"We are not immune": Corona problems are catching up with Apple

Created: 04/28/2022Updated: 04/29/2022 03:21

The iPhone group Apple was able to increase its sales.

© Sven Hoppe/dpa

The past quarter was the third best in Apple's history, but in the current quarter the iPhone company could experience the strongest headwind to date from the corona pandemic.

Cupertino - After an impressive run in the corona pandemic, Apple is preparing for a strong setback in the current quarter.

The iPhone group expects sales to be four to eight billion dollars lower, mainly because of the corona lockdowns in Shanghai.

"We are not immune to such challenges," said CEO Tim Cook.

The difficulties would affect most product categories.

The halt to business in Russia in response to the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine will also slow down sales growth, said CFO Luca Maestri.

On the other hand, Cook sees signs of optimism about the corona situation around Shanghai.

At the same time, he qualified that it is difficult to predict how much of the lost business in the current quarter can be made up later.

In the past quarter, Apple was able to successfully combat the global problems in the electronics industry and increased sales by nine percent year-on-year to $97.3 billion.

The bottom line was a profit of 25 billion dollars in the coffers - almost six percent more than a year earlier.

It was Apple's third-highest quarterly profit.

The group had only achieved the record of 34.6 billion dollars in the previous quarter.

Good earnings and sales increase

The growth in the service area was particularly strong, in which the business with storage services, the app platform, but also music and video streaming is bundled.

The division's sales grew by a good 17 percent to $19.8 billion.

With the most important Apple product, the iPhone, sales increased by 5.4 percent to almost 50.6 billion dollars.

According to calculations by the market research company Canalys, Apple was the only major smartphone manufacturer to increase sales in the past quarter.

According to Canalys, Apple sold 56.5 million devices - 7.8 percent more than in the same quarter last year.

Market leader Samsung, on the other hand, fell by 3.6 percent to 73.7 million computer cell phones.

Many of the leading smartphone providers no longer give sales figures themselves.

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Mac computers also made Apple happy, with sales up 14.6 percent to a good $10.4 billion.

In contrast, the global PC market shrank by around five percent in the quarter, according to calculations by the analysis company IDC.

Chip shortages and supply chain issues

The electronics industry as a whole is struggling with chip bottlenecks and other problems in the supply chain.

At Apple, the iPad tablet was already affected by this in the past quarter, with sales falling by two percent to $7.65 billion.

In the division with the Airpods earphones and the computer watch Apple Watch, on the other hand, there was an increase in sales of twelve percent to 8.8 billion dollars.

In the past quarter, Apple significantly exceeded the expectations of analysts, including in group sales and in the iPhone and Mac business.

The share buyback program is now being expanded by an additional $90 billion.

The stock ended after-hours trading down 2.24 percent after warnings for current business.

According to the figures for the past quarter, she had initially recorded price gains.

An analyst wanted to know from Cook whether Apple was considering fundamental changes to its supplier model after the recent corona problems - such as stocking up on larger chips.

The Apple CEO said the company's supply chain is global and building semiconductor inventories is also not possible in today's world.

But the group reacts: "We learn something every day and make adjustments." dpa