Apple forecast sales for the current quarter ending in September would grow more slowly than Wall Street targeted as the iPhone maker struggled to get the parts it needed to deliver products, and shares fell 6% in after-hours trade.
Chief Financial Officer Kevan Parekh told analysts and investors on a call that the iPhone maker expects revenue growth of 9% to 11% in the quarter compared to the year before. That was less than the 12% rise predicted by Wall Street, according to LSEG data.
Apple said sales for its fiscal third quarter ended June 27 were up 16.4% to $109.42 billion, compared with analyst estimates of a 15.5% rise to $108.65 billion, according to LSEG data, and Apple’s own forecast of 14% to 17% sales growth.
Apple’s third-quarter profits were $2.02 per share, with 11 cents attributable to tariff refunds from the US government.
Even excluding the tariff refunds, Apple’s profits were still above Wall Street estimates of $1.89 per share.
Apple shares fell 4% in extended trading after the results.
The decline comes after Apple, whose shares have risen more than 22% this year, reclaimed its throne as the world’s most valuable company from AI chip leader Nvidia. With help from Alphabet’s Google, Apple earlier this year unveiled a revamped version of its Siri virtual assistant with a raft of new AI-driven features, and consumers and software developers alike have been gravitating toward its Mac products to handle AI tasks on device rather than paying monthly fees.
Driving Apple’s results was a 21.7% increase in iPhone sales to $54.25 billion, above analyst estimates of $53.86 billion, according to LSEG data. Those iPhone sales were Apple’s best-ever for a third quarter, when phone sales typically begin to slow as customers anticipate new models during the fall.
But this year, Apple customers are racing to snap up iPhones after a global crunch in memory chip supplies prompted Apple to raise prices of Macs and iPads. Apple has so far spared its signature product, with Wall Street analysts increasingly expecting that Apple will hike iPhone prices around its annual fall launch event in September.
In an interview with Reuters, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that the main supply constraint that Apple had during the third quarter was an industry shortage of advanced chipmaking technology used to produce the Apple Silicon chips at the heart of its devices. Cook said that was particularly true for the company’s Mac lineup, whose sales grew 29% on the strength of the entry-level MacBook Neo and the high-end MacBook Pro despite price increases for those models.
“If you look at the root causes behind those, it’s that we’re having an incredibly strong product cycle beyond our expectations, and the (advanced chipmaking) supply chain just fundamentally has less flexibility in it to meet the high levels of demand,” Cook told Reuters.
Apple is also grappling with a supply chain strained by hundreds of billions of dollars of spending to build out AI data centers, leading to a thinly concealed conflict with longtime memory supplier Micron MU.O. Cook has previously noted shortages of both memory chips and the main processor of iPhones supplied by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.
Apple said its gross margins, which it had warned would come under pressure due to memory costs, were 50.1%, with Apple saying that tariff refunds contributed two points of that margin. Excluding the refunds, gross margins were 48.1%, which was above the midpoint of Apple’s guidance and above estimates of 47.92%, according to LSEG data.
Unlike its Big Tech rivals, Apple has been more cautious with its spending, declining to plow hundreds of billions of dollars into its own data centers. By comparison, Google has invested heavily in data centers and stunned investors with negative free cash flow. But Apple has also signaled that it may have upcoming capital needs of its own by ending its longtime goal of returning all of its cash to shareholders.
Apple on Thursday said that sales of Macs were up 28.7% to $10.35 billion, beating analyst estimates of $8.74 billion, according to LSEG data. Sales of iPads were down 5.9% to $6.19 billion, below analyst expectations of $6.92 billion, according to LSEG data.
Cook attributed the iPad decline to a “tough compare” to the same quarter a year ago when Apple introduced the budget-minded A16 iPad.
Apple’s services business, which includes its App Store, iCloud and content businesses, was up 12.1% to$30.74 billion, missing estimates of $31.22 billion, according to LSEG data. Wearable sales were up 6.5% to$7.88 billion, slightly above expectations of $7.82 billion, according to LSEG.
Sales rose in all parts of the globe, with Greater China revenue up 22.4% to $18.82 billion.
