The iPhone X Actually Failed During The 2017 Holidays, But A New iPhone SE Might Bode Well For Apple
The iPhone X might be Apple’s best handset today, but the smartphone might not necessarily be the company’s most profitable product. During Apple’s last earnings call, CEO Tim Cook stated that the Cupertino-based tech giant set new records in both revenue and earnings. Inasmuch as this is accurate, however, the raw number of sales that the iPhone X has earned so far paint a completely different picture.
During Apple’s Q4 2017 earnings report, Tim Cook announced that the entire company managed to generate a revenue of $88.3 billion. Such impressive figures are on the high-end of the iPhone maker’s guidance range and were up almost $10 billion or 13 percent over the previous all-time record the company set back in Q4 2016, as noted in Seeking Alpha‘s transcript of Apple’s recent earnings call.
Amidst the impressive figures in the company’s earnings, however, is an important metric that has declined during the quarter. While Apple managed to set new records in revenue, its Device Sales decreased 1 percent during the last quarter. This means that much of the reason behind Apple’s record-breaking quarter was not because its devices such as its current flagship — the iPhone X — is selling well. The Cupertino-based tech giant earned a lot of money simply because it had raised its prices significantly.
This means that numbers-wise, the iPhone X was actually not that successful during the 2017 holiday season. According to Shawn Harrison and Gausia Chowdhury, analysts from Longbow Research, the iPhone X actually did not sell well during the past holidays, and Apple didn’t get as many orders for the device in Q1 2018 as the company expected, as noted in a Business Insider report. Citing anonymous sources, the Longbow analysts stated that Apple might very well see a “flat production quarter” year-over-year.
“The cut for Q1 (2018) is worse than usual and worse than what has happened in prior years. The March quarter has been low and we’re expecting flat production year over year,” the anonymous sources said, according to BI.
Surprisingly, Apple’s game-changing device for the early part of 2018 could come in the form of a refreshed version of its humblest and cheapest handset to date — the iPhone SE. In a note to Longbow’s clients, Chowdhury and Harrison stated that the rumored device, informally dubbed as the iPhone SE2, could be key in Apple’s performance this quarter. If Apple does release a refreshed iPhone SE, the Cupertino-based tech giant might have a pretty good way to drive sales for the second quarter, at least until the unveiling of the rumored three-pronged release of the iPhone X2 series later this year.
