Wearables and services are paying off for Apple

The iPhone is still the biggest contributor to the monstrous profits Apple claws in each quarter, but efforts in wearables and services are balancing out the company.

While Apple is not a company which is going to go bust at any point in the foreseeable future, the dependence on the performance of the iPhone was leaning onto the unhealthy side. With more consumers leaning towards second-hand, refurbished devices, or extending the life of products due to the eye-watering price of new iPhones, there was a threat to profitability.

For the most recent quarter, there are no worries about the profitability of Apple, however. Total revenues for the three-month period, including Christmas sales, stood at $91.8 billion, a 9% increase from the same period in 2019. Net income set a new record of $22.2 billion, while international sales accounted for 61%.

That said, efforts over the last few years to supercharge alternative revenue streams and diversify the profit channels have certainly been paying off. The iPhone is still king at Apple, but it is evolving into a different company.

For the purpose of continuity, we have only selected Q1 for the above comparison. This is a quarter which contains the Christmas period and therefore revenues are almost incomparable to the rest of the year.

As you can see, there is a clear trend of Apple become less reliant on hardware for revenues and profits, with the Software and Services becoming more than a bolt-on bonus for investors. $12.715 billion is an amount most companies would be happy to call group revenues for the year.

Interestingly enough, even in the ‘product’ segment, the team is becoming less reliant on the iPhone to drive revenues and profits.

In short, diversification of revenues is an excellent way forward for the Apple business and demonstrative of the power of the Apple brand.

Apple is a brand which certain consumer identify with, and such is the innovation and creativity of the Apple marketing department, loyalty has been almost cult-like. Cross-selling alternative products when the consumer is so heavily invested in the brand and ecosystem is a much simpler task, this will be one of the reasons Apple’s services division is becoming so successful, but it also explains the growing wearables segment.

Wearables is a family of technologies which has struggled through the years. The first smart watch, in its current form, was released in 2011, though the segment has never really gained the traction to make it an attractive business. Apple has been persisting with its own portfolio of smart watches for years, but it does now appear to have turned a corner.

“Apple Watch had a great start to fiscal 2020, setting an all-time revenue record during the quarter,” CEO Cook said during the earnings call. “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.”

Apple is no-longer simply satisfying product refreshment cycles but attracting new customers into the smart watch bonanza. The more smart watch customers there are, the more normalised the product becomes, which then compounds the success, especially with more digital natives entering their 20s and collecting bigger salaries.

Apple is a company which is defined by iPhone. This will not change, such is the success of the product and the importance of the smartphone in today’s society, but diversifying the business was always viewed as critical to expanding the profitability of the firm. Apple is doing a remarkable job of capturing new revenues.