Apple, which published its quarterly results on Thursday, substantially exceeded analysts' predictions with nearly $ 95 billion in revenue for the period from January to March, of which the Californian group generated $ 24 billion in net profit.

Sales of its flagship iPhone, up slightly year-on-year to $51.33 billion, also beat forecasts while demand for electronics fell sharply due to inflation.

Its services business (music, entertainment, online storage, payments, etc.) also grew slightly year-on-year, to nearly $21 billion for the second quarter of its staggered fiscal year.

"We are pleased to have achieved an all-time record in services and a record for the second quarter for the iPhone (...) Our base of active devices is at its highest," said Tim Cook, the boss of Apple, quoted in the statement.

"We have record revenues across the App Store," he added during the conference call to analysts, also mentioning "more than 975 million paid subscriptions" subscribed to services of the Apple brand.

"Apple scored a lot of points in the past quarter," said Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities. The analyst noted the rise of the iPhone which shows that the company "continues to gain market share in China despite the poor economic situation".

Mac down

The Cupertino group's revenue and net profit fell slightly year-on-year, but the market was expecting worse.

Because the demand for electronic devices, which had exploded during the pandemic and its lockdowns, has fallen in recent months in the face of inflation.

In the second half of 2022, mobile phone sales worldwide fell to their lowest level since 2014, according to Canalys.

But "the popularity of the professional iPhone range is helping Apple expand its market share, despite the constraints on demand," Canalys analyst Le Xuan Chiew said in late January.

"And unexpected difficulties on the supply side for these models have led Apple to accelerate its diversification to mitigate the impact of this issue," he added.

Apple last month launched a high-interest savings account (4.15% per year, compared to 0.37% on average in the United States) for holders of the Apple Card, the card it put on the market in 2019. Some $990 million was deposited into these accounts in the first four days, according to Forbes.

Sales of personal computers also collapsed at the beginning of the year, and Apple's Macs were not spared: they generated $ 7.2 billion in revenue in the past quarter, compared to $ 10.4 billion in the same period last year.

Paid dismissals

Last week, Alphabet (Google), Microsoft, Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) and Amazon also reassured the markets with better-than-expected quarterly results even if their growth slowed.

Despite advertisers' budget cuts, revenues from the world's two digital advertising leaders, Google and Meta, rose slightly year-on-year to nearly $70 billion and $29 billion, respectively.

Their massive redundancy plans have been particularly appreciated by investors, as has Amazon's, which has decided to cut a total of 27,000 jobs.

The e-commerce and cloud giant's revenue exceeded $127 billion, $3 billion more than expected.

And Microsoft delighted Wall Street with cloud-boosted revenue. The IT group also enjoys the ascendancy it has gained in artificial intelligence with the integration into its services of state-of-the-art tools developed with OpenAI, the start-up that launched the ChatGPT phenomenon.

"The macro-economic environment is not flamboyant but tech still fared better than all the pessimists expected," Wedbush's Dan Ives said last week. "With cost reductions, and huge market caps as a safety net, we can expect the sector to navigate the storm more easily than others."

© 2023 AFP