to pay for things in stores and in apps. It makes mobile payments easier, more secure and more private. Apple Pay went live today and now making purchases and participating stores happens with just a touch of a finger. Paying within apps is as easy as selecting Apple Pay and placing a finger on Touch ID. Today Apple Pay supports credit and debit cards from the three major payment networks and the top U.S. banks and over 500 additional banks have signed on and will be supporting Apple Pay beginning this year and early next year. Apple Pay is being supported by many of the nation's top retailers and we continue to sign more retailers. The second new category is Apple Watch, our most personal device ever and one that has already captured the world's imagination. We can't wait to get Apple Watch to customers beginning in early calendar 2015. We'll be providing more details on Apple Watch as we get closer to the shipment day. Last week we launched the new iPad Air 2 and iPad Mini 3 with innovations that make them dramatically better than previous generation and the stunning new iMac with a Retina 5K display. We released iOS 8 last month and our customers are enjoying new ways to use their iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch with intuitive new features and groundbreaking security. Last week, we also released OS X Yosemite, with an all new design and continuity features that deliver an even more fluid experience across all of our iOS devices and Mac. These introductions reflect years of innovation and hard work by teams all across Apple and they demonstrate the seamless integration of hardware, software and services that provides unparallel user experiences for our customers. These are things that only Apple can do. We've also communicated and demonstrated our commitment to respecting and protecting users' privacy with strong encryption and strict policies that govern how our data is handled. Today we're also reporting very strong results for Apple's fourth fiscal quarter. We generated our strongest revenue growth rate in seven quarters far surpassing our expectations we communicated in July and establishing a new record for Apple's September quarter revenue. We're also reporting gross margin of 38% compared to 37% last year, leading to a very strong EPS growth of 20%. Fueled by the launch of iPhone 6 and 6 Plus and strong demand for our previous iPhone models, we set a new September quarter record for iPhone with revenue growth of 21% year-over-year. Demand for iPhone was strong across all geographies with global unit sell-through growth of 26% and we exited the quarter with significant backlog for both iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. We established an all-time quarterly record for Mac sales with revenue growing 18% year-over-year, thanks in particular to the very strong performance of our portables. We're especially proud of our Mac results considering the overall contraction of the global PC market this year and we achieved our highest quarterly market share since 1995. We also set an all-time record for the App Store revenue, thanks to the tremendous momentum and ongoing success of our developer community. App Store revenue grew 36% over last year and cumulative app downloads have now topped 85 billion. These results bring to a close a record breaking fiscal 2014. Over the last four quarters, our products and services have generated a $183 billion in revenues, an increase of $12 billion over last year. We sold 243 million iOS devices and 19 million Macs, both all-time highs. Our revenue from iTunes software and services reached $18 billion, which was more than the annual sales of two thirds of the companies in the Fortune 500 and we generated $6.45 in earnings per share, which is 14% higher than last year and also set a new record. We made big investments in our business and have continued to expand our global footprint. Today we have 437 Apple retail stores in 15 countries and our partners are selling Apple products in hundreds of thousands of locations around the world. We're continuing to invest in developing markets where revenues approached $50 million in fiscal year '14, up 16% over last year and twice the rate of growth of the company overall. We [forged] (ph) a landmark partnership with IBM to provide a new generation of mobile enterprise application designed with our products legendary ease of use and backed by IBM's cloud services and data analytics. Our partnership aims to redefine the way work is done, address key industry mobility challenges and sparked true mobile-led business change. Developer teams have been working closely to develop the first wave of Mobile First solutions and these solutions will be ready for customers beginning next month across six sectors; banking, government, insurance, retail, travel and transportation and telecommunication. We brought tremendous new talent and technology into Apple through 20 acquisitions in fiscal '14 including seven alone in the September quarter. We closed the Beats transition in July and we're off to a great start with some wonderful plans we'll share with you in the future. Our strong results continue to generate significant cash and we're extremely happy that this has enabled us to make substantial investments in Apple's future, while retaining -- while returning cash to our shareholders. We had executed aggressively against our share repurchase program, spending $17 billion in the September quarter alone and $45 billion in the last year. In addition to Apple's strong business performance over the past four quarters, I am incredibly proud of all of our work to protect the environment, to advance human rights, to improve working conditions in the supply chain and to change the way teachers teach and students learn. I'd like to thank all of our customers, employees, developers and business partners for making fiscal 2014 Apple's best year yet and I'd like to thank all of our shareholders for their continued support. I could not be more excited about the road ahead in fiscal 2015. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Luca to discuss our September quarter results in more detail.
Luca Maestri:
Thank you, Tim, and good afternoon, everyone. During the September quarter we generated record revenue of $42.1 billion, an increase $4.7 billion or 12% year-over-year. These results exceeded our guidance range due to better than expected sales of iPhones and Macs for which customer demand grew strongly year-over-year in all our segments. Gross margin was 38% at the high end of the guidance range, operating margin was $11.2 billion representing 26.5% of revenue. Net income was $8.5 billion, a new September quarter record translating to diluted earnings per share of $1.42, a 20% year-over-year increase. Cash flow from operations was very strong, a $13.3 billion, also a new Q4 record. For details by product, I will start with iPhone. We sold 39.3 million iPhones, an increase of 5.5 million over last year or 16% growth. Underlying demand was even stronger with sell-through growth of 26%. iPhone sales grew across both developed and emerging markets. Unit sales in the U.S. grew 17% year-over-year, and in Western Europe they were up 20%. We saw even stronger growth in Latin America and the Middle East with sales up more than 50% and in Central and Eastern Europe where sales more than doubled. We increased iPhone channel inventory by just under one million units during the September quarter this year, significantly less than the 3.3 million unit increase in the September quarter a year ago. Based on the very strong demand for our new iPhones, this left us below our target range of four to six weeks for channel inventory on a look forward basis. iPhone momentum in enterprise market remains very strong. The latest data published by IDC indicates that iPhone have 69% share of the U.S. commercial smartphone market. Also, In August ChangeWave survey of U.S. corporate IT buyers found that among those planning to purchase smartphones in the December quarter 75% plan to purchase iPhones. An iPhone continues to fuel innovation of companies around the world. Schindler, a leading global escalator and elevator manufacturer has deployed over 20,000 iPhones and 20 customer apps to improve customer engagements for safety and to allow service technicians to access vital documentation, repair and safety functions when they are in the field. Baidu, China's top search provider currently has over 20,000 employees using iPhones and the company has developed over 30 in-house iOS apps to help its employees work more efficiently, track sales leads and manage internal IT infrastructure and processes. Next, I would like to talk about the Mac. We sold 5.5 million Macs, an increase of almost a million over last year. That represents 21% growth year-over-year and an all-time quarterly record. We saw great demand in the back-to-school season for both desktops and portables with especially strong growth for MacBook Pro and MacBook Air. We achieved double-digit Mac growth across most markets around the world, with particularly impressive performance in emerging markets where Mac sales were up 46%. These results are truly remarkable given the contraction in the global PC market and we now gain market share for 33 of the last 34 quarters. We ended the quarter with Mac channel inventory slightly below our four to five week target range. Turning to iPad, we sold 12.3 million units compared to 14.1 million in the September quarter last year. In anticipation of our October new product announcement we reduced iPad channel inventory by 500,000 from the end of the June quarter, which left us within our target range of channel inventory on a look-back basis. iPad sales were consistent with our expectations and we experienced very strong results in Japan where iPad sales were up 46% year-over-year. Customers continue to love their iPads. In an August survey by ChangeWave iPad Mini with retina display earned an incredible 100% satisfaction rate, and among consumers planning to purchase a tablet within 90 days, the survey indicated a 55% plan to buy an iPad. We continue to see some momentum in enterprise for iPad. Progressive IT organizations around the world continue to deploy, manage and develop amazing in-house apps for iPad. Healthcare leader Sanofi has over 25,000 iPads and over 450 in-house apps for sales teams and corporate employees to get their products and information into the hands of doctors and other healthcare providers. Premium eyewear designer Luxottica has deployed over 10,000 iPads to improve how customers experience the size, fit and overall look of eyewear in a retail environment. Importantly, since the announcement of the partnership with IBM hundreds of corporations around the world have expressed interest in MobileFirst solutions and we are actively working with over 50 of them to become foundational client for MobileFirst solutions in their industries. iPad continues to lead the U.S. education tablet market with 90% share based on the latest data from IDC. In the September quarter the St. Paul public school in Minnesota purchased over 22,000 iPad Airs and over 5,000 iPad Minis in the first race of the district's personalized learning through technology plan that will ultimately equip every student with an iPad. We are fully consistent and continue to strive. Our item store generated all time record billings of $5.4 billion in the September quarter, up 22% year-over-year, thanks to the tremendous momentum of the app store. Developers around the world have embraced the iOS platform and keep broadening the appeal of our thoughtfully designed app store to a large, loyal and engaged customer base. Across all of our programs the number of registered app developers has grown by 22% in the last year and we are rapidly approaching 10 million. We are seeing especially strong interest in the enterprise with a number of registered developers is up 39% over a year ago. Our retail stores also generated strong results. Revenue for the quarter was $5.1 billion, up 15% from a year ago and a new September quarter record. We opened 10 new stores and completed the remodels of three stores during the quarter ending with a total of 437 stores, 41% of which are outside the United States. We are projecting a total of approximately 25 new store openings in fiscal '15, about three quarters of which will be outside the U.S. We also plan to remodel about five stores over the course of the year. With an average of 432 stores opened in the September quarter average revenue per store was $11.9 million compared to $10.9 million in the year ago quarter. We hosted 102 million visitors to our stores during the quarter, which translates to over 18,000 visitors per store per week. Let me now turn to our cash position. We ended the quarter with $155.2 billion in cash plus marketable securities, a sequential decline of $9.3 billion. We are continue to execute our capital return program aggressively with the total spend of over $20 billion in just the September quarter. We launched our fourth accelerated share repurchase program at the end of August spending $9 billion. We also spent $8 billion to repurchase $81 million Apple's shares to open market transactions, paid $2.8 billion in dividends and equivalence and utilized over $300 million to net share sell vesting employee RSUs. So, we've already taken action on over $94 billion of our $130 billion capital return program including $68 billion in share repurchases with five quarters remaining to its completion. We remained firmly committed to our objective of delivering attractive returns to shareholders through both business performance and return of capital. As we said before, we review our capital allocation regularly. We have solicited feedback on our capital return program from shareholders in the past and we will continue to do so. We plan to report on our conclusions in a timeframe similar to last year. Now, as we move ahead into the December quarter, I'd like to review our outlook which includes the types of forward-looking information that Nancy referred to at the beginning of the call. We expect revenue to be between $63.5 billion and $66.5 billion compared to $57.6 billion in the year ago quarter. This represents a double-digit revenue increase despite significant foreign exchange headwinds from the recent strengthening of the U.S. dollar against most currencies. We expect gross margin to be between 37.5% and 38.5%. We expect OpEx to be between $5.4 billion and $5.5 billion. We expect OI&E to be about $325 million and we expect the tax rate to be about 26.5%. Also today our Board has declared a dividend of $0.47 per common share payable on November 13, 2014, to shareholders of record as of November 10, 2014. With that, I will hand it over to Nancy for some final remarks.
Nancy Paxton:
Thanks, Luca. We'd like to let you know about some reporting changes that we'll be making beginning with the release of our Q1 '15 results. First, to better serve our customers and optimize our results around the world we are collaborating like never before across our direct and indirect channels. Accordingly, beginning in Q1 '15, we'll be including the results of our retail stores in the geographic segments where the stores are located providing a consolidated view of regional performance that is consistent with the way our executive team measures the business. This means that going forward our reportable segment will be Americas, Europe, Greater China, Japan and the rest of Asia-Pacific with the retail no longer classified as a segment. Second, to better reflect our evolving products and services, we'll be making some changes to our product summary reporting. We will continue to report iPhone, iPad and Macs as separate line items and we'll also have a category that we refer to as services and this will encompass everything we report under the heading of iTunes software and services today including content, apps, licensing and other services and beginning this month it will also include Apple Pay. We'll be creating a new reporting category called other products. This will encompass everything we report in the accessories category today including Beats headphones and speakers, Apple TV and peripherals and accessories for iPhone, iPad, Mac and iPod. In addition, we will begin to include iPod sales in the other products category and we will also reflect sales of Apple Watch in this line item once it begins shipping in early calendar 2015. So to recap, beginning in Q1 '15. our products reporting categories will be iPhone, iPad, Mac, services and other products. We wanted to give analysts and investors a heads up on these plans so you can reflect them in your models accordingly. We'll also reclassify historical results to be consistent with these newer groupings and we'll provide that information on our Investor Relations website when we release Q1 results. And finally, our distribution channels have evolved and expanded significantly in the last couple of years including traditional resellers, consumer electronic stores, mass retailers, distributors and carriers, and each of these channels have the different distribution model. Today, iPhone is sold in over 200,000 locations around the world and iPad is sold in more than 100,000. In addition, revenue from emerging markets has increased considerably over the last few years and now accounts for over quarter of our sales. And channel inventory requirements in those markets tend to be much longer. So, due to the size, complexity and different needs of our channels around the world we've determined that a five to seven week average range for both iPhone and iPad channel inventory is more appropriate and that will be our target range going forward. However, given the backlog for our new products, we expect to exit the December quarter within our old four to six weeks target range. So with that let's open the call to questions and we ask that you please limit yourself to one one-part question and one follow-up.
Operator:
(Operator Instructions) Your first question will come from Shannon Cross with Cross Research.
Shannon Cross - Cross Research:
Thank you very much. Good afternoon. My first question is with regard to Apple Pay, which we actually used this afternoon and where it was rolled out it actually worked pretty well which was nice, but could you provide some more color, Tim and Luca, on how you see the business model for Apple? And maybe from a high level perspective, if you see there's more over time becoming a standalone business like you look at iTunes, or is this more just a way to sell incremental product?
Tim Cook:
Shannon, hi, it's Tim. The -- what we wanted to achieve with Apple Pay was first and foremost to have an incredible consumer experience. And so we focused very much on making it elegant and simple and hopefully your trails have proven them. I know I used it over the weekend and it worked fantastically. We also wanted to focus on security and privacy, and so we see huge issues with the security of the traditional credit card system. And many people that have entered mobile payments are doing still in a way that they want to monetize the data that they collect from the customers and we think customers in general do not want this that they'd like to keep their data private. And so, we wanted to have ease of use, security and privacy and maximize all three. By doing so, we think we will sell more devices because we think it's a killer feature. It's far better than reaching in your pocket book and trying to find the card that you're looking for and half the time it's not working. There -- we do not charge the customer for the benefit. We do not charge the merchant for the benefit. However, there are commercial terms between Apple and the issuing banks, but we're not disclosing what they are, like any other contractual arrangement those are private things. And so as Nancy was saying in her closing comments, we'll be reporting Apple Pay in the services line item on the data sheet. And so, we see it as an incredible service that is the most customer-centric mobile payment system that there is. And we are very proud of it and can't wait to sign up more retailers and also extend it around the world.
Shannon Cross - Cross Research:
Thank you. And then, Luca, if you could talk a little bit about the impact of currency. In IBM's results this morning they talked substantially about potential pressure going forward from currency. So could you walk us through how your hedges work, how we should think about currency and how you reflected in at least the current quarter guidance?
Luca Maestri:
Yeah. Definitely, Shannon. As you know, the U.S. dollar has strengthened quite significantly against most currencies in recent weeks. When we looked at our Q4 results actually the impact was fairly limited combination of the hedging program and the fact that the dollar really strengthened towards the very end of the quarter. Not much impact in Q4. It is becoming a significant headwind in Q1 both on a year-over-year basis and on a sequential basis. As I said before, we have reflected the new FX situation at current levels into our guidance that we provided for both revenue and gross margins. And it's a fact of life if the U.S. dollar strengthens, that creates a headwind for us both in revenue and margins for our business outside the United States. As you know, we have a comprehensive hedging program in place that mitigates the impact of foreign exchange. Over time, of course, these hedges roll off and get replaced by new hedges at new spot levels, and so the protection that you get from hedging program is temporary. But again, the guidance that we provided fully reflects that current situation in the FX markets.
Shannon Cross - Cross Research:
Thank you.
Nancy Paxton:
Thanks Shannon, can we have the next question please?
Operator:
And from Goldman Sachs we'll hear from Bill Shope.
Bill Shope - Goldman Sachs:
Okay. Thank you. Could you comment on how we should think about the key swing factors for gross margins in the December quarter, obviously outside the FX impact you just mentioned, Luca? And more broadly, I know it's still early, but how should we think about the gross margin path as the iPhone 6 family ramps versus what we saw with the 5S and 5C cycle. I guess you can answer that specifically. I'm trying to figure out if you characterize this as a fairly normal cycle in terms of expected cost improvements over the life of the product.
Luca Maestri:
Yes, Bill let me start with put and takes of margins for Q1. I would say that on the positive we are so pleased with the launch of new phones you might have seen phenomenal. So we think we're going to be getting favorable impact from iPhone mix. Of course, we're also going to be getting some positive leverage from the higher revenues that we guided to and we continue to see fairly favorable commodity environment. So these are the things that are on the positive side. On the negative side I've talked about FX. Obviously we have launched a lot of new products even in the last six weeks and we've got transition costs as we move from current products to new products and that tends to be a headwind. And every time we launch new products, we make them better and what that means is that our cost structures tend to go up when we produce new products. We have a very good track record of taking those cost structures down over time and so when you take the positives and negatives that I have just mentioned that is what gives us the guidance that we just provided.
Bill Shope - Goldman Sachs:
Okay great. And then my second question is, looking at that current supply constraints of the iPhone, could you confirm that your guidance is assuming you will reach supply demand balance before the end of the quarter, I think that's what was implied by your commentary on channel inventory? And related to that, could you give us some more color on what you see as the key bottlenecks at this point for supply on the iPhone side?
Tim Cook:
Bill its Tim. The ramp itself is going great. The chances are ever in our history, so I couldn’t be happier with it. That said, today demand is far obstructing supply. It is unclear looking at the data when supply will catch up with demand. And so I don’t want to leave you with a view that we know that we're going to get to a supply-demand balance on both of the new products this quarter because I don’t know that at this point. It's very difficult to gauge demand without first achieving finding the balance and it's clear that as of today, and certainly as of the end of the quarter where you're looking at the data, we're not nearly, we're not close, we're not on the same plan. And -- but that said, I am really confident that supply is going to be great and that's the reason you see incredibly strong guidance that we're giving from $63.5 billion to $66.5 billion. At -- but at this point, it's just very difficult to gauge what the true demand is. When you see it's very unusual to see every country having a marked improvement over the previous year and that's what we're seeing on iPhone. And so, I couldn’t be happier with the way the demand looks. Nancy's comment at the end was meant to tell you that we do not envision as of today being able to achieve the extra inventory in the channel that we believe is needed when you think about the long food chains in some of the emerging markets where the distribution channels are not as official, so that's the purpose of that comment.
Bill Shope - Goldman Sachs:
Okay, that's helpful, thank you.
Tim Cook:
Yes.
Nancy Paxton:
Thanks Bill. Can we have the next question please?
Operator:
We'll hear from Katy Huberty with Morgan Stanley.
Katy Huberty - Morgan Stanley:
Thanks. Luca I wonder if you can quantify the currency headwind on gross margin in the December quarter, just because there is a big focus on currency across tech right now and should we expect price harmonization if the dollar remained strong? And then I have a follow-up.
Luca Maestri:
Katy, it's you know I said that there's headwinds from foreign exchange are going to be significant. So -- and I would tell you that they are more significant when you look at it from a year-over-year basis that it is on a sequential basis because clearly the dollar has been strengthening for quite a while particularly against certain currencies like the Yen or the Canadian dollar a lot of the emerging market currencies. So it's again impact and that's the reason why we wanted to call it out.
Katy Huberty – Morgan Stanley:
Will you do any price harmonization if the dollar remained strong?
Luca Maestri:
No, we price our products in a way that is in general reflective of pricing here in the United States and it's a pricing that we want to keep in place for reasonable periods of time. We do not like to make sudden changes to our pricing.
Katy Huberty – Morgan Stanley:
Okay, then as a follow up, I wonder if you can comment on the how NAND capacity and SKU mix is tracking versus your expectations for iPhone 6?
Tim Cook:
Yeah Katy, it's Tim. At this point, we're selling everything we made. And so it's difficult to say that we've been -- that we've absolutely made it well on the SKU mix and the split between the iPhone 6 and the 6 Plus. From everything we can tell, we've done a pretty good job on that. But I'll stop short of saying there is no issue at all, because it's hard to tell when you are at a point where you are selling everything you are making. It is a good problem to have.
Katy Huberty – Morgan Stanley:
Got it, congrats on the quarter.
Tim Cook:
Thank you, very much, thank you.
Nancy Paxton:
Thanks Katy. Can we have the next question please?
Operator:
From Sanford Bernstein we'll hear from Toni Sacconaghi. And Toni you may want to check your mute button.
Toni Sacconaghi – Sanford Bernstein:
Yes, sorry about that. I have one for Luca and one for Tim please. Luca the question for you is a bit of a follow up from the last one which is that we saw a pretty robust sequential increase in ASPs this quarter in the iPhone and I was wondering if you could qualitatively help us understand whether that was a higher mix of new phones than you typically see in the September quarter or was it really a function of the new phones having a richer ASP? And if we look forward to calendar fiscal Q1, last year you had a very substantial ASP increase, should we be thinking about a similar kind of ASP increase this quarter given I think a widespread belief that availability on the 6 Plus has been even more constrained and that we could see a much higher percentage of 6 Plus as a percentage of total iPhones shipped in the quarter and next quarter?
Luca Maestri:
Yes Toni. So, on a sequential basis our ASPs for iPhone were up $42. And as you said correctly the reason for the increase was a higher mix of the new iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. There was a partial offset in the quarter from the transition cost that we incurred typically when we moved to a new product. Going forward obviously, the percentage of new iPhone 6 and 6 Plus will increase sequentially as we are going to have the full quarter available to us and it's correct that iPhone 6 Plus is supply constrained right now.
Toni Sacconaghi – Sanford Bernstein:
Okay and then Tim for you, I was wondering again qualitatively if you could help us understand what you think the mix of repeat buyers is for iPhone 6 let's say over the next year versus first time iPhone customers. And you know the question in that is, do you believe that because the iPhone 6 is so compelling that that traditional replacement cycle might be accelerated over the next several quarters? And if that’s ultimately the case, do you in the future run reversion back towards in the elongating of that replacement cycle in future generations?
Tim Cook:
It is difficult to answer exactly, but let me sort of back up and give you some data, maybe that will help frame the topic. So if you look at some of our top countries and how they did in the mid year of selling a customer the first iPhone they had ever bought. What you would see is that in countries like China over 80% of the people that we were selling the 4s2 were buying the first iPhone ever in the U.S. it was over 60%. And so those kind of give you some goalpost of large countries in terms of first time ownership at our entry level. As you step across and look at the 5s, which was at that time the top end phone, in China still almost half the people were buying their first iPhone ever buying try this and about a quarter of the U.S. population buying a 5s or buying their first one. So that kind of gives you some goalpost and so, the way I look at those numbers are, that on a forward basis what would I expect, obviously we don’t give guidance on this kind of stuff is that I still see a fairly large opportunity in people buying their first iPhone ever and I think with these products that we just announced with 6 and 6 Plus that opportunity increases not decreases. I also believe that the upgrade market for people that were waiting for 6, for iPhone 6 or 6 Plus, as we can see from our order backlog that number is huge. And so I would expect that to go on for some period of time because you have people that time out of contract at different time, no everybody does that at launch time. And so I see both the first time buyer being a great opportunity and the up-grader. Some of the first time buyers are people that have never owned a smartphone before and some of them are switchers from android. And so, right now, everything, all of those look very good to us, but we're in the early going and we're selling everything we're making and so it's going to take some period of time before we have a better handle on what those numbers will look like in steady state. But I've never felt so great after a launch before, maybe that's the best way to summarized it all.
Toni Sacconaghi – Sanford Bernstein:
Thank you.
Nancy Paxton:
Thanks Toni. Can we have the next question please?
Operator:
From UBS we'll hear from Steven Milunovich.
Steven Milunovich - UBS:
Thanks. Is there more color you can give us on the mix of 6 and 6 Plus, particularly to the degree you see it in the order book? Our book suggests it's maybe 2.5 to 1, 6 to 6 Plus in the U.S., but and maybe that geographically it's quite different. Asia may be going for the bigger screen is there any color you can give us?
Tim Cook:
Steve, there's not a lot of color that I can give that I feel is terribly accurate because as I said before, we're selling everything we're making and so essentially what our current sell through looks like is our current supply. And so in the long arc of time, once there is enough supply to meet demand that mix might look differently. Digits clear or at least I think that we will see a difference by geography in terms of preference and we thought that going into the launch of -- and there's no data that we perceived to date that would suggest that, that's not the case and so that's all about all I can say at this point.
Steven Milunovich - UBS:
Okay. And then regarding the strength in Mac and the weakness in iPad I guess, what's the message from the market that you take away from that and does that perhaps at all affect your view of doing a convertible type product which in the past has not kind of an Apple's approach, you tend to like to do very focused products there might be that there is something in between that could be quite successful?
Tim Cook:
Let me comment on both the Mac and the iPad. On the Mac it was just absolutely blow-away order. Our best ever, it will result in our highest market share since 1995. It's just absolutely stunning. Get back-to-school season voted and the Mac 1 and carried the day and we're really proud of that. I'm proud of the Mac team. It's clear that the -- all the work that we've put into our Notebooks, on the hardware and the software side is resonating with our customers and I think if you went out to college campuses about now, you will see a lot of Mac and there are lot of new Mac Notebooks there based on the sales. And so that feels fantastic being up 21% in that market that's shrinking it just -- it doesn’t get better than that. For iPad, if I take a step back on iPad, and I know that there is a lot of negative commentary in the market on this, but I have a little different perspective on it. Here's sort of my simple perspective. If you look at, instead of looking at this thing each 90 days, if you back up and look at it, we've sold 237 million in just over four years. That's about twice the number of iPhones that we sold over the first four years of iPhone. If you look at the last 12 months of iPad, we sold 68 million in '13, in fiscal year '13 we sold 71 million. So we were down, but we were down 4% on sell in and the sell-through was a bit better than the negative 4 because we took down channel inventories. And so, to me I view it as a speed bob, not a huge issue. That's said, we want to grow. We don’t like negative numbers on these things and so, looking further in the data, I know that there is a popular view that the market is saturated, but we don’t see that. I can't speak to other people but I do look at our data deeply. And in the last market research data we have is in the June quarter, and let me give you some of this -- the real data that we've got. is that if you look at our top six revenue countries, in the country that’s sold the lowest percentage of iPads to people who had never bought an iPad before that number is 50%. And the range goes from 50 to over 70. And so when I look at number, our first time buyer rates in that area, it is saturated, that's not a saturated market. You never have first time buyer rates at 50% and 70%. What you do see is that people hold on to iPad longer than they do a phone. And because we've only been in this business four years, we don’t really know what the upgrade cycle will be for people. And so that's a difficult thing to call. What we do know is that people always respond for us doing great products and we feel really great about what we introduced last week. We also know that the deeper the Apps go in the enterprise, the more it opens up avenues in enterprise and that's a key part of the IBM partnership and what I think customers will get out of that, which is more important than our selling is changing the right people who work. And so I see catalyst going forward. There are obvious cannibalization; things that are occurring. I'm sure that some people looked at the Mac and iPad and decided on a Mac. I don’t have research to demonstrate that, but I am sure that will be just looking at the numbers and I am fine with that by the way. I am sure that some people will look at an iPad and an iPhone and decide just to get an iPhone and I'm fine with that as well. But over the long arc of time, my own judgment is that iPad has a great future, healthy individual 90-day clicks workout, I don’t know, But I'm very bullish on where we can take iPad over time and so we're continuing to invest in the product pipeline. We're continuing to invest in distribution. If you look at how we did in emerging markets like BRIC countries as an example, we were up 20% for the full year of '14. And so these numbers are impressive and obviously the BRIC countries are growing as a percentage of our total as is developing markets. And so, it looks a bit different geography to geography, and so that’s a long answer to your question, but I thought it was important for you to at least share my perspective and you can judge it as you will.
Steven Milunovich - UBS:
Thanks.
Nancy Paxton:
Thanks Steve. Can we have the next question please?
Operator:
And we'll hear from Ben Reitzes from Barclays.
Ben Reitzes - Barclays:
Hey, thanks a lot. Tim, I was wondering what we were to make out of your new segments with the Apple Watch being in the other category. We were just a little surprised to hear that because it seems like such a substantial new category and you could sell may be even tens of millions of unit. So by putting it lumped in the other with iPods and a lot of other things, does that say something about your expectations for that product or do you think that you'll just break it out after a little while?
Tim Cook:
Probably it says nothing about our expectation for the product. We didn't form those categories based on expectations. We looked at current revenue, today revenue, and decided that we would love everything that wasn’t a Mac, an iPad, or an iPhone or a service in one kind of category. In the future, we might decide something different, but for now, in Q1 we're not shipping any iPhone or excuse me, Apple Watches and so it seems appropriate to start it that way. And also to be also straight is I am not very anxious in reporting a lot of numbers on Apple Watch because of the -- and giving a lot of detail on it because our competitors are looking for it and so aggregating it is helpful from that point of view as well.
Ben Reitzes - Barclays:
Okay. Got it. And then with regard to my next question is you put out a lot of products and we obviously everybody gives you a lot of credit for the great new product lineup that we have, but everybody talks about what's next. You said in an interview recently on TV that you were working on products that people didn't even speculate on yet and that's pretty hard with Apple considering how many people watch your company and write about it. So I was just wondering if you could elaborate on that may be in terms of your excitement around new products and what did you mean by that comment and how do you feel about the future in light of that comment you made? Thanks a lot.
Tim Cook:
I am incredibly optimistic about the future. We've already announced two new categories in the last 60 days or so or less than 60 days with Apple Pay and Apple Watch. So shipping the watch early next year and obviously we're working on other things as well and to the degree that I can keep that in the cone of silence, I am going to do it and so I am not sure what to say. I am not going to give any answer or anything. We look at a lot of different things and we're fortunate to have a lot of creative people here that want to change the world and have a lot of great ideas.
Ben Reitzes - Barclays:
All right. Thanks Tim.
Nancy Paxton:
Thanks. And could we have the next question please?
Operator:
We'll go to Gene Munster with Piper Jaffray.
Gene Munster - Piper Jaffray:
Hey, good afternoon. A follow-up to Ben's question in terms of the last year you had higher expectations in terms of new product categories and the iPhone 6 launch but there are some investors who think about Apple and a products type of story. So Tim, I'd be interested in how you think about the story broadly in 2015 and kind of exciting things to be focused on as an investor and then I have a follow-up to Luca.
Tim Cook:
Well for Apple if as an investor I would hope that people would look at what we've done and what we've delivered and the power and strength of the product line that we've announced and maybe more importantly then all the stuff that you see, is to look at the skills within this company. And the fact that I think it's the only company on the planet that has the ability to integrate hardware and software and services at a world-class level and that in itself allows Apple to play in so many different areas and so the challenge becomes one of deciding which ones to say no to and which ones to say yes to and want to focus not once -- not once do we have any great ideas and we always had more ideas than we have resources to deal with. And so I would look at that. I would look at what we talked about last week. Things like continuity and if you use your imagination and think about where that goes, there is no other company that can do this. Apple is the only one and I think this becomes so incredibly important moving forward for customers living in an environment where they're using multiple devices. And so I would look at the skills, the capabilities, the passion of the company and the creative engine has never been stronger. And I think you can see that from the Apple Watch, you can see that with Apple Pay. Apple Pay is a classic app for taking something that is incredibly old, outdated, kludgy. Everybody is focused on everything except for the customer and putting the customer at the center of the experience and making something very elegant. And so I would look at those things and when I look at those things, I would as an investor, I feel great, as a personal investor I feel great.
Gene Munster - Piper Jaffray:
No. That's helpful. And a follow-up for Luca, you mentioned that you have typical transition costs that involve in new products you're rolling out. Do those costs start to ease in the March quarter and would that presumably have a positive impact on gross margins in March versus December. Thanks.
Luca Maestri:
Yes, and you know pretty much what our product cadence is and what it's been in the past and you know that the holiday season is a period where we have significant product events and we're not providing any guidance for the March quarter. And also keep in mind Gene if you're trying to extrapolate gross margins into the future, there are so many factors that affect gross margin over time and it's not only transition cost, but its product mix, its foreign exchange, its commodity markets.
Gene Munster - Piper Jaffray:
Okay. Great. Thanks. Congratulations.
Luca Maestri:
Thank you.
Nancy Paxton:
Thanks Gene. Could we have the next question please?
Operator:
And from Bank of Montreal, we'll go to Keith Buckman.
Keith Buckman - Bank of Montreal:
Hi, Tim, I was wondering if you could characterize China a little bit. The numbers I understand weren't as good as the rest of the company this quarter but presumably that was all the delay of the iPhone. So I'm really asking if you talk about the last few weeks and more importantly as you look at December quarter in particular related to some of the political backdrop including the carriers have been mandated not to spend the same level of subsidies. Do you see any of that impacting your opportunities for Apple broadly speaking but more specifically for iPhones as it relates to subsidy levels?
Tim Cook:
That's a good question. If you -- if you just -- if you look at Greater China Q4 of '14 compared to Q4 of '13, the obvious difference is that we launched the 5s in Q4 of '13 and in this year, we didn't have a new product launch. We were launching in this quarter in Q1 of '15. The second thing that's not as apparent probably, but is more related to that is that last year we increased our channel inventory by $1.3 million. This year, we actually decreased it slightly. And so you have a compounded effect of their launch and a huge change in channel inventory on a year-over-year basis. So the way that I assess the strength of the market is I look at unit sell-through and to share with you what it was in Greater China, iPhone unit sell through despite no launch in Q4 was up 32% year-over-year. The market was projected by IDC to only grow 13%. So we feel incredibly great about that. Macs were up 54% year-over-year and that's against the IDC's estimate of the market contraction in China of 7% and so those are two stalwarts that were really driving results and so the underlying results look totally different than the reported results because of the channel inventory kind of differences. The App Store in China is also doing great. The growth there is phenomenal. iPad concreted some during the quarter, but for the full year we did grow -- we were up 9% year-over-year for the full year and so I see lots of positives. As you know China is on the early stages of their huge 4G rollout.
Keith Buckman - Bank of Montreal:
Yes.
Tim Cook:
And this weekend -- this past weekend we launched it with China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom. This was the first time we've launched a new iPhone with all three carriers and we've done it at the early stages of the 4G rollout and so I am incredibly bullish over it. In terms of subsidies there are regulatory pressures on subsidies. We have -- we've seen that. However, only 20% of the iPhones that we've been selling in China have had a traditional subsidy applied to it and so the vast majority don't. And so will it make a difference with that 20%, I don't know yet. Intuitively you were thinking, it would, but it's at least a percentage of a 20% instead of a percentage of 100%. And so when I look at China, I see an enormous market where there are more people graduating into the middle class than any nation on earth in history and just an incredible market where people brought the latest technology and products that we were providing. And so we're investing like crazy in the market. We're more than doubling our stores. We've got 15 in Greater China today. We're going to be close to 40 in the next couple of years. We've expanded our online store to cover now 315 cities in China. The revenue results for Q4 were up more than double the previous year. The App Store is growing. Chinese developers have now created a 150,000 apps -- of the apps on the App Store and so I see lots of very, very positive factors there and I couldn’t be more excited.
Keith Buckman - Bank of Montreal:
Okay. And then as my follow-up if I could, Tim, you mentioned before on a previous comment on iPad where you saw I think 50% to 70% in the top six countries were new buyers and related to a previous question, wondered if you could give that same range. I understand it's probably a pretty wide range for iPhones and that was to the June quarter I think. And broadly speaking, how does that number change at least your guess as you look out over the next couple quarters given the launch of the 6 and the 6 Plus.
Tim Cook:
For iPhone I really have it by model from the June quarter and as I had mentioned before, the highest percentage is the 4s buyer in China over 80% of the people were buying their first iPhone. And for a 5s in China, 50% were and so I think what that says. Those numbers are so high, the 80 that I think are great -- my gut tells me, a great percentage of 6 and 6 Plus buyers will eventually -- a great percentage of those will be new to iPhone. That's what I would predict.
Keith Buckman - Bank of Montreal:
Okay. That's it for me guys. Thank you.
Tim Cook:
Thank you, Keith.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank Keith. A replay of today's call will be available for two weeks as a podcast on the iTunes Store, as a webcast on apple.com/investor and via telephone and the numbers for the telephone replay are 888-203-1112 or 719-457-0820 and please enter a confirmation code 1997837. And these replays will be available by approximately 5.00 PM Pacific Time today. Members of the press can contact Kristin Fugate and financial analysts can contact Joan Hoover or me with additional questions. Thanks again for joining us.
Operator:
And ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude today’s presentation. We do thank everyone for your participation.
Executives:
Nancy Paxton - Senior Director of Investor Relations Tim Cook - CEO Luca Maestri - SVP and CFO
Analysts:
Katy Huberty - Morgan Stanley Bill Shope - Goldman Sachs Toni Sacconaghi - Sanford Bernstein Steve Milunovich - UBS Kulbinder Garcha - Credit Suisse Ben Reitzes - Barclays Ben Schachter - Macquarie
Presentation:
Operator:
Good day, everyone, and welcome to the Apple Incorporated Third Quarter Fiscal Year 2014 Earnings Release Conference Call. Today’s call is being recorded. At this time, for opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn the call over to Nancy Paxton, Senior Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you. Good afternoon, and thanks everyone for joining us today. Speaking first is Apple CEO, Tim Cook; and he will be followed by CFO, Luca Maestri, and then we'll open the call for questions from analysts. Please note that some of the information you’ll hear during our discussion today will consist of forward-looking statements, including without limitation, those regarding revenue, gross margins, operating expenses, other income and expense, taxes, future products. Actual results or trends could differ materially from our forecast. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in Apple’s Form 10-K for 2013, the Form 10-Q for the first two quarters of fiscal 2014, and the Form 8-K filed with the SEC today, along with the associated press release. Apple assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements or information, which speak as of their respective dates. I’d now like to turn the call over to Tim for introductory remarks.
Tim Cook:
Thanks, Nancy. Good afternoon, everyone. It’s been a very busy and exciting time at Apple and I'd like to review some of the highlights of our June quarter. We hosted our best ever Worldwide Developer’s Conference last month with over 20 million people from around the world watching our keynote session, which is the a record. We've had overwhelming response from customers and developers to the new features we previewed in OS X Yosemite and iOS 8. Yosemite has been redesigned with a fresh look and powerful new apps and iOS 8 is the biggest release since the launch of the App Store. With powerful continuity features, these upcoming releases will allow Macs and iOS devices to work together in even smarter ways. Customers can start on activity like writing an email on one device and pass it to another, picking up where they left off without missing a beat. They will even be able to make and receive iPhone calls on their Mac with just a click. These are features that only Apple can deliver. With iOS 8, we have opened over 4000 APIs providing more flexibility and opportunity for developers than ever before. iOS 8 provides developers with amazing new frameworks, enables wide use of Touch ID to securely authenticate users within apps and lets developers further customize the user experience with major extensibility features such as third-party keyboards. We have also introduced Swift, an innovative new programming language for both iOS and OS X. Swift is the result of the latest research on programming languages, combined with decades of experience within building Apple platforms. It makes writing code interactive and fun, eliminates entire classes of unsafe code and generates apps that run lightning fast. It's easy to learn, allowing even more people to dream big and create whole new categories of apps. We believe our new OS releases, combined with Swift will result in a huge leap forward for the Apple ecosystem and we can’t wait to what developers will create with Yosemite, iOS 8 and Swift. When we introduced iOS 7 years ago, it was a revolutionary operating system for iPhone. Over the years we've extended it to the iPod family with iPod Touch and later to a tablet form factor with iPad. An explosion of apps, accessories and services for these devices has created an incredibly vibrant ecosystem. We’re extending iOS in even more dimensions as customers around the world make iPhones and iPads an essential part of their lives, at home, at school, at work and on the go. We’re putting a huge effort into delivering the best experience to our customers wherever they use iOS. That includes a safe and intuitive user interface for driving, called CarPlay, which is being integrated by 29 major car brands including Audi, BMW, Ford, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai, Mercedes, Toyota and Volvo; and after-market systems like Pioneer and Alpine. We’ve created a new tool for developers called HealthKit, which allows health and fitness apps work to together and empowers customers to choose what health data they share. We're taking the first steps in this area in collaboration with the Mayo clinic, whose new apps can automatically receive data from a blood pressure app, for example and share it with a physician, or a nutrition app can inform fitness apps how many calories are being consumed each day. Our ARM health app will provide an easy to read dashboard of all health and fitness data. We're enabling new ways to control light and doors and thermostats and other connected devices around the house using Siri with the HomeKit feature of iOS 8. And in the Enterprise, we are including new security, productivity and device management features in iOS 8. We forged a relationship with IBM to deliver a new class of mobile business solutions to enterprise customers around the world. We are working together to provide companies access to the power of Big Data analytics, right on every employee's iPhone or iPad. Using Swift, we will collaborate to bring over 100 Mobile First apps to enterprise clients, each addressing a specific industry need or opportunity. This is a radical step for Enterprise and opens up a large market opportunity for Apple but more importantly, it’s great for productivity and creativity of our enterprise customers. From the pocket to the car, to the workplace, home and gym, we have a very large vision of what iOS can be and we're incredibly excited about our plans. Turning to our financial results, today we are reporting record June quarter revenue, thanks to the very strong performance of iPhone, Mac and the continued growth of revenue from the Apple ecosystem. Our teams executed brilliantly during the quarter with earnings per share up 20% year-over-year, our highest growth rate in seven quarters. We sold over 35 million iPhones, setting a new third quarter record. We generated healthy growth in our entry priced, mid-tier and lead iPhone categories. I'm especially happy about our progress in the BRIC countries, where iPhone sales were up a very strong 55% year-over-year. We also had a record June quarter for Mac sales, with growth of 18% year-over-year in a market that is shrinking by 2% according to IDC’s latest estimate. Demand has been very strong for our portables in particular and we've have had a great customer response to the new higher performance, lower priced MacBook Air. It was another strong performance for the App Store and the other services contributing to the thriving Apple ecosystem. In fact for the first nine months of this fiscal year, the line item that we call iTunes software and services has been the fastest growing part of our business. iTunes billings grew 25% year-over-year in the June quarter and reached an all-time quarterly high, thanks to the very strong results from the App Store. We're continuing to invest in our incredible ecosystem, which is a huge asset for Apple and a very important differentiator of our customer experience. iPad sales met our expectations but we realized they didn’t meet many of yours. Our sales were gated in-part by a reduction in channel inventory and in-part by market softness in certain parts of the world. For example IDC’s latest estimate indicates a 5% overall decline in the U.S. tablet market, as well as a decline in the Western European tablet market in the June quarter. But what’s most important to us is that customers are enjoying their iPads and using them heavily. In a survey conducted in May by ChangeWave, iPad Air registered a 98% customer satisfaction rate, while iPad Mini with retina display received an astonishing 100% customer satisfaction rate. The survey also found that among people planning to purchase a tablet within 90 days, 63% plan to buy an iPad and our own data indicates that more than half of customers purchasing an iPad are buying their very first iPad. Another recent study by Custora found that iPad accounts for 80% of all U.S. tablet based e-commerce purchases. We're very bullish about the future of the tablet market and we're confident that we can continue to bring significant innovation to this category through hardware, software and services. We think our partnership with IBM, providing a new generation of mobile enterprise applications, designed with iPad’s legendary ease of use and backed by IBM’s cloud services and data analytics will be one such catalyst for future iPad growth. Looking ahead, we are very excited about our agreement to purchase Beats Electronics and Beats Music. We think its part of Apple’s DNA and we think the addition of Beats team will be great for music lovers. Beats provides Apple with a fantastic subscription music service, access to rare talent and a fast growing line up of products that we can build upon. Not counting Beats, we've completed 29 acquisitions since the beginning of fiscal year 2013 including five since the end of the March quarter and we have brought some incredible technology and more importantly some incredible talent into Apple in the process. We are hard at work and investing heavily on exciting opportunities across our business and we have an incredible pipeline of new products and services that we can’t wait to show you. With that I would like to turn the call over to Luca to discuss our Q3 results in more detail.
Luca Maestri:
Thank you, Tim and good afternoon everyone. We set a new June quarter record for revenue at $37.4 billion, up $2.1 billion or 6% year-over-year. This result was towards the high end of our guidance range, despite a reduction in channel inventory for both iPhone and iPad. The revenue growth was driven by strong sales of iPhones and Macs, as well as the continued great performance of iTunes softwares and services. Gross margin was 39.4%, above our guidance range and operating margin was $10.3 billion, representing 27.5% of revenue. Net income was $7.7 billion, translating to diluted earnings per share of $1.28, a 20% year-over-year increase. For details by product, I'd like to start with iPhone. We sold 35.2 million iPhones, an increase of 4 million over last year, representing 13% growth. As Tim mentioned, iPhone sales grew well across all three of our entry-price, mid-tier and lead product categories. In the U.S., iPhone accounts for 41.9% of the smartphone subscriber base according to the latest data from ComScore, up from 41.3% in the previous measurement period. Also based on the latest survey by ChangeWave, iPhone earned a 97% customer satisfaction rate and among responders planning purchase a smartphone within 90 days, 50% planned to purchase an iPhone, up from 42% in the March quarter and 44% a year ago. iPhone sales were at the high end of our expectations, despite new product rumors that we believe resulted in purchase delay. In addition, tax increases and the regulatory environment in Japan affected smartphone sales in what has been one of iPhone’s fastest growing markets in recent quarters. Considering these factors, the performance of iPhone was even more impressive in the June quarter and it boosts our confidence for the future. We reduced iPhone channel inventory by about 150,000 from the end of the March quarter, leaving us within our target range of four to six weeks. Apple continues to innovate through hardware, software and services to make iPhone the best smartphone for business. Today, companies have equipped millions of employees with iPhones and they are seeing tremendous benefits in productivity, employee satisfaction and profitability. For instance medical device leader Medtronic has developed over 175 internal iOS apps for over 16,500 iPhones used by its employees to facilitate sales, improve productivity and ensure that essential marketing materials are up to date. Throughout the global offices of Nestle, the largest food company in the world, over 25,000 iPhones are accessing corporate networks, improving communication and connecting employees to critical internal resources. And at NASA over 26,000 iPhones are in use by scientists, flight crew members, technicians and researchers. Turning to iPad, we sold 13.3 million units, compared to 14.6 million in the June quarter last year. iPad sales grew overall in the developing markets with particularly strong year-over-year growth in the Middle-East, where iPad sales were up 64%, in China where they grew 51%, and in India, where they were up 45%. This growth was more than offset by lower sales in more mature markets. We reduced iPad channel inventory by 500,000 from the end of the March quarter, which left us within our target range of four to six weeks. In the Enterprise, global companies are using iPad to improve customer service, boost work and productivity and enhance critical processes. iPad continues to be the standard for teams across the airline industry. Qantas Airlines has over 15,000 iPads deployed to pilots as well as cabin, customer service and ground crews to enhance key processes across the daily operations and governments are deploying thousands of iPads worldwide. One of the largest examples is Sweden, where over 100,000 iPads are being used by local government offices across the country. In education, iPad remains the tablet of choice with 85% share of the U.S. education tablet market according to the latest published estimate from IDC. We’ve now sold 13 million iPads to education customers globally. We’re bringing teachers and students great new tools to build an experience educational count into an iPad. As of this month, teachers using the free iTunes U app can create, edit and manage entire courses that are on iPad for the first time and students can discover new ways to collaborate, including the ability to start class discussions and ask questions right from their iPad. Next, I'd like to talk about the Mac. We sold 4.4 million Macs, compared to under 3.8 million in the year ago quarter, an increase of 18% year-over-year and a new June quarter record. The increase was driven by portables, thanks to very strong growth of MacBook Air. We achieved strong double digit Mac growth across many countries, including the U.S. Canada, Mexico, the UK, Germany, France, Australia, China, India and the Middle-East. This growth is particularly impressive, given the contraction of the overall PC market. Macs have now gained global market share for 32 of the last 33 quarters. Macs performed well in the U.S. education buying season with double-digit growth in the K to 12 market, driven primarily by large deployments of MacBook Air. The Shawnee Mission School District in Kansas chose Apple to provide an entire solution that will equip every teacher with a MacBook Air and an iPad Air, every high school student with a MacBook Air and every middle school and elementary student with an iPad. The Rowan-Salisbury School System in North Carolina is deploying thousands of MacBook Airs to students and teachers in grades 9 to 12 as part of the district's digital learning initiatives. We ended the quarter with Mac channel inventory slightly below our four to five week target range. The Apple ecosystem continues to grow and thrive. Total revenue from iTunes software and services was $4.5 billion, an increase of 12% year-over-year. Our iTunes stores generated all time record billings of $5.4 billion in the June quarter, up 25% year-over-year, driven by very strong growth in App Store sales. These items billings translated to quarterly iTunes revenue of almost $2.6 billion, up 8% from the year ago quarter. Software and services revenue was $1.9 billion, up 19% from a year ago. App Store momentum remains very strong and cumulative app downloads has topped 75 billion. We continue be amazed by our vibrant and diverse developer community and we are extremely proud that our developers have now earned over 20 billion for sales of their apps through the App Store, nearly half of which have been earned in the past 12 months. This number truly stands out among our competition as our developers continue to benefit from the broad reach and powerful design of the App Store, coupled with Apple’s large, loyal and very engaged customer base. Let me now turn to our cash position. We ended the quarter with $164.5 billion in cash plus marketable securities, a sequential increase of $13.9 billion. Our domestic cash was $26.8 billion at the end of the June quarter, a sequential increase of $8.3 billion and $137.7 billion or 84% of our total cash was offshore. Cash flow from operations was $10.3 billion. We executed another very successful debt offering in April, issuing a total of 12 billion in notes across 3, 5, 7, 10 and 30 year maturities. In addition, during the quarter, we entered the commercial paper market for the first time with $2 billion in short-term obligations outstanding as of the end of June. We also continued to execute our shareholder return program with $8.3 billion of capital returned to inventors during the June quarter. We spent $5 billion to repurchase 59 million Apple shares to open market transactions. We paid almost $2.9 billion in dividends and equivalents and utilized over $400 million to net share settle vesting employee RSUs. We've now taken action on over $74 billion of our $130 billion capital return program, including $51 billion in share repurchases with six quarters remaining to its completion. And finally our Board has declared a dividend of $0.47 per common share payable on August 14, 2014 to shareholders of record as of record as of August 11, 2014. Now as we move ahead into September quarter, I’d like to review our outlook which includes the types of forward-looking information that Nancy referred to at the beginning of the call. We expect revenue to be between $37 billion and $40 billion, compared to $37.5 billion in the year ago quarter. We expect gross margin to between 37% and 38%. We expect OpEx to be between $4.75 billion and $4.85 billion. We expect OI&E to be about $250 million and we expect the tax rate to be about 26.1%. Finally, we expect the Beats transaction to close this quarter and we expect the acquisition to be accreted to our earnings in our fiscal 2015. With that, let me open the call to questions.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Luca. And we ask that you limit yourself to one question and one follow-up please. Operator, may we have the first question.
Operator:
(Operator Instructions). And your first question will come from Katy Huberty with Morgan Stanley.
Katy Huberty - Morgan Stanley:
Luca, this is the third quarter in a row that gross margin came in above your guidance. Can you talk about what’s driving that gap and why you expect the margin to come down sequentially in the September quarter?
Luca Maestri:
Yes, Katy, it was obviously a surprise also to us. We were expecting obviously a loss in leverage from the sequential declining revenue which obviously happened. We also expect that some unfavorable mix, which also happens -- it's typical as we move away from the launch quarter. And we were expecting some cost improvements. These cost improvements came in. They came in stronger than we were anticipating. The commodity markets continue to be favorable, the product quality continues to be excellent, our teams executed really, really well. And all these things came together at the same time and it was a very nice surprise for us. As we look forward into Q4, yes, we’ve guided to 37% to 38%. Again, the mix is the normal mix that we see as we continue to move through the product cycle. And obviously in Q4, we got some transition costs because we’re expecting a very busy fall. We're bit excited about what we've got in the pipeline. And that’s the reason why we guided to that range.
Katy Huberty - Morgan Stanley:
And then just a follow-up on that last point, because in the press release you referenced the excitement about new products and services. Can you remind us of your guidance philosophy as it relates to product cycles? Do you embed assumptions around the contribution from new products? And if so, do those tend to be more conservative than for products that’s already shipped today?
Luca Maestri:
So our guidance, Katy is that -- we put our numbers that we believe at this point in time with all the information that is available to us, we're going to land within. So we take into account the fact that we’ve seen some purchase delays for executing Q3, but we have seen some safe trends in certain geographies. That continues to happen. And what you see this quarter is that our guidance range is $3 billion, as opposed to $2 billion during the third quarter, just to take into account the fact that we got many moving pieces.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you Katy. Can we have the next question please?
Operator:
From Goldman Sachs, we will hear from Bill Shope.
Bill Shope - Goldman Sachs:
With the pockets of market we just noted for tablets, could you give us some more detail on how you are thinking about the category longer term, and in particular in the context of your usage comments, how are you thinking about the competitive landscape now and how that may evolve? And then I guess, related to that, what do you think to be the next driver of renewed growth for the category?
Tim Cook:
It’s Tim. If you sort of back up from this, the category that we created, which has just been a little over four years, we have now sold 225 million iPads, which is I think probably a larger number than anyone would have predicted at the time and including ourselves, quite frankly. We still feel that category as a whole is in its early days and that there is also significant innovation that can be brought to the iPad and we plan on doing that. When I look at the top level numbers, I get really excited when I see that more than 50% of the iPads that we're selling are going to someone who is a first time tablet buyer. I get excited when I see that our retail share according to the MPD in the month of June was 59% of UNIX and over 70% in terms of dollars. And of course, Luca has mentioned in his preamble that our education share is 85%. We also are in the -- virtually all Fortune 500 companies, we are in 99% of them to be exact and 93% of the Global 500. However, when we dig into the business market deeper, though our market share in the U.S., in the commercial sector is good at 76% -- this is according to IDC; the penetration in business is low. It’s only 20%. And to put that in some kind of context, if you looked at penetration of notebooks in business, it would be over 60%. And so we think that there is a substantial upside in business. And this was one of the thinkings behind the partnership with IBM that we announced last week. We think that the core thing that unleashes this is a better go to market, which IBM clearly brings to the table, but even more importantly apps that are written with Mobile First in mind. Not all but many of the enterprises apps that have been written for iPad have been essentially ports from a desktop arrangement and haven’t taken full advantage of mobile. And so we're excited about bringing that to business along with partnering with IBM, which we think is a first class company. And seeing what that can do to sales of business, which I honestly believe the opportunity is huge. The market is still predicted in 2018 -- I think these are Gartner numbers -- to be about 350 million in size and put that in some context, I think the PC market right now is about 315 million. And so I think our theory that has been there honestly since the first time that we shipped iPad, that the tablet market would eventually surpass the PC market, that theory is still intact. I just think we have to do some more things to get the business side of it moving in a faster trajectory and I think we're now on to something that can really do that. So as I look at it and sort of back up from the 90 day clock kind of thing, I'm incredibly excited. I'm excited about the plans that we have on the product side and also on the go to market side, and in particular the IBM announcement. One other point I might add on this, because I think this is interesting. I don’t think it came out in our commentary so far as; the market's very bifurcated on iPad. In the BRIC countries, iPad did extremely well. The growth was very high. Like in the China it was in the 50%s, in the Middle East it was in the 60%s. Luca may have mentioned those numbers. In the developed countries like the U.S., the market is clearly weaker there. It’s interesting to note however that the U.S. as an example, we had a very, very strong Macintosh market in the U.S. and so there is probably a bit of higher add kind of stuff beginning to play out too, where higher add is clearly still very much notebook oriented. K12 on the other hand, we sell 2.5 iPads for every Mac in the K12. And so we're clearly headed into that season now and it typically starts in graduation time prime in fiscal Q3 for us. And so I think that’s probably another thing that we're seeing.
Bill Shope - Goldman Sachs:
One more question if I could. You've had obviously great performance in the BRIC countries and you've touched on China for few categories. Can you talk about the overall demand environment you saw for China in the quarter? Obviously there's some seasonal factors to consider but how should we think about your performance versus your expectations and how you are thinking about it for the rest of the calendar year?
Tim Cook:
China, honestly was surprising to us that it was -- we thought it would be strong but it well went past what we thought. We came in at 26% of revenue growth, including retail and if you look at the units, the unit growth was really off the charts across the board. I found 48% off that compares to a market estimate of 24%. So growing it two times the market. iPad was up as well, as I've mentioned before. The Mac was up 39% and that’s versus a market in China that’s also contracting along with markets in most parts of the world and China was projected to contract by 5%. And so we're seeing some substantial strength there and the thing that’s actually growing the most is the iTunes software and services category, which has the App Store and et cetera and that area is almost doubling year-over-year. And so it’s very, very exciting what we're seeing there. We are still in the process of rolling out along with our partner China Mobile, the TD-LTE into more cities and we're still in early going on that. That just started in January as you know. And my understanding is that later this year there will be a license for the other operators to begin shipping FDD-LTE, which I think is another big opportunity in China.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Bill. Could we have the next question please?
Operator:
Next we'll go to Toni Sacconaghi with Sanford Bernstein.
Toni Sacconaghi - Sanford Bernstein:
I have one for Luca and one for Tim please. Luca, I wanted to revisit the gross margin question. You talked about guidance for next quarter, that the drivers of the sequential decline being a normal mix through the cycle on transition cost. Your guidance to the midpoint is down 190 basis points in gross margin, last year in Q4 gross margins were up 10 basis points sequentially in fiscal Q4 and the product transition issues or cycle issues that you alluded to seem essentially identical. So I'd like to try and understand what might make this Q4 different let’s say than last Q4?
Luca Maestri:
If I understand the question, also when you look at it in terms of absolute levels of gross margin, last year it was 37%. So our range is above that level. There is obviously many, many things that affect us in different ways from one year to the other. Foreign exchange is a case where a lot of the emerging market currencies and the yen and the Australian dollar, the Canadian dollar, they have been weaker against the U.S. dollar. That has an impact on margin. And also when you think our product cycle, I think we don’t get into the specifics but this is not exactly the same cycle as we've had a year ago.
Toni Sacconaghi - Sanford Bernstein:
I mean is it better? If we look back two years to the iPhone 5, your product margins were down 260 basis points sequentially. So is the reference there that we should be thinking in terms of changes that are more akin to what we saw two years ago rather than to this year?
Luca Maestri:
I wouldn’t necessarily draw that analogy. I think we need to start thinking from the fact that we had a very, very strong Q3. A lot of things came together extremely well. 37% to 38% is a range that is -- we think is very good, and that’s where we are right now and we still have several weeks in the quarter.
Toni Sacconaghi - Sanford Bernstein:
Tim, I wanted to get your input on the impact of trade-in programs for the iPhone, particularly in mature markets where they are most prevalent. As best I can tell, if I look at the last four quarters, they're not hyper-focused on 90 days. It looks like the iPhone has been about flat in unit terms in the Americas and up low single digits in Europe and I think Europe includes India, which is obviously very fast growing. So perhaps low single digits in Europe. So if we look at those western geographies, we've seen relatively flattish iPhone unit sales over the last year. I know you don’t report it but just sort of based on overall revenue reporting, I'm wondering if you can comment on what you're seeing in terms of iPhone trade-in programs and this is four quarters, still over a complete cycle. Whether you think they are elongating or shrinking and what impact is very prevalent, increasingly prevalent trade-in programs might be having on them and what impact your pricing of older generation devices might be having on them.
Tim Cook:
Yes, the theory that you have Toni is not precisely correct. Like if I look at Europe, the operating segment of Europe for quarter or year-to-date for 2014 versus the same period last year, iPhone units were actually up 10%. Your more macro question; what I understand to be your macro question of do I think there is some sort of cannibalization going on trade-in programs on new product sales? What I think is happening in the aggregate if you look across the world is that trade-ins are actually hugely beneficial for our ecosystem because people wind up -- we have more people that are able to join the party when we have a trade-in, because in essence, it winds up being used by -- probably the prime example someone else within the family or in the example that has become more common in the last year, someone trades it in and then that goes to either somebody else in that country that is very price sensitive or somebody in a different country and I see all of this as good. In looking at how much of it cannibalizes, it is very hard to answer that question with any degree of preciseness. But my gut is that the cannibalization factor is low, because you wind up having -- you wind up attracting people that are much more price sensitive in there. I think the great thing is that our products command a much higher resale value than others do. And so that leads to a larger trade-in and from my perspective, that being the larger ecosystem, more people that wind up getting on iPhone, and as you know from following us for quite some time, if we get somebody to try an Apple product and then buy an Apple product, the likelihood that they begin buying other Apple products that may be in different categories or upgrading to one in that category and the future is very high. And so net-net, I view it to be positive. It’s very difficult to quantify with certainty.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Toni. Could we have the next question please?
Operator:
From UBS, we will hear from Steve Milunovich.
Steve Milunovich - UBS:
Tim you mentioned that Japan was fairly flat due to regulations and taxes. Could you elaborate on that and what kind of comparisons perhaps you see going forward?
Tim Cook:
Yes, it was actually Luca, but I can comment on it. VAT was increased from 5% to 8% close to the beginning of the quarter. I think it was actually April 1 or so. That was the first planned VAT increase. There are other or at least one additional planned VAT increase in the future. This was a part of the overall tax reform package in Japan. Secondly, the carriers received some guidance from the regulators to essentially stop incenting people to transfer from another carrier at a higher amount than they were incenting their -- retaining their own customers. And so it appears that the combination of these two things dampened the whole market for smartphones in Japan. We haven’t been able to get very detailed data on share but my expectation is we're not going to see very much of a share change. And we are beginning to see some coming back of that market as we step into this quarter, may be not back to the level that it was previously but you can begin to see the market growing again which we view as very positive. In the past when we've seen these type of things, tax changes et cetera, there is usually a rush to buy before the tax increase, a pause that happens thereafter and then the market eventually goes back to some kind of steady state that may not be exactly where it was but it nears it. And so I think that’s likely our guts or that’s what happens on the VAT side. The other piece is a little harder to conclude what will happen in terms of that guidance and how long that might be employed. I don’t know that part.
Steve Milunovich - UBS:
Okay, that’s very helpful. And then you talked about your three tiers of iPhones. I wonder if you would be willing to breakout in any more detail the growth and particularly how to defend the 5C in the mid-tier. I know our surveys continue to find in the U.S. that it's falling little bit as a percentage of business but you seem to believe it’s doing exactly what you expected it to do.
Tim Cook:
I can tell you this. That if you look at the growth rates, we don’t divide out each one but if you look at year-over-year growth rates and so this would be comparing the 5C to last year. It would be comparing the 4S, which was in the mid-tier. The growth in that sector was the highest growth during the quarter we just finished.
Steve Milunovich - UBS:
Of the three tiers?
Tim Cook:
Of the three tiers. And so we are extremely happy with how it performed last quarter.
Nancy Paxton:
Thanks Steve. Can we have the next question please?
Operator:
Kulbinder Garcha with Credit Suisse.
Kulbinder Garcha - Credit Suisse:
Thanks. I have just one question for Luca and one for Tim. And for Luca, you mentioned that commodity pricing, I guess the environment was good for you. Is it your working assumption in your guidance that continued to be favorable and a tailwind for you? And then my question for Tim is, with the installment plans that are being introduced in the U.S., I imagine that given the increases in flexibility for people to operate faster, would you expect that to happen? Are you seeing any evidence as these contests come up because we've had them out now for several months? And how do you see that impacting your business because obviously the U.S. iPhone part of your business is still very significant and it can be quite a big catalyst to your iPhone business going forward I would imagine or would you be more tensed in how these are playing out?
Tim Cook:
I will take both of these. This is Tim. On the component question, what we saw in the June quarter was that NAND, mobile DRAM and LCD, the pricing on all of those declined, while PC DRAM increased, despite the market for PCs contracting. In the September quarter, what is factored in our guidance is that LCDs and mobile DRAM continue to decline, that NAND pricing remains essentially flat last quarter and that PC DRAM has a slight price increase. And in terms of other commodities that I didn’t talk about, we've assumed that they would decline at historical rates and so that’s factored into the gross margin guidance that Luca gave you. In terms of the installment plans that you mentioned in the U.S. relative to iPhone, there is a lot of different models that are being tried in the U.S. and throughout the world. And actually last quarter, as we estimated and this is subject to estimating but we're estimating that less than one out of four iPhones were sold on a traditional subsidy plan. And so that number is markedly different than it would have been two years ago. The installment plan that you're speaking about which gives the customer the right to upgrade SAP or faster than a usual two year cycle, we think that plays to our customer base in a large way. And so that makes us incredibly bullish that customers on those plans would be very likely to upgrade when we announce a new product.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Kulbinder. May we have a next question please?
Operator:
Next we'll hear from Ben Reitzes with Barclays.
Ben Reitzes - Barclays:
Thanks a lot. Tim, questions for you. I guess during the quarter you did two very big things in our opinion, obviously buying Beats, biggest acquisition in your history and you also did this IBM deal, which obviously was in this quarter, but since the last call, and that was very interesting, obviously really collaborating with another huge company to get further into the enterprise. And I was just wondering, what are you seeing in Apple that’s changing? These seem like big deals that change your direction a bit, something that you wouldn’t have done in the past. And do you see a lot more partnerships and larger acquisitions on the horizon to grow your TAM in various markets?
Tim Cook:
Well, I think we have a lot of really great people and I think we have the capability. As I've said before, I think we have the capability to acquire a sizable company and manage it. And relative to IBM, I feel the same way. I think you can only do so many partnerships well, and so it is unusual that we enter into a partnership. But in this particular case, I think arguably the companies are so complementary, and I've gotten to know Gini fairly well over the last couple of years and I think we see the importance of the customer, a lot of the same way and both feel that Mobile and Enterprise is just an enormous opportunity. And we’re not competing with each other. And so I think a partnership in that case is particularly great. Would we do more of either of the things we did? We’re always looking in the acquisition space, but we don’t let our money burn a hole in our pocket and we don’t do things that aren’t strategic. And so with Beats we felt we were getting an incredible subscription service, a very rare set of talent that we think can do great things in Apple and access to a very fast growing businesses in their headphone and earphone space. And culturally we felt there was a match and music has been deeply embedded in Apple’s DNA for many, many years. And so it was a great marriage and I think the partnership with IBM is a great marriage as well. It’s more like that, presented themselves -- or I think we can manage more things. I think that we have a very, very strong executive team and can do that. But it’s not my goal to acquire certain number of companies or spend a certain amount of money. We want to do things that help us make great products that are great for our customers and so forth.
Ben Reitzes - Barclays:
I am sorry, just really quick on the IBM. Does this say something about Apple doing more in Big Data, and taking a cut maybe of some of the analytics opportunities as well?
Tim Cook:
Yes, we didn’t talk about how the business model is going to work. But generally speaking, I think that each of us have revenue streams in the enterprise and each of us went from having those revenue streams. So that’s how I look at that. And we win if we can drive that penetration number I spoke about from 20% to 60%. That would be incredibly exciting here. The walls would shake. And so that’s what I hope for.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you Ben. Could we have the next question please?
Operator:
We will hear from Ben Schachter with Macquarie.
Ben Schachter - Macquarie:
Tim, I just wanted to talk about the app market for Enterprise. Right now I believe that app developers can sell to the enterprise directly and therefore that they can bypass sharing revenue from these app sales with Apple. Is Apple going to allow that to continue, and can you also just more broadly discuss how Apple thinks about the opportunity to sell apps directly to the enterprise?
Tim Cook:
We have no plans to change the rules with Enterprise. Some enterprises like proprietary apps that they do not want to offer to others and so we obviously have a way for them to distribute those into their enterprise or just the employees that they want to and so I'm not worried about changing that. We’re also taking friction out of the system and not adding it. Again, the big thing for us is getting the penetration number, I think getting our product, iPhones and iPads and Macs in more people hands and we think there is a huge opportunity in Enterprise to do that.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you Ben. A replay of today's call will be available for two weeks as podcast on the iTunes Store, as a webcast on apple.com/investor and via telephone and the numbers for the telephone replay are 888-203-1112888-203-1112 or 719-457-0820719-457-0820 and please enter confirmation code 76136258 [ph]. These replays will be available by approximately 5.00 PM Pacific Time today. Members of the press with additional questions can contact Steve Dowling at 408-974-1896408-974-1896 and financial analysts can contact Joan Hoover or me with additional questions. Joan is at 408-974-4570408-974-4570 and I'm at 408-974-5420408-974-5420. And thanks again to everyone for joining us.
Operator:
And ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude today’s presentation. We do thank everyone for your participation. Call Send SMS Add to Skype You'll need Skype CreditFree via Skype
Executives:
Nancy Paxton –Senior Director-Investor Relations Timothy D. Cook – Chief Executive Officer Luca Maestri – Vice President of Finance and Corporate Controller
Analysts:
Katy Huberty – Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC Bill C. Shope – Goldman Sachs & Co. Toni Sacconaghi – Sanford Bernstein Steven M. Milunovich – UBS Securities LLC Shannon S. Cross – Cross Research LLC Gene Munster – Piper Jaffray
Operator:
Good day, everyone, and welcome to the Apple Incorporated Second Quarter Fiscal Year 2014 Earnings Release Conference Call. Today’s call is being recorded. At this time, for opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn the call over to Nancy Paxton, Senior Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, ma’am.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you. Good afternoon, and thanks to everyone for joining us today. Speaking first today are Apple CEO, Tim Cook, and Vice President and Corporate Controller, Luca Maestri, and they will be joined by CFO, Peter Oppenheimer for the Q&A session with the analysts. Please note that some of the information you’ll hear during our discussion today will consists of forward-looking statements, including without limitation, those regarding revenue, gross margins, operating expenses, other income and expense, stock-based compensation expense, taxes, future products and capital allocation plans. Actual results or trends could differ materially from our forecast. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in Apple’s Form 10-K for 2013, the Form 10-Q for the first quarter of fiscal 2014, and the Form 8-K filed with the SEC today, along with the associated press release. Apple assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements or information, which speak as of their respective dates. I’d now like to turn the call over to Tim for introductory remarks.
Timothy D. Cook:
Thanks, Nancy. Good afternoon, everyone. We have a lot to share with you over the next hour, and I’d like to start right away with the very strong results we’re reporting for the March quarter. We generated $45.6 billion in revenue, which was ahead of our expectations and represents a new March quarter record, and is our strongest non-holiday quarter ever. Our underlying business performance was even stronger than our reported results imply. When you take into account changes in channel inventory this year versus last year and foreign exchange had wins that we faced in several of our international markets. Setting foreign exchange and inventory changes aside, our underlying growth rate would have been close to double digits. These strong revenue results combined with our best gross margin percentage since September of 2012 resulted in earnings per share growth of 15%, which is our highest earnings growth rate in the last six quarters. iPhone was key in driving our stronger-than-expected results. We sold almost 44 million iPhones, setting a new March quarter record. These stronger results were broad-based both from a product point of view with demand for each of our three iPhone stronger than its predecessor and from a geographic standpoint. We gained smartphone share in many developed and emerging markets including the U.S., the UK, Japan, Canada, Germany, France, Vietnam and Greater China, just to mention a few. In fact, we established a new all-time record for total iPhone sales in the BRIC countries. iTunes software and services revenue continue to grow at a double-digit rate, thanks to an incredible ecosystem and our very large, loyal and engaged customer base. With its strong momentum in growing profitability, iTunes is a very important driver of our business not only here in the United States, but around the world. We now have an almost 800 million iTunes accounts, most of these with credit cards. This is a staggering number. We continue to gain share in the personal computer market as well. We defied industry trends again by growing while the market contracted. Our bold decision to make OS X free has resulted in the largest ever percentage of the Mac installed base running on the latest version of the operating system just months after its release. iPad sales came in at the high end of our expectations, but we realized they were below analyst estimates, and I would like to proactively address, why we think there was a difference. We believe almost all of the difference can be explained by two factors. First, in the March quarter last year, we significantly increased iPad channel inventory, while this year we significantly reduced it. Luca will go into more detail about this later. Second, we ended the December quarter last year with a substantial backlog with iPad mini that was subsequently shipped in the March quarter, whereas we ended the December quarter this year near supply demand balance. We continue to believe that the tablet market will surpass the PC market in size within the next few years and we believe that Apple will be a major beneficiary of this trend. When we look at our company performance on a geographic basis, we’re especially proud of our very strong results in Greater China, where we established an all time quarterly revenue record of almost $10 billion including the results from our retail stores. And in Japan, where revenue was up 26% in spite of the foreign exchange headwinds and where our smartphone market share reached an incredible 55%. We are continuing to invest in our retail stores and since our last call, we had opened our first stores in Brazil and Turkey and we now have retail stores in 15 countries around the world. I’m looking forward to welcoming our new retail and online leader, Angela Ahrendts, who will be joining Apple’s Executive Team next week. Stepping back, we are now just passed the halfway mark for fiscal 2014. Our strong March quarter results bring us to total revenues of over $103 billion for the first six months of the year and earnings per share growth close to double-digits. We estimate that over the last six months, we’ve added over $60 million new registered users of our four product categories. Additionally, over two-third’s of people registering an iPad in the last six months, were new to iPad, while over half of the people registering iPhones were new to iPhone. It is wonderful to add tens of millions of first time Apple product users, especially considering the strong halo effect, we’ve seen over and over again in our history. Customers who have a great experience with their first Apple products, often become loyal and happy owners of the multiple Apple products overtime. As always, I’d like to thank our talented employees who make these results possible through their creativity and passion they bring to their work everyday. And I’d like to thank our hundreds of millions of customers for their loyalty and enthusiasm and for continually inspiring us to surprise and delight them. In addition to our quarterly results, we are also announcing an update to our capital return program today, and I’d like to share a few thoughts about our guiding principles for capital allocation and our conclusion on the changes we are making for this year. Apple has created tremendous value for shareholders by developing great products that enrich people’s lives and that will always be our top priority and driving force. We’ll continue to innovate by investing in research and development and capitalizing on our strengths in hardware, software and services. We’ll keep investing in our supply chains promote scale and efficiencies, expanding our global presence by building retail stores, investing in marketing and distribution and extending our reach into new markets. We are expanding Apple’s products and services into new categories and we are not going to under invest in this business. We are also investing through acquisitions and we’ve acquired 24 companies in the past 18 months. To invest organically and to make acquisition strategically, we need to maintain financial flexibility. With this framework in mind, Apple’s Board and management team, will do capital allocation regularly and we solicit input on our program from a broad base of shareholders. We very much appreciate all of the input that so many of our shareholders have provided us on how the best to deploy our cash. We’ve continued to seek investor input going forward and we’ll update you on our conclusions around this time each year. This regular process allows us to continually evaluate return of capital in light of the most current information available and it enables us to be thoughtful about the size, mix and pace of the program. We continue to be in the fortunate position of being able to return significant capital to shareholders. We started doing so two years ago when we announced our first program of $45 billion and we more than doubled the program last April to $100 billion. Today, we are announcing that we are increasing the size of our program once again with an addition of over $30 billion for a total program size of over $130 billion. The size and pace of our program is unprecedented and we still expect to complete it by December of 2015 as we announced last year. We think very deliberately about how much and in which way to return cash to our shareholders. We decided to continue to allocate the vast majority of the incremental capital return to share repurchases because we believe our current stock price does not reflect the full value of the company. The size of the share back increases the signal of the Board and the management team’s strong confidence in the future of Apple. We also understand the importance of the dividend to many of our investors and we are increasing it for the second time in less than two years. We believe this is a meaningful increase for those shareholders who value income and we are planning for annual dividend increases going forward. Now, I would like to turn the call over to Luca for the details of our quarterly results as well as more information about our capital return program.
Luca Maestri:
Thank you Tim and good afternoon everyone. As Tim said revenue for the March quarter was $45.6 billion, up $2 billion or 5% from a year ago and above our guidance range. Sales in each of our major product categories were at the high end of our expectations or better and the vast majority of the revenue upside came from strong sales of iPhone. Gross margin was 39.3%, also above our guidance range and operating margin was $15.6 billion, representing 29.8% of revenue. Net income was $10.2 billion translating to diluted earnings per share of $11.62. For details by product, I’d like to start with iPhone. We sold 43.7 million iPhones which was a March quarter record. That’s an increase of 6.3 million iPhones over last year that represents 17% growth. The addition of China Mobile coupled with great response to our more affordably priced iPhone 4S led to an all time quarterly record for iPhone sales in Greater China. We look forward to broadening our relationship with China Mobile as they expand points of sale and continue to build out their 4G network. In Japan, iPhone sales were up over 50% year-over-year resulting in significant market share gains, as Tim mentioned we’ll try strong growth and share gains in many other major developed markets based on IDCs latest estimates for the March quarter. iPhone also continued to perform exceptionally well in many developing markets. In Greater China, Brazil, Indonesia, Poland and Turkey. iPhone sales grew by strong double-digits year-over-year, and in India and Vietnam sales more than doubled. We exited the quarter with 15.4 million total iPhones in channel inventory, which represents a sequential increase of about 100,000 from the December quarter and left us within our target range of four to six weeks. In the enterprise market progressive organizations are leading the charge to replace legacy devices and systems, and are using iPhone and iOS to drive innovation at their companies. Deutsche Bank has nearly 20,000 iPhones running on its network and has created 40 internal apps that extend the capabilities of its mobile workforce. Siemens have 30,000 iPhones on its network and has deployed over 50 internal apps for field service teams, sales associates and corporate executives for solution that are only possible with iOS and iPhone. We are really happy with the continued growth and strength of the Apple ecosystem. Total revenue from iTunes software and services was $4.6 billion, an increase of 11% year-over-year at an all time quarterly record. Our iTunes stores generated record billings of $5.2 billion in the March quarter, up 24% year-over-year driven by very strong growth in App Store sales. These iTunes billings translated to quarterly iTunes revenue of over $2.6 billion, up 9% from the year ago quarter, and also a new all-time record. Software and services revenue was over $1.9 billion, up 14% from a year ago. App Store momentum is incredibly strong as cumulative app downloads at 70 billion, 87% of iOS devices are now running iOS 7 and our highly engaged users are a great audience for developers. According to App Annie, the App Store generated 85% more global revenue than Google Play in the March quarter despite the differences in unit market share between iOS and Android devices. Now, I’d like to talk about the Mac. We saw 4.1 million Macs compared to just under 4 million in the year ago quarter. Thanks to strong performance from MacBook Pro and MacBook Air and Macs have now gained global market share for 31 of the last 32 quarters. Response to Mavericks has been great, and we are very proud of the fact that so many of our Mac customers are taking advantage of the most advanced and secured experience possible. We ended the quarter with Mac channel inventory slightly below our four to five week target range. Turning to iPad, we saw 16.4 million units. As Tim explained earlier, our iPad results and the comparison to the March quarter last year were heavily influenced by channel inventory changes. Specifically, this year we saw 16.4 million iPads into our channels and sold through almost 17.5 million reducing our channel inventory by 1.1 million units. Last year we sold over 19.4 million iPads into our channels and sold through 18 million and therefore increased channel inventory by 1.4 million units. As a result, the year-over-year sell through decline was only 3% compared to the sell in decline of 16%. We exit the March quarter with 5.1 million units of iPad channel inventory, which left us within our target range of four to six weeks. iPad continues to lead all other tablets by far in terms of user engagement, size of ecosystem, customer satisfaction and e-commerce. A recent study by Chitika Insights found that iPad users in North America generate almost four times the web traffic of all Android tablet users combined. In a February survey, ChangeWave measured a 98% customer satisfaction rate for both iPad Air and iPad Mini with Retina display. And also found that among people planning to purchase a tablet within 90 days two-thirds plan to buy an iPad. iPad continues to allow companies around the world to reimagine the way they use technology to drive efficiency and improve employee satisfaction. Thousands of iPads are used at FedEx everyday. In an industry where efficiency is critical FedEx pilots and maintenance crews around the world use iPad to transform operational processes and save the company millions of dollars. Eli Lilly has deployed over 20,000 iPads and 50 internal apps as part of a laptop replacement program that dramatically increased the productivity and capabilities of its employees. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is on its way to deploying iPads to 11,000 providers to transform the way doctors and patients interact. As part of this initiative, a suite of applications is being developed to allow quick access to real-time secure medical information. In education, according to the latest data published by IDC, iPad has over 95% share of the U.S. education tablet market as teachers and students increasingly benefit from the growing range of engaging iBooks, textbooks and solutions that are helping to transform the education experience. Let me now turn to our cash position. We ended the quarter with $150.6 billion in cash plus marketable securities, a sequential decline of $8.3 billion. Our domestic cash was $18.4 billion at the end of the March quarter, a sequential decline of $16 billion and $132.2 billion or 88% of our total cash was offshore. Cash flow from operations was very strong at $13.5 billion for the quarter. In total, we executed almost $21 billion worth of capital return activities during the March quarter. First, we launched our third accelerated share repurchase program in late January through which we will acquire an additional $12 billion of Apple stock. We received an initial delivery of 19.2 million shares under this ASR and we received a balance of shares due when the program concludes by December of this year. Second, we paid $2.7 billion in dividends in February. And finally, we spent $6 billion on open market purchases of 11.4 million shares throughout the March quarter. At the end of March, we also settled our second ASR program, which was launched in April of last year, resulting in the retirement of an additional 1.1 million shares. I would like now to go into more detail about the expansion of our capital return program that we’re announcing today. Let me start by summarizing the progress that we’ve made on the program we updated a year ago. By the end of March 2014, we’ve already taken action of $46 billion of the current $60 billion share repurchase authorization, over 75% of the program with seven quarters remaining to its completion. We have acted aggressively and opportunistically and have delivered on our intention to return capital to shareholders at a fast pace. Including dividends and net-share-settlements, we’ve taken action on $66 billion of total $100 billion program announced last year. Today we’ve taken additional steps that will increase the overall size of the program from $100 billion to over $130 billion within the same timeframe of December 2015 as before. There are two elements to the expansion of the program. First, we’re increasing the size of our share repurchase authorization from $60 billion to $90 billion. We are very confident in Apple’s future, and we believe our current stock price does not reflect the full value of the Company. That’s why the vast majority of our capital program continues to be allocated to share repurchases. We will also continue to net-share-settle, restricted stock units and expect to utilize about $1 billion of cash annually for that purpose. Second, our Board has declared a dividend of $3.29 per common share payable on May 15, 2014 to shareholders of record as of May 12, 2014. That represents an increase of about 8% in our quarterly dividend. We understand the importance of dividend increases to many of our investors, and we’re increasing the dividend for the second time in less than two years. We are planning for continued annual increases and we’re very proud that Apple is one of the largest dividend payers in the world, with annual payments of $11 billion. All our capital return activities must be funded by domestic cash which as I mentioned was about $18 billion as we exited the March quarter, and down from $39 billion in the quarter that we paid our first dividend. We would maintain sufficient domestic liquidity to grow the business and execute capital expenditures and acquisitions. Thanks to Apple’s strong growth in international expansion in recent years. We have built substantial offshore cash balances to repatriate our fall in cash on the current U.S. tax law, we will incur significant cash tax consequences and we don’t believe this would be in the best interest of our shareholders. We continue to advocate for comprehensive corporate tax reform and streamlining the tax code which we believe would be of great benefit to the U.S. economy. To execute our updated capital return program in a tax efficient manner and leverage our very strong balance sheet, we intend to access the debt markets again. We plan to be active in both the domestic and international bond markets during 2014 for an amount of term debt financing similar to what we issued in 2015, with a break down between markets currencies and tenures to be determined over the course of the year and subject to prevailing conditions in each market. We have also prepared ourselves to access the commercial paper market given the substantial short term liquidity and flexibility that this channel can provide. Now, as we move ahead into the June quarter, I’d like to review our outlook which includes the types of forward-looking information that Nancy referred to at the beginning of the call. We expect revenue to be between $36 billion and $38 billion compared to $35.3 billion in the year ago quarter. We expect gross margins to be between 37% and 38%. We expect OpEx to be between $4.4 billion and $4.5 billion. We are continuing to invest heavily in R&D for current revenue generating categories as well as future products and services. We expect OI&E to be about $200 million and we expect the tax rate to be about 26.1%. And now, I’d like to turn it back to Tim.
Timothy D. Cook:
:
Finally, before we start the Q&A, I would like to take a minute to talk about my dear friend and colleague Peter Oppenheimer. As you know, Peter will be transitioning from the CFO role in June. Peter has been Apple’s CFO for 10 years and the list of his accomplishments is immense. Apple is now more than 20 times the size it was when Peter became our CFO and his expertise, leadership and incredibly hard work had been instrumental to the company’s success. I’d like to thank him very publicly for his contributions to Apple, from the very bottom of my heart and wish him all the best in his approaching retirement at the end of September. And I’d also like to recognize him that he has never missed guidance in the 10 years as CFO which must be an all-time record for CFOs. We’re really happy and fortunate to have someone with Luca’s talent on Board to replace Peter. He has over 25 years of experience, building and leading finance teams in global companies and has an exceptionally broad international background, which you might be able to detect from his accent. He’s been managing most of Apple’s financial functions since coming on Board last year and has done an outstanding job. I’m looking forward to working with Luca even closer as Apple’s next CFO. With that, I’d like to open the call for questions.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Tim. We’d like to ask that you limit yourself to one question and one follow-up please. Operator, may we have the first question.
Operator:
(Operator Instructions) Your first question will come from Katy Huberty with Morgan Stanley.
Katy Huberty – Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC:
Thanks. Congrats on the great quarter. Tim, if I heard you right that $800 million account is a staggering jump from the last time you reported that number and yet iTunes, software and services growth decelerated again this quarter. Can you just talk a little bit about your view on the importance of better monetizing the installed base in the future? And then I have a follow-up.
Timothy D. Cook:
Keep in mind, in that category there’s several things, not just the App Store kind of revenues and so if you looked at App Store only, it would look a little different than what you’re seeing. But in terms of your question about monetization, I do believe that we can monetize more than we owe from a services point of view in existing areas and in new areas. And I’m particularly encouraged that when I look at the App Store and how it’s doing the strength was broad based. And in fact in China the growth was in the triple digits.
Katy Huberty – Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC:
Okay. And then question the around iPhone ASPs, just looking at the trend iPhone 5s, demand has surprised to the upside over this cycle. Does that give you any confidence that Apple could actually charge more for highly innovative products in the future or does the strategy remain to add innovation at the same price as previous versions of a product?
Timothy D. Cook:
We price things that we think – are priced in such a way that we think it’s a fair price for the value that we’re delivering and we make those on each thing as it gets closer time to come to market.
Katy Huberty – Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC:
Okay. Thank you. Peter, much luck to you.
Peter Oppenheimer:
Thanks, Katy.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Katy. Could we have the next question please?
Operator:
From Goldman Sachs we’ll hear from Bill Shope.
Bill C. Shope – Goldman Sachs & Co.:
Okay, great. Thanks. Can you walk through the key drivers of the June quarter gross margin guidance off of what was admittedly very sharp upside for the March quarter.
Luca Maestri:
Sure. Bill, I’ll take that. So March quarter was very good as you said. There were three seasons for it. We had obviously better volume as you’ve seen from our revenue results. We had better cost than anticipated, and we had some favorable mix of both products and services. As we get into Q3, obviously as you’ve seen from our revenue guidance we are expecting some loss of leverage, which would come from the sequential decline in revenue. It’s about 19% at the midpoint of the range, and we’re also expecting less favorable mix. This is something very typical that happens to us as we move farther away from the quarter when we launched the new products. To offset that, it's only going to be a partial offset. We will have some cost improvements.
Bill C. Shope – Goldman Sachs & Co.:
Then looking at the iPhone upside for the March quarter, obviously, it looks like China was a key driver here, but within the U.S., did you see as much pressure from the changes in U.S. carrier upgrade policy that you had discussed last quarter, and was demand I guess just strong enough to completely counter that? And then is this headwind behind us now, and potentially a tailwind in the U.S. as we head into the June quarter?
Timothy D. Cook:
We saw some pressure in the quarter because of the stricter enforcement of upgrade policies. So this was primarily in the U.S. as I mentioned last time. But if you really look at iPhone, the strength of iPhone was very broad-based and as I've mentioned, we gained share in a whole host of markets, from developing markets like the U.S., U.K., France, Germany to more of the emerging markets like China, Vietnam, and had the largest total sales of iPhone in the BRIC countries that we've ever seen in our history. And so we feel very good about that the strength was broad-based.
Bill C. Shope – Goldman Sachs & Co.:
Great thank you.
Nancy Paxton:
Thanks Bill. Could we have the next question please.
Operator:
We’ll hear from Toni Sacconaghi with Sanford Bernstein.
Toni Sacconaghi – Sanford Bernstein:
Yes. Thank you. Peter best wishes going forward. I have one question for Luca and a follow-up for Tim please. Luca, on the iPhone ASPs this quarter, they were down a little over $40. I think that was the largest sequential decline that we've seen in history. I was wondering if you could help us understand what drove that. Was it entirely mix? You mentioned good growth in each of the three models, but were you seeing particularly strong growth in the 4s? I think you mentioned that in China. And how significant if any was selling older generation for iPhone 4?
Luca Maestri:
Yes, Toni. When you look at the $41 of decline, I would say about half of that was driven by the fact that we have continued to do very well in emerging markets with the 4s. I have mentioned that there is a lot of markets where we've grown very strongly in Latin America, in Asia-Pacific, in Eastern Europe. So, about half of that decline came from the stronger sales of the 4s. And then the rest was primarily the fact that, again as we move away from the quarter where we launched a product, we tend to have lower capacity mix in our numbers.
Toni Sacconaghi – Sanford Bernstein:
Okay. Tim, I was wondering if you could talk about how you think about replacement cycles generally for the iPhone over the longer term. Clearly U.S. carriers have started introducing plans that may ultimately encourage people to keep their phone longer than two years, because their total price paid is less. And so one could argue and I'd like your opinion on whether you think that could push out replacement cycles. I guess, the other consideration is the imperative for Apple to continue to introduce really great products to want to have people upgrade at the same frequency. And I guess, the dilemma in doing that is as we've seen with the 5 and with the 4 is introducing really great products, typically puts pressure on your BOM and pressures margin. So perhaps you could just tell us how you think conceptually about where you think replacement cycles go over time and why? And then secondly, how do you address this dilemma of well in order to make a great phone it typically costs more to do so and managing their potential margin pressure.
Timothy D. Cook:
There is a lot there, let me see if I can address it quickly and I want to just add one thing to the point that you asked Luca. Just to be clear on the iPhone 4 question, we sold a very, very low single-digit percentage of those and so it had extremely minimal impact of results on the quarter. In terms of the general upgrade or the installed base, some of the programs that the carriers are running may serve to increase the upgrade cycle because there are some areas where customers can pay a bit more in the beginning and have the ability to essentially upgrade each year. So I think there is some that work that way. I think there is some that work the way that more of the way that you're leaning, and how these balanced are very difficult currently to conclude. But regardless of how those balance, what I see as the bigger opportunity for Apple is that the smartphone market is still only 1 billion or so units and it will eventually take over the entire mobile phone market. We've seen our ability to attract new users to iPhone to be very significant in the emerging markets. We were seeing new to iPhone numbers on the iPhone 4s sales in the 80 percentages in certain large geos. So, this to us give us a great comfort that we can continue to grow and we may not be able to attract some of those buyers to our top phone because of the price point. But if we can get them in on the entry iPhone, it gives them a great product, at a great value and gets them into the ecosystem. And as you know from following us for a while, our ability to keep customers is very good and our ability to show other products that Apple produces to a family that's buying Apple product is also very good. And so, at the macro level, I see the opportunity of the market and getting more people into the Apple ecosystem much larger than any of the noise around the different carrier plans, some of which I think helped, and some of which I think worked the opposite way and it's completely unclear to me how those net. It's probably also important to know that the bulk of the things you're seeing in the U.S. are not occurring in many of the other geos in terms of the upgrade policies and so forth. I mean, each country has its own kind of cadence associated with this, and the U.S. is – it’s in the 30% of our business, not 100%. So it’s important to weigh it with a proper perspective.
Toni Sacconaghi – Sanford Bernstein:
Okay. And any comments on the latter part of that around, sort of the imperative to continue to come out with really great products that ensure people have an incentive to upgrade, yet when we’ve seen you really revolutionize phones between iterations we’ve seen margin pressure?
Timothy D. Cook:
The most important thing, Toni, that we do is to make great products that really get our users excited to want the next one and that will always be the case. And you can bet that that’s where the vast majority of all of our attention is on doing this thing. In terms of the BOM pressure of any new product, you have seen in the past that exists. I think you’ve also seen that we have a way of working down the cost curve. That was certainly very key in achieving the 39.3% gross margin from this past quarter. And as I said before, we price things at a level that is fair for the value that we are providing, and so we’re certainly not stuck on certain price points. We price that values that are fair for the value that we are delivering.
Toni Sacconaghi – Sanford Bernstein:
Thank you.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Tony. Could we have the next question please?
Operator:
And from UBS we’ll hear from Steve Milunovich.
Steven M. Milunovich – UBS Securities LLC:
Thank you. Tim, I understand that the iPad is not as weak as it appears on a sell-through basis, but still it’s relatively flat over the last year in terms of sell-through. What are your thoughts in terms of why that is and can that accelerate with Office on the iPad going forward?
Timothy D. Cook:
It’s a good question. Let’s talk about iPad a little more than we did in the comments. When I backup from iPad, here’s what I see. It absolutely has been the fastest growing product in Apple’s history and it’s been the only product that we’ve ever made that was instantly a hit in three of our key markets, from consumer to business including the enterprise and education. And so, if you really look at it in just four years after we launched the very first iPad, we’ve sold over 210 million, which is more than we or I think anyone thought was possible at that period of time. And it’s interesting to note that that’s almost twice as many iPhones that we’ve sold in a comparable period of time, and over seven times as many iPods as we’ve sold in the period of time. So, I think it’s important to kind of to put that in perspective. We’ve come a long way very, very quickly. Looking at it by market a bit, which I think is important. I think Luca mentioned a little bit of this in his comments. In the education market in the U.S., we have a 95% share. And so the focus in education is on penetration, is on getting more schools to buy and my belief is the match has been lit, and it’s very clear to the educators that have studied this is that student achievement is higher with iPad in the classroom than without it. And so I’m confident we’ve got a really great start in education far beyond the U.S. now. This is happening in many, many parts of the world. In the enterprise market, we’re seeing virtually all, 98% of the Fortune 500 that using iPad. And we’re seeing, according to Good Technology who looks at activations of tablets, the latest data we have from them is that 91% of the activation of tablets in enterprise were iPads. And so this is also an astonishing number and many of those enterprises are writing apps that are key proprietary apps for running that business, and this is great for that company because they’re more productive as a result of that. And so once again, just like in education in a way, what we have to do in enterprise is focus on penetration. It has to be deeper and broader. But in terms of having people begin the process, beginning writing apps, we’re doing a pretty good job of that. In the retail market, if you look at the U.S. as a proxy, the NPD numbers for March just came out a few days ago and we had 46% share and embedded in that 46%, there’s a lot of things in there that I personally wouldn’t put in the same category as iPad and that are weighing the share down. It’s certainly a market we wouldn’t play in and a type of product you would never see an Apple brand on. So we feel like we’re doing well there. Office, I believe does help. It’s very unclear to say how much. I believe if it would have been done earlier, it would have been even better for Microsoft frankly. There is a lots of alternatives out there from a productivity point of view, some of which we brought to the market, some of which many, many innovative companies have brought. But I do see that Office is still a very key franchise in the enterprise, in particular. And I think having it on iPad is good, and I wholeheartedly welcome Microsoft to the App Store to sell Office. Our customers are clearly responding in a good way that it’s available. So, I do think it helps us particularly in the enterprise area. The other things you look at on iPad that are just blow away as customer sat is 98. There is almost nothing in the world with a 98% customer sat and the intention to buy numbers look good with two-thirds of the people planning to buy a tablet or planning to buy an iPad. The usage numbers are off the chart, far and exceeding Android tablets, four times the web traffic of all Android tablets combined. And so, when I backup from all of these, I feel great. That doesn’t mean that every quarter, every 90 days is going to be a number that everybody is thrilled with. But what it means to me is that the trend over the arc of time that things look very, very good, that iPad has a great future. And of course the thing that drives us more than any of this are the next iPads if you will, the things that are in the pipeline, the things that we can do to make the product even better and there is no shortage of work going in on that nor any shortage of ideas. And so when I backup from all of this, I can’t help but still be extremely excited about where we are. I think we did a reasonable job of explaining what we think the disconnect was between what we had expected, which we hit it at the high end of our expectation and the street's view of this one. I believe the vast majority of it is that first thing was just channel inventory that maybe we should have been even clearer on last quarter to take into account. But I'm very bullish on iPad.
Steven M. Milunovich – UBS Securities LLC:
Okay, very complete thank you. One other question, when you look at Google and Amazon and Facebook, they've very much diversified their business over time in a way that one has rarely seen. Apple, sort of the opposite. People say you ought to buy this or that and you'll do acquisitions, but you're obviously very focused. Is that because it's just a management philosophy of wanting to be more focused than some of these other companies? Or is there something about Apple's products that particularly being more hardware oriented that kind of prevents you from saying, yes, let's go make TV shows or let's go often do something else, even though you probably have the money and the technical capability to do all these things?
Timothy D. Cook:
The key thing for us, Steve, is to stay focused on things that we can do best and that we can perform at a really high-level of quality that our customers have come to expect. And so we currently feel comfortable in expanding the number of things we're working on. So we've been doing that in the background and we're not ready yet to pull the string on the curtain. But we've got some great things there. We're working on them. Very, very proud of and very, very excited about. But for us, we care about every detail and when you care about every detail and getting it right, it takes a bit longer to do that and that's always been the case, that's not something that just occur. As you probably know from following us for a long time, we didn't ship the first MP3 player, nor the first smartphone, nor the first tablet. In fact, there were tablets being shipped a decade or so before then, but arguably, we shipped the first successful modern tablet and the first successful modern smartphone and the first successful modern MP3 player. And so it means much more to us to get it right than to be first. I think you can see so many examples out in the marketplace, where it's clear that the objective has been to be first. But customers at the end of the day don't care about that. That's not what they look for from Apple. They want great, insanely great and that's what we want to deliver, and so that's the way we look at it. From an acquisition point of view, we have done 24 in 18 months. That shows that we're on the prowl, I suppose you could say. We look for companies that have great people and great technology and that fit culturally. And we don't have a rule that says we can't spend a lot or whatever. We'll spend what we think is a fair price. What's important to us is that strategically it makes sense and that it winds up adding value to our shareholders over the long haul. We are not in a race to spend the most or acquire the most. We're in a race to make the worlds' best product that really enrich people's lives. So, to the tune that acquisitions can help us do that and they've done that and continue to do that, then we will acquire it. And so you can bet that you will continue to see acquisitions and some of which we'll try to keep quiet and some of which seems to be impossible to keep quiet.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Steve. Could we have the next question please?
Operator:
From Cross Research, we’ll hear from Shannon Cross.
Shannon S. Cross – Cross Research LLC:
Thank you. First I just want to tell Peter, thank you very much, we've really enjoyed working with you over the past 10 years. But then secondly, in terms of a question for Tim, can you talk a bit about the competitive landscape for smartphone? If you look at some of your competitors seem to be have cut prices fairly quickly in the most recent product cycle, perhaps faster than before. You've got Microsoft about to close on Nokia. Lenovo is buying Motorola, there is a lot going on from a sort of competitive standpoint. So I'm curious as to how you're seeing the market?
Timothy D. Cook:
Yes, there is a lot of moving parts, a lot of acquisitions, a lot of people giving up to some degree and deciding to do other things. But at the end of the day we see it much like we've always seen it, as the part of the market that we're interested in is the market of people that really want the best smartphone and that doesn't mean that they're all at the high end of the price stand. I mean, we have smartphones that go down to a very affordable price with the 4S because we're proud to ship that product. I think that this quarter, if you were unsure, hopefully this quarter demonstrates to you that we can do well in a number of geographies from emerging markets to develop markets. Some of the numbers that we've experienced just to quote some of the more historic prepaid market through the first half of 2014; Brazil was up 61%, Russia was up 97%, Turkey was up 56%, India was up 55%, Vietnam was up 262%. I could go on, but the point is that there's a number of markets out there where we are beginning to really catch on to a number of customers, and I am particularly proud of the results in these markets because these have not been historic strong points for Apple. We've been working at China for a while and have learned a lot and I'm very proud of what we've done there. But I think some of these other numbers I just read demonstrates that we're beginning to have really nice success outside of there as well.
Shannon S. Cross – Cross Research LLC:
Great and then, if you can just, actually as a follow-up on the China side, I think it grew at 13% year-over-year, and you mentioned obviously China Mobile has been the driver of that. But can you talk about some of the other categories as well, and perhaps some of the other carriers in terms of where you're seeing demand out of China?
Timothy D. Cook:
Yes, really great question. We did have an all-time revenue record in Greater China, just under $10 billion at $9.8 billion. iPhone sales were up 28%, that's versus the IDCs market forecast of 20% growth. So we gained share. Mac units were up double-digit, in particular they were up 13%, and that's far outpacing IDCs PC market forecast of a negative 8%. So we gained share there as well. If you look at the iTunes software and services revenue in China, we more than doubled it. Year-over-year, we were in the triple digits percentages. And if you look at iPad and you take out the channel inventories, ins and outs and look at demand instead of sell in, we grew by 6% and that compares to IDC’s forecast of a flat tablet market in China for last quarter. And so we literally did well in every single area in China. It wasn’t just because we were able to come to an agreement with the world’s largest carrier. That was certainly key, but as you can tell from the rest of these numbers there are other things going on. Also, I’d mentioned this briefly with Steve, but I think it’s important to point out that if you look at some of the numbers we’re seeing on first-time iPhone buyers, people that bought the iPhone 4s, 85% were first-time iPhone buyers, and the 5c, 69% first-time iPhone buyers. So these are extraordinary, and as you would expect, these are also heavily Android switchers. 62% of the people that bought the 4s switched from Android. 60% of the people that bought the 5c switched from Android. And so we’re incredibly pleased with this. For the first half, including our retail stores, Greater China revenue topped $19 billion. So this is a 21% year-over-year, and is our fastest growing region. So, we’re looking at this data and deciding to continue investing in a big way. We plan to triple the number of Apple Retail Stores over the next two years. We’re continuing to expand in online. We’re continuing to build out channels. We’re up to 40,000 points of sales now in iPhone, but we’re not nearly where we need to be on the rest of our product line and even the 40,000 is a low number in considering the broad landmass and the number of folks in China. And so, I feel like there’s still loads of opportunity there, and feel really, really good about how we’re doing.
Shannon S. Cross – Cross Research LLC:
Thank you.
Nancy Paxton:
Thanks, Shannon. Could we have the next question please?
Operator:
And from Piper Jaffray we got Gene Munster.
Gene Munster – Piper Jaffray:
Hey, good afternoon and I’ll add congratulations to Peter on itinerary for the record there. And Tim, I want to talk a little bit about some of your comments at the recent shareholder meeting. You mentioned that Apple TV is no longer a hobby. Wanted to hear a little bit about why you made that distinction? And separately, it would be interesting to hear your feedback on the HBO Amazon announcement today and what you think that means, if anything, in terms of some content partners being a little more – work with some more players like yourself? Thanks.
Timothy D. Cook:
Good questions, Gene. The reason that I stripped off the hobby label is that when you look at the sales of the Apple TV box itself, and you look at a content that was bought directly off of Apple TV for 2013, that number was over $1 billion. And so, it didn’t feel right to me to refer to something that’s over $1 billion as a hobby. Also from an investment point of view, we continue to make the product better and better. And so it doesn’t feel right from that point of view either. We had HBO GO already on Apple TV and you have to authenticate in order to use it, but you have to do that with Amazon service as well from my brief read of their announcement. I think they in addition to that got some older content from HBO to put on there. I haven't had a chance to evaluate exactly what it is and don't have a personal point of view on that yet. But if I look broadly at the content on Apple TV, I think it compares extremely favorable to the content that is on the Amazon box. We've sold now, Gene, about 20 million of the Apple TV, and so we've got a pretty large installed base there. And I'm feeling quite good about that business and where it can go.
Gene Munster – Piper Jaffray:
Excellent, thank you.
Timothy D. Cook:
You bet.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Gene. A replay of today's call will be available for two weeks as a podcast on the iTunes Store, as a webcast on apple.com/investor and via telephone and numbers for the telephone replay are 888-203-1112 or 719-457-0820 and please enter confirmation code 5206019. And these replays will be available by approximately 5.00 PM Pacific Time today. Members of the press with additional questions can contact Steve Dowling at 408-974-1896 and financial analysts can contact Joan Hoover or me with additional questions. Joan is at 408-974-4570, and I'm at 408-974-5420. Thanks again for joining us.
Operator:
And with that ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude today’s presentation. We do thank everyone for your participation.
Executives:
Tim Cook - CEO Peter Oppenheimer - SVP, CFO Luca Maestri - Vice President and Corporate Controller Nancy Paxton - Senior Director, Investor Relations
Analysts:
Katy Huberty - Morgan Stanley Bill Shope - Goldman Sachs Shannon Cross - Cross Research Toni Sacconaghi - Sanford Bernstein Ben Reitzes - Barclays Steve Milunovich - UBS Brian Marshall - ISI Group Keith Bachman - BMO Capital Markets Andy Hargreaves - Pacific Crest Securities Mark Moskowitz - JPMorgan Gene Munster - Piper Jaffray
Operator:
Good day, everyone, and welcome to the Apple Incorporated First Quarter Fiscal Year 2014 Earnings Release Conference Call. Today’s call is being recorded. At this time, for opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn the call over to Nancy Paxton, Senior Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, ma’am.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you. Good afternoon, and thanks to everyone for joining us. Speaking first today is Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer. And he’ll be joined by CEO Tim Cook, and Vice Vice President and Corporate Controller Luca Maestri for a Q&A session with analysts. Please note that some of the information you’ll hear during our discussion today will consist of forward-looking statements, including without limitation, those regarding revenue, gross margins, operating expenses, other income and expense, stock-based compensation expense, taxes, and future products. Actual results or trends could differ materially from our forecast. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in Apple’s Form 10-K for 2013 and the Form 8-K filed with the SEC today, along with the associated press release. Apple assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements or information, which speak as of their respective dates. I’d now like to turn the call over to Peter Oppenheimer for introductory remarks.
Peter Oppenheimer:
Thank you, Nancy. We’re very pleased to report the results of the first quarter of Apple’s fiscal year ’14. We established new all-time quarterly records for iPhone and iPad sales and had one of our best Mac quarters ever, driving the highest quarterly revenue and operating profit in Apple’s history. We were also very pleased with our results in emerging markets around the world. Revenue for the quarter was $57.6 billion, up $3.1 billion, or 6%, from the year ago quarter and near the high end of our guidance range. No technology company has ever generated that much revenue in a single quarter, and we’re especially pleased to have generated that record despite foreign exchange headwinds, the year over year decline in iPod sales, and the higher revenue deferral rates from iOS devices and Macs that we discussed last quarter. These three factors negatively impacted revenue by about $2.5 billion, and without them, our year over year revenue growth would have been about 10%. Gross margin was 37.9%, above the high end of our guidance range, and operating margin was an all-time record of $17.5 billion, representing 30.3% of revenue. Net income was $13.1 billion, translating to diluted earnings per share of $14.50, a new record. As for the details of the quarter, I’d like to begin with iPhone. Despite supply constraints on iPhone 5S, we sold 51 million iPhones compared to 47.8 million in the year ago quarter. That’s an increase of over 3 million phones, or 7%, and a new quarterly record. iPhone sales growth was very strong year over year in Japan, thanks to the addition of NTT Docomo in September and our continued partnership with Softbank and KDDI. In fact, based on the latest data published by Kantar, iPhone accounts for 69% share of the smartphone market in Japan. We also generated strong year over year iPhone growth in greater China, Latin America, the Middle East, and Russia. In the U.S. market, Apple remains the leading smartphone manufacturer, with iPhone accounting for 41% of smartphone subscribers in the three-month period ending in November, according to ComScore. We’re very pleased to have reached a multiyear agreement with China Mobile, the largest network in the world, with over 750 million customers, and to be selling iPhones through their expansive network of stores, beginning on January 17. China is an incredibly important market to Apple, and iOS devices already account for 57% of all mobile web browsing in China. iPhone customers are loving their phones, and continue to produce the highest loyalty rates in the industry. A December survey of U.S. customers by ChangeWave indicated a 96% customer satisfaction rate for iPhone. And based on the latest data provided by Kantar, iPhone customers have a 90% loyalty rate, significantly higher than the competition. We exited the quarter with about 15.3 million total iPhones in channel inventory, which represented a sequential increase of less than 1 million units from the September quarter, and left us within our target range of 4 to 6 weeks of iPhone channel inventory. The release of new iPhones with iOS 7 introduced powerful new security and management features for business and enterprise customers. And iOS 7 has received FIPS 140-2 certification from the U.S. federal government. These features, coupled with ease of developing custom enterprise apps, continue to make iPhone the device of choice for large organizations. Many companies, including Accenture, Cisco, and American Airlines, have tens of thousands of employees using iPhones for work. In fact, some, including Deloitte and GE, have over 50,000 iPhones each on their networks around the world. And based on the latest data published by IDC, combining business, government, and education institutions, iPhone has a 59% share of the U.S. commercial smartphone market. Turning to iPad, despite supply constraints, we sold over 26 million iPads during the quarter, compared to 22.9 million in the year ago quarter. That’s an increase of over 3 million iPads, or 14%, and represents a new all-time quarterly sales record. iPad sales were very robust in Mainland China, where sales more than doubled year over year. We also experienced strong iPad sales growth in the Middle East, Latin America, Russia, and parts of Western Europe. Customers are loving the new iPad Air and iPad Mini, with Retina Display, introduced in October, and response to the more affordable iPad Mini has been very strong. In fact, a November ChangeWave survey of customers planning to buy a tablet within 90 days found that 72% plan to purchase an iPad. And among customers who already owned an iPad, the survey measured a 97% satisfaction rate. We exited the quarter with 6.2 million units of iPad channel inventory, a sequential increase of about 2.1 million units, which placed us within our target range of 4 to 6 weeks of iPad channel inventory. Based on the latest data published by IDC, iPad has a 78% share of the U.S. commercial tablet market, and iPad continues to spark innovation for businesses around the world. Leveraging custom developed and App Store apps, progressive IT organizations have embraced mobility, armed employees with iPad, and fundamentally changed the way people do their jobs. British Airways has deployed thousands of iPads to their employees across the business, including senior cabin staff, engineers, check-in staff, pilots, and ground crew. At Kindred Healthcare, iPads are now being used by the sales team, executives, and thousands of therapists nationwide, resulting in millions of dollars of estimated savings and productivity gains for Kindred and their customers. And this football season, nearly every team in the NFL use iPads as playbooks, replacing their traditional three-ring paper binders. In the education market, schools continue to choose iPad and the great content available across apps, books, and courses. To date, U.S. educational institutions have purchased over 7 million iPads. In fact, we’ve sold over 750,000 iPads to K-12 schools in the state of Texas alone, including 7,000 iPads rolling out to all K-12 students in the Midway Independent School District. We have expanded the availability of iBook textbooks in four countries to over 50 countries, so that students and teachers around the world can experience the power of what a textbook can be. We continue to add new titles from key education publishers like Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press. In addition, nearly 25,000 books have been created and published by individual educators using iBooks Author, bringing lessons to life in exciting new ways. And over 1,000 institutions are delivering courses and content through iTunes U. At the Ohio State University, where there are over 20,000 iPads on campus, faculty have developed over 70 iTunes U courses in less than one school year. We remain very focused on providing a great user experience for our iPhone and iPad customers, and we’re extremely pleased that the iOS platform continues to lead the industry in user engagement. According to IBM’s Digital Analytics Benchmark, iOS devices accounted for more than twice the online traffic and more than five times the online sales compared to Android devices on both Black Friday and Christmas Day. IBM reported that iOS devices represented 32.6% of online traffic on December 25, and more than double the 14.8% for Android. While iOS devices drove 23% of online sales that day, 5x the 4.6% for Android. And, according to the latest reports by TechInsights, iPhone accounted for 54% of North American smartphone web traffic, while iPad accounted for 78% of tablet traffic. These usage percentages are far greater than the share of the smartphone and tablet markets represented by our devices, and they underscore just how engaging and important our iPhones and iPads are to the people who own them. We’re also very pleased with our customers’ adoption of iOS 7. As of this month, 80% of iOS devices are running iOS 7. That dwarfs the single-digit adoption percentage measured for the latest version of the Android operating system, and makes iOS 7 the most popular operating system in the world. The rapid transition to the latest version of iOS provides a more advanced and secure experience for our customers, and a more streamlined opportunity for our developers. Turning to Mac, we sold 4.8 million Macs, compared to 4.1 million in the year ago quarter, an increase of 19%, making this among our best Mac quarters ever. The growth was driven by significantly increased sales of iMac and Macbook Air, while sales of Macbook Pro also remained strong. Mac sales grew in each of our operating segments, led by Europe and greater China. We were also very pleased to have generated such strong results for our Mac products, particularly given IDC’s most recently published estimate of a 6% year over year contraction in worldwide personal computer sales. Macs have now gained global market share for 30 of the last 31 quarters. We were happy to begin selling the all-new Mac Pro last month, manufactured in the U.S., and we had great customer response to OS X Mavericks, now available for free and running on millions of Macs around the world. And we were also delighted to be providing our groundbreaking iWork productivity apps for free of charge to our Mac, iPhone, and iPad customers. We ended the quarter with Mac channel inventory that was within our 4-5 week target range. 30 years ago this week, Apple launched the Macintosh. Not only was the Macintosh a breakthrough for the personal computer, it was also a promise that the power of technology taken from the few and put in the hands of everyone could change the world. Over the past 30 years, people have done extraordinary things with the Mac, and with the Apple products it inspired. To coincide with the 30 year mark, we’ve taken a look at what people have accomplished on a special website that showcases their Mac stories. Their achievements are a result of Apple’s continued commitment to create and deliver the best technology to people all over the world, every day. Happy Birthday, Mac. Imagine what we can accomplish in the next 30 years. We continue to be very pleased with the growth of iTunes software and services and the strength of the Apple ecosystem. Total revenue from iTunes software and services was $4.4 billion, an increase of 19% year over year. Our iTunes stores generated record billings of $4.7 billion in the December quarter, thanks primarily to strong growth in App Store sales. The quarter of iTunes billings translated to quarterly iTunes revenue of over $2.4 billion, up 14% from the year ago quarter, and a new all-time record. Software and services revenue was about $2 billion, up 26% from the year ago quarter, and also a new record. We achieved these records despite the fact we are now making iPhoto, iMovie, Pages, Numbers, and Keynote free with new iOS device purchases, and we’re also making Mavericks, iLife, and iWork free to our Mac customers. As we mentioned last quarter, we are now deferring a greater amount of revenue for each new iOS device and Mac sold as a result of the free software and associated upgrade rights. At the end of the quarter, our total deferred revenue from all sources was $11.4 billion, and we expect to realize $8.4 billion of it in the next four quarters. The App Store now offers 1 million apps in 24 categories and cumulative downloads have surpassed 65 billion. Our app developers earned 2 billion from sales in the App Store in the December quarter. That translates to $15 billion in cumulative App Store earnings for our developers, about half of which was generated in the last four quarters, and we are thrilled with the success that they have achieved. In China specifically, we have an incredibly vibrant iOS and Mac developer community. Developers in China have created over 130,000 apps on the App Store to date. A recent study by Business Insider Intelligence indicated that iOS has a 5x advantage over Android when it comes to developer revenue per app download, a 4x advantage in revenue from in-app purchases, and a 2x advantage in revenue from paid downloads plus in-app purchases. And according to a recent report from Distimo, the App Store has a 63% to 37% market share advantage over Google Play in global revenue from apps. Top developers continue to launch their apps first, or exclusively, on the App Store. Examples of highly successful launches from 2013 include Temple Run 2 and Cut The Rope 2, which generated millions of downloads in multiweek periods of App Store exclusivity. NaturalMotion recently launched Clumsy Ninja exclusively on iOS and saw 10 million downloads in the first week. And Plants Versus Zombies 2 resulted in the biggest game title launch ever for Electronic Arts’ Pop Cap, with 16 million downloads from the App Store in the first five days alone. With the introduction of iOS 7, developers are able to create stunning apps to take advantage of the redesigned user interface and more than 200 new features and APIs. And many of the App Store’s biggest recent successes, including Candy Crush Saga, Puzzle & Dragons, Minecraft, QuizUp, and Clumsy Ninja, were created by international developers. The seamless integration of the iOS platform, the global reach of our ecosystem, our thoughtful app review process, and our highly engaged customers continue to make the App Store a superior marketplace for our extremely talented developer community. I’d now like to turn to the Apple retail stores. Revenue for the quarter was $7 billion, a new quarterly record, and in increase of 9% from the year ago quarter. The growth was fueled by record iPhone and iPad sales through the stores as well as strong Mac sales. We completed the remodel of six stores and opened four new stores during the quarter, ending with a total of 420 stores, including 166 outside the United States. With an average of 418 stores open during the December quarter, average revenue per store was $16.7 million, compared to $16.3 million in the year ago quarter. Retail segment income was $1.7 billion. We hosted 114 million visitors to our stores during the quarter, which translates to almost 21,000 visitors per store, per week. We were excited to roll out iBeacon technology at our stores in the U.S. during the quarter, enabling shoppers to receive iPhone notifications about products and services via the Apple Store app. iBeacon transmitters use Bluetooth wireless technology to sense a shopper’s exact location inside an Apple Store and send messages based on the aisle or product the customer is near. For example, customers walking by an iPhone table could receive a message offering to help them check their upgrade eligibility or trade-in value of an existing phone. We expect to see many innovative uses of iBeacon technology from other businesses and developers in the coming months, including retailers and professional sports. Total company operating expenses were $4.4 billion, and included $572 million in stock based compensation expense, aligning with $246 million, and the tax rate for the quarter was 26.2%. And turning to our cash, we ended the quarter with $158.8 billion in cash or short term and long term marketable securities, a sequential increase of $12 billion from the September quarter. Our domestic cash was $34.4 billion at the end of the December quarter, a sequential decline of $1.1 billion. $124.4 billion, or 78%, of our total cash was offshore at the end of the December quarter, and cash flow from operations was $22.7 billion. We paid $2.7 billion in dividends in the quarter, and we executed an additional $5 billion in repurchases of 9.6 million shares of Apple stock during the quarter. This brings us to a cumulative total of over $43 billion in payments for dividends and share repurchases over the last six quarters, of which share buybacks were $28 billion. This has resulted in Q1 retirement of 56.5 million shares and represents 6% of the total shares outstanding prior to the launch of the repurchase program. Our board of directors has declared a dividend of $3.05 per common share, payable on February 13, 2014, to shareholders of record as of the close of business on February 10, 2014. Now, as we move ahead in the March quarter, I’d like to review our outlook, which includes the types of forward-looking information that Nancy referred to at the beginning of the call. We expect revenue to be between $42 billion and $44 billion, compared to $43.6 billion in the year ago quarter. We expect gross margin to be between 37% and 38%, reflecting approximately $110 million related to stock based compensation expense. We expect opex to be between $4.3 billion and $4.4 billion, including about $590 million related to stock based compensation. We are continuing to invest heavily in R&D, in both current revenue generating categories as well as future products and services. We expect OI&E to be about $200 million, and we expect the tax rate to be about 26.2%. In closing, we are very pleased with our record iPhone and iPad sales, the strong performance of our Mac products, and the growth of iTunes software and services revenue. We are thrilled to have the most satisfied, loyal, and engaged customers in our industry, and we are confidently working to make the user experience even better for them. We are continuing to invest heavily in our future, and remain very confident in our new product pipeline. With that, I’d like to open the call to questions.
Nancy Paxton:
Thank you, Peter. We ask that you limit yourself to one question and one follow up. Operator, may we have the first question, please?
Operator:
[Operator instructions.] First, we’ll go to Katy Huberty with Morgan Stanley.
Katy Huberty - Morgan Stanley :
Peter, revenue guidance embeds a sequential decline that’s bigger than what you experienced in the March 2013 quarter, and I think implies iPhone units may not grow in the March quarter year on year. So can you just talk about what’s driving the cautious view on the top line for March?
Peter Oppenheimer :
The biggest reason for the larger sequential decline in revenue this year relates to changes in channel inventory between the years. And I’ll go through some detail, but let me actually do it on a year over year basis. I’d like to go through some things about the guidance, and I think you’ll see that the underlying performance of our business is stronger than what the guidance might imply. We expect four factors to negatively impact the year over year revenue comparison by over $2 billion. These are channel inventory increases in the year ago quarter that we don’t expect to repeat, lower iPod sales, a stronger U.S. dollar against a number of currencies, particularly the yen and the Australian dollar, and the higher per unit deferral for Mac and iOS devices that I talked about in my prepared remarks. Let me go through these a little more. First, beginning with channel inventory, in the March quarter last year, we increased channel inventory for both iPhone and iPad, whereas this year we increased the channel inventory for both product families in the December quarter, and we exited within our target range of channel inventory. For iPhone, specifically last year, the supply of iPhone 5 was short for the entire December quarter, and we were not able to achieve supply and demand balance for iPhone 5 until the March quarter. As a result, we increased the iPhone inventory last year by about 1.1 million units. In contrast, this year we executed the fastest rollout for our new iPhones, and we included China in wave one, in the launch in September, and we were able to exit the quarter in supply and demand balance. For iPad, we introduced the Mini in the December quarter last year, and we were not able to meet demand in any week of the quarter. We didn’t reach supply and demand balance for the iPad Mini until the March quarter last year, and we increased inventory in the March quarter by 1.4 million units. In contrast, this year we exited the December quarter near supply and demand balance. So looking past the inventory changes year-to-year, we expect the value of the underlying sell through to grow year over year, and we’re very confident in what we’re shipping. Turning to iPod, sales declined by 52% year over year in the December quarter, and we would expect them to continue to decline year over year in the March quarter. And FX is a headwind for us with the strengthening dollar against a number of currencies. So when you consider these factors, we’re very pleased with the underlying performance of the business and the revenue growth is stronger than what the guidance might imply.
Katy Huberty - Morgan Stanley :
And Peter, you’re guiding OpEx flattish sequentially, despite the big revenue downtick. Are there any one-time items in SG&A and R&D in the March quarter? Or is the run rate reflective of investments for future opportunities?
Peter Oppenheimer :
It’s definitely the latter, and let me have Luca take you through some details.
Luca Maestri :
Yes, at the midpoint of the range of our guidance, we are expecting a minor decrease of $50 million. This is largely due to the lower variable expenses that we’re going to have, in line with the seasonal sequential decline in revenue. But one thing that Peter already mentioned in his remarks is that we continue to invest very heavily in R&D. We make investments in areas that are visible to all of you today, but also in areas that are not visible, which we’re very excited about. And for the things that are not visible to you, obviously were impacting ahead of the revenue that these products and services will generate in the future. So there is nothing that is one-off in nature in our guidance.
Operator:
From Goldman Sachs, we’ll go to Bill Shope.
Bill Shope - Goldman Sachs:
I have a question on the revenue guidance as well. The ramp of China Mobile would presumably act as a tailwind to the March quarter, yet that’s not apparent in the numbers. Can you comment on how you’re thinking about demand trends for China Mobile and perhaps how it compares to prior large carrier ramps?
Peter Oppenheimer :
Let me start, then Tim may want to have some comments. We’re thrilled to be working with China Mobile, and Docomo also. We had a great launch with both carriers, Docomo in the December quarter and China Mobile just in the last couple of weeks. These carrier additions will have a positive impact on our iPhone sales year over year. China Mobile’s 4G service is only available in 16 cities today, and they plan to complete the rollout of more than 500,000 4G base stations, which will cover more than 340 cities by year-end. With the addition of Docomo last quarter, we were able to achieve 69% smartphone market share in Japan, which we’re thrilled with. However, the benefit of these two carrier additions this quarter is being partially offset by a couple of things
Tim Cook :
I would add, as a further update, we’ve been selling with China Mobile now for about a week, and last week was the best week for activations we’ve ever had in China. So it’s been an incredible start, and at this moment, we’re just selling in 16 cities with China Mobile, and as Peter alluded to, this number is projected to be over 300 cities by the end of this year. And so we’ve got quite the ramp in front of us, and we’re incredibly excited. This comes after a new high water mark in China for us last quarter. We grew revenues including our retail stores at 31%, and we had some very, very strong sales on iPad. iPads in greater China were up 64% year over year, Macs were up 28%. This compares to a tablet market in China that’s growing at 21% per IDC, and a PC market that is contracting by 7%. And so in addition to the great iPhone news with China Mobile and how we’re looking there, we really turned in a stellar quarter in greater China overall, and we are very proud of it.
Bill Shope - Goldman Sachs :
Can you comment on your progress so far in getting down the cost curve for the iPhone/iPad? And would you say you’re in line with the types of improvements you’ve seen in cycles prior to the iPhone 5?
Tim Cook :
You can see that we projected in the guidance, gross margins between 37% and 38%, and that’s despite going from a holiday quarter to a non-holiday quarter, which we lose quite a bit of leverage from doing that. And so one of the primary things that’s going on there is cost. So yeah, we’re happy with how we’re doing.
Operator:
And next we’ll hear from Shannon Cross with Cross Research.
Shannon Cross - Cross Research:
Can you talk a bit more about opportunities in the mobile payment market? And maybe talk about what you’re seeing with regard to use of the touch sensor for mobile payments in your iTunes store, and then how you sort of think about this as an opportunity, whether over time it’s revenue or margin?
Tim Cook :
Let me sort of avoid the last part of your question, but in general, we’re seeing that people love being able to buy content, whether it’s music or movies or books, from their iPhone, using Touch ID. It’s incredibly simple and easy and elegant, and it’s clear that there’s a lot of opportunity there. The mobile payments area in general is one that we’ve been intrigued with, and that was one of the thoughts behind Touch ID. But we’re not limiting ourselves just to that. So I don’t have anything specific to announce today, but you can tell by looking at the demographics of our customers and the amount of commerce that goes through iOS devices versus the competition that it’s a big opportunity on the platform.
Operator:
And we’ll hear from Toni Sacconaghi with Sanford Bernstein.
Toni Sacconaghi - Sanford Bernstein:
I have one for Tim, and then a follow up, please. Tim, I wanted to just step back and talk a little bit about iPhone market share. The market data isn’t out for Q1, but if we look at your prior four quarters, fiscal ’13, Apple grew its iPhone units about 20%. The market grew in the 40s. I think this quarter, even with a new product and having China front loaded, the iPhone is going to grow at a fraction of ultimately what the market is likely to grow at. And I know your belief and philosophy historically has been that you want to make the best product, and that’s the most important thing, but in Macs, you’ve actually succeeded in making the best product and being able to gain share. You cited again how you’ve gained share in 30 out of the last 31 quarters in Mac. But in iPhone, that is not happening. And so my question is, what is different about the smartphone market that is not allowing you to hold or gain unit share despite apparently having the best product, and do you propose to do anything differently going forward, because I think it’s great to have an aspiration to make the best products, but I think that’s in the spirit of ultimately growing at least in line with or faster than the market. And that doesn’t appear to be happening.
Tim Cook :
As I’ve said before, our objective has always been to make the best, not the most. And we feel we’re doing that. If you look at what we did this year, we announced two iPhones for the first time, rather than one. And looking at last quarter, if you looked at our sell through - so not sell in, but the sell through - of what I’ll just call our entry phone, or mid phone, and our top phone, with the 5S, all of those grew year over year versus the phones that were in those categories previously. If you look at the emerging markets, which is one of the things that I’ve alluded to that we have to grow in these areas and grow at reasonable amounts, in Latin America we grew at 76% year over year. In the Middle East and Africa, we grew at 65%. In central and eastern Europe, we grew 115%. In China, we grew at 20%. However, as you know, we just added China Mobile, the largest carrier there, in this quarter, and did not have channel load in China Mobile last quarter. We just started selling those in January. Also, in Japan, as we’ve added Docomo, iPhone units were up 40%. Now, when you translate that performance into revenue in Japan, and we have the issue with the yen that Peter spoke about earlier, and so the revenue growth looks much less than that, because of the strength of the dollar there. In North America, we did not do as well, and this weighed our results. Our North American business contracted somewhat year over year. And if you look at the reason for this, one was that as we entered the quarter, and forecasted our iPhone sales, where we achieved what we thought, we actually sold more iPhone 5Ss than we projected. And so the mix was stronger to the 5S, and it took us some amount of time in order to build the mix that customers were demanding. And as a result, we lost some sort of units for part of the quarter in North America and relative to the world, it took us the bulk of the quarter, almost all the quarter, to get the iPhone 5S into proper supply. The other thing that happened in North America specifically was that some carriers changed their upgrade policies. And this affected last quarter, and will have some effect on the current quarter. This restricted customers who are used to upgrading earlier than the 24 months that they’re allowed and sort of stretched the time out to be a hard and fast 24 months. And so that’s a major factor playing into the North American results. So as I back up and sort of zoom out on this, and look at it, one of the most important things for us in the iPhone business was to do really well in emerging markets, and we had the best quarter ever from that respect. Another was to grow in China, because I think you can’t be in the business that we’re in and not have a reasonable China business. And you can see how we did last quarter, and we’ve now followed that up with a deal with China Mobile. And so I feel great about that. I think part of what’s happening in North America is a short term effect because of these upgrade policy changes. This affects the period of time, three to six months, I would think, and then it washes through. So as I look at it, I feel very good about where we are, and I would guess that the market numbers, some of the stuff that you’ve been seeing, will actually be decreased as the revisions come out, given what you’re hearing and what everyone is saying.
Toni Sacconaghi - Sanford Bernstein :
I’d like to follow that up, just on your comments on China. You’ve characterized the agreement with China Mobile as huge. Could you tell me what would define success for you in China Mobile one and three years out? What ultimately should we be looking at to measure and ultimately determine whether this was huge?
Tim Cook :
I’m not going to give you a forecast for it. I think if you just back up and look at it from a common sense point of view, China Mobile has more subscribers than anyone in the world. They have three quarters of a billion, and so I do see it as a watershed moment for Apple, and have a very strong belief in the ability of those two companies to do great things together.
Operator:
Ben Reitzes with Barclays.
Ben Reitzes - Barclays:
My question is for Tim. You’re at the midpoint of your guidance. It obviously implies a decline in revenue in the quarter coming up, and you haven’t done that forever. You came pretty close a couple of quarters ago, but you had some growth. And my question is, are you still a growth company? And should we expect the growth rate to accelerate as we go throughout the year? And why, if that’s the case?
Tim Cook :
I think it’s important to listen to what Peter said about the guidance, and about the compares year over year, and the point that he made that the underlying sell through, that we’re very confident of growth year over year. And that is the way we look at it. Some people just look at the numbers on a piece of paper, but the way I’d look at the business is our business from a sell through point of view less iPod, because I think all of us have known for some time that iPod is a declining business. And when you do that, the numbers from last quarter, and the deferral, which we’ve just increased, as Peter went through, when you look at that, and look at the numbers from last quarter, it comes up to a double digit growth. And we’re proud of that. I think that’s a pretty good result. We’ll see how we do in the March quarter, but I do think it’s important in the March quarter to take into consideration sell through versus just a view of sell in.
Ben Reitzes - Barclays :
And I guess there’s been a lot of things in the media about your potential to buy back more stock, and shares are around $500 tonight. I was wondering if you thought this was a good level, and whether it was time to accelerate the buyback from current levels. You obviously generated a ton of cash in the quarter, and what are your latest thoughts there?
Tim Cook :
We’ve been buying back stock. As you know, last year we increased the program overall, our cash return, doubling it to $100 billion. And $60 billion of that is buyback, and we’ve been progressing on that. Luca can give you the precise numbers of it. So we’re a big believer in buying back the stock, and that doesn’t change today, whether the stock goes up or down.
Operator:
From UBS, we’ll go to Steve Milunovich.
Steve Milunovich - UBS:
:
Could you talk a bit more about the gross margin? It did provide an upside surprise to your guidance in the quarter. What were the factors? And then looking forward, what are some of the gives and takes for the March quarter?
Luca Maestri :
Let me answer that one. Let me start with the quarter. We were above the guidance range. It was primarily for two factors. We had favorable product mix, and we had favorable commodity pricing. And so those were the two things that actually helped us come in above the guidance range. For the quarter, for Q2, we’re guiding 37% to 38%, compared to 37.9% in the December quarter. We’re going to have some loss of leverage, as you can imagine, because of the usual seasonal decline in revenue. But we expect that loss of leverage to be largely offset by cost improvements and also by less deferred revenue that we’re going to have in Q2.
Steve Milunovich - UBS :
And then regarding overall demand, one thing you didn’t mention, Tim, is maturity of the particularly high end smartphone market. I know in our surveys we’re finding, relative to a year ago, a lot higher percentage or Apple buyers already have an Apple handset. So I’m curious if you think the Western world can show decent unit growth over the next year or two. And I was also wondering, the 5C generally is viewed as having turned out to be pretty light in the mix. What are you going to do with that product going forward?
Tim Cook :
Well, I’ll sidestep the last question, of course, because it’s about future products. But to your question about the 5S in particular, if I look at the sell through year over year, there was growth in that portion of the line, despite adding an entirely new phone underneath it. And so I think that’s a good sign, and that’s despite it being in short supply for the bulk or virtually all of the quarter. And so I do believe that that category of product can grow in those markets, if you’re thinking about the U.S. and western Europe, for example, and Japan. In Japan, we grew 40% last quarter. That’s fairly good.
Operator:
Brian Marshall with ISI Group.
Brian Marshall - ISI Group:
Obviously the iPhone business grew about 7% year over year, $200 million in [unintelligible] unit sales now. And that’s with two new [unintelligible] being launched in the quarter. Can you help us think about how you guys view the iPhone new user growth out there in the marketplace versus simply a solid replacement cycle that the company has in its installed base?
Tim Cook :
We saw a significant new to iPhone number. It’s not a number that we throw out, but we particularly saw that on the 5C, which is what we wanted to see. So it’s clearly not just upgraders. As a matter of fact, the upgraders, particularly in North America, would have been less than we thought, because of the changes in the upgrade policy that I talked about earlier.
Brian Marshall - ISI Group :
And then with respect to innovation at the company, obviously iPhone came out in 2007, iPad came out in 2010. 2013 came around, we’ve got some new products, obviously, but nothing really from our new product category. Do you care to comment on the innovation cycle of the company and the cadence there?
Tim Cook :
It’s never been stronger. I’m very confident with the work that’s going on, and I think our customers are going to love what we’re going to do.
Operator:
We’ll go to Keith Bachman with Bank of Montreal.
Keith Bachman - BMO Capital Markets:
I had a question and a follow up. And Tim, for you, the first one, to follow up from Brian’s question, you’re growing iPhones about 7%. I think the market is going to end up looking up to be 14%. Are you happy with the pricing umbrella that you currently have? When you originally brought out iPhones, in subsequent periods you talked about wanting to push some pricing umbrellas. But are you happy with the pricing umbrellas that you have? In particular, as you think about the 5C, I think most of the industry views have panned the product as not being enough features for that price point. But if you could just talk about the positioning of your broader product portfolio on iPhones. Are you happy where you are?
Tim Cook :
I think last quarter we did a tremendous job, particularly given the mix was something very different than we thought. It was the first time we’d ever run that particular play before, and demand percentage turned out to be different than we thought. We obviously always look at our results, and conclude what to change moving forward. And if we decide it’s in our best interest to make a change, then we’ll make one. Obviously I’m not going to predict price changes on the earnings call.
Keith Bachman - BMO Capital Markets :
Sorry, not price changes, but at least product position. Are you willing to expand the product portfolio into new categories within the phone family?
Tim Cook :
We’re willing to make any product that’s a great product. Where our line in the sand is, it’s making something that’s not fantastic.
Keith Bachman - BMO Capital Markets :
Okay. Then my follow up for you Peter is, you mentioned four factors that influenced guidance. In particular, you talked about inventory. I think most investors would conclude then December wasn’t as good as it looked, if you had increases in channel inventory. So I was hoping you could peel off a little bit and talk about the foreign exchange impact and the higher deferrals. Is there a way to quantify that impact on the guidance in March in particular?
Peter Oppenheimer : :
Operator:
From Pacific Crest Securities, we’ll go to Andy Hargreaves.
Andy Hargreaves - Pacific Crest Securities :
Just a quick follow up to some of your comments about demand mix being significantly different, or different than what you thought, in the quarter. Do you have any thoughts on why it was so much different than what you expected it to be?
Tim Cook :
I think the 5S, people are really intrigued with Touch ID. It’s a major feature that has excited people. And I think that, associated with the other things that are unique to the 5S, got the 5S to have a significant amount more attention and a higher mix of sales.
Andy Hargreaves - Pacific Crest Securities : :
Tim Cook:
What Luca is saying is that we’re working on things that are things that you see that we’re shipping today but that we’re working on things that you can’t see today.
Operator:
The next question will come from Mark Moskowitz with JPMorgan.
Mark Moskowitz - JPMorgan:
What’s your user data kind of telling you right now in terms of the replacement cycle? Are you starting to see a lot of heritage Apple users now refresh their iPhone every three years plus, or their iPad every two years plus, versus previous? Are you seeing any major changes there?
Tim Cook :
We don’t have great data yet from last quarter. And so I don’t know the answer to your question.
Mark Moskowitz - JPMorgan :
And then the follow up is around this opex being flat relative to the revenue guidance. Is there something around the vertical in terms of maybe increasing focus on the enterprise vertical that you see an opportunity to take advantage of, maybe hiring more folks to service that industry?
Tim Cook:
It’s clear that the enterprise area has huge potential, and we’re doing well from a percentage of companies that are using iPhone and iPad. It’s up to unbelievable numbers. The iPhone is used in 97% of the Fortune 500, and 91% of the Global 500, and iPad is used in 98% of the Fortune 500 and 93% of the Global 500. And we have a number of accounts, some of which Peter reviewed in the opening remarks, that have tens of thousands of iOS devices working. And also, as I think was mentioned earlier, 90% of tablet activations in corporations are iPads. And 95% of total app activations were on iOS. And I think that’s an incredible measure of ultimately how sticky the products are, because you can get so much productivity out of an iPad and an iPhone. And so I think the road in enterprise is a longer one. The arc is longer than in consumer, which can immediately go out and buy things, etc. And I think we’ve done a lot of the groundwork as you can tell from these numbers that I’ve given you, and I would expect that it would have more and more payback in the future.
Operator:
And the next question will come from Gene Munster with Piper Jaffray.
Gene Munster - Piper Jaffray:
Just a follow up to some of the previous questions. Tim, I’ve got to ask it. In the previous quarters, you’ve talked about specifically product categories multiple, and that’s different than variations of existing products. And that would be by the end of 2014. I just want to be clear that’s still on track, and consistent with some of the expenses that we talked about earlier in the call?
Tim Cook :
Yes, absolutely. No change.
Gene Munster - Piper Jaffray :
And then second, and this goes back to some of the other themes on the call here too, but you’re obviously going to have a big year in terms of new product categories. And maybe even thinking beyond 2014, when the new products come out and they kind of ramp in 2015, how do you think about the trajectory of the platform, or what would you say to investors to say this is just a product cycle story?
Tim Cook:
I would just say, innovation is deeply embedded in everybody here, and there’s still so much of the world that is full of very complex products, etc. We have zero issue coming up with things we want to do that we think we can disrupt in a major way. The challenge is always to focus to the very few that deserve all of our energy. And we’ve always done that, and we’re continuing to do that.
Nancy Paxton:
A replay of today’s call will be available for two weeks as a podcast on the iTunes store, as a webcast on Apple.com/investor, and via telephone. And the numbers for the telephone replay are 888-203-1112 or 719-457-0820. And please enter confirmation code 9268358. These replays will be available by approximately 5 p.m. Pacific time today. And members of the press with additional questions can contact Steve Dowling at 408-974-1896, and financial analysts can contact Joan Hoover or me with additional questions. Joan is at 408-974-4570, and I’m at 408-974-5420. Thanks again for joining us.