The world’s most valuable company will report its latest financial results Thursday afternoon, providing yet another major event in a jampacked week for big American technology companies.
The flagship New York City Apple store.
Consensus analyst forecasts call for record top and bottom lines for Apple in the last three months of 2024, according to FactSet: The $2.35 projected earnings per share would top the record set in 2023’s fourth calendar quarter and the $124.3 projected revenue would top the record set in 2021’s fourth calendar quarter.
Apple is expected to report $71 billion in iPhone sales as the smartphones’ newest AI-enabled iPhone 16 model launched, the best result since late 2021 and a 1.4% projected increase from 2023’s comparable period.
But Apple’s overall 4% forecasted year-over-year sales growth and 5% net profit growth comes largely on the back of growth in the company’s high-margin services division, which encompasses most of Apple’s non-device offerings including the App Store, AppleCare and Apple Music.
The services unit is expected to bring in a record $26.1 billion in quarterly revenue, rising 13% year-over-year.
Shares of Apple fell about 0.3% ahead of Thursday’s report, but remained up almost 7% this week as the iPhone maker emerged as an unlikely winner from the stock market upheaval from the release of China’s DeepSeek’s large-language AI model.
Apple typically publishes its quarterly results at 4:30 p.m. EST. Its earnings call is scheduled for 5 p.m., which will be streamed on the company’s website here.
Apple’s report will come 24 hours after a trio of its fellow trillion-dollar American tech firms reported their own quarterly results, to mixed sour investor response. Microsoft stock fell 6% Thursday after the world’s second-most valuable company fell short of forecasts in its Azure cloud computing unit, heading toward its worst daily loss since 2022. Shares of Meta and Tesla each gained about 2% after Meta topped sales and profit forecasts and Tesla provided bullish production updates for its forthcoming vehicles, despite falling well short of analyst projections.
Wall Street may be calling for all-time best financial performance, but there’s “concern heading into the earnings print,” cautioned JPMorgan analysts led by Samik Chatterjee in a recent note to clients. The JPMorgan group outlined a trio of worries which loom over the report: Declining iPhone market share in China, “limited traction” for AI features on iPhones so far and foreign exchange headwinds as the dollar’s recent appreciation makes American products more expensive abroad. Consensus forecasts call for $20.9 billion in quarterly revenue from Apple’s greater China segment, a 0.2% increase from 2023’s final three months but a 19% decline from 2021’s record $25.8 billion. China accounted for 17% of Apple revenues in its 2024 fiscal year ending in September.