Apple's CEO on the company's 2019 Q2 earnings
Apple's second-quarter results for 2019 are in. Here's our transcript of the call.
Apple CEO Tim Cook and CFO Luca Maestri spoke with analysts during the company's Q2 2019 earnings call. Here's our ongoing live transcript of their remarks! If you want more info on Apple's results, we recommend checking out the awesome charts from Six Colors.
Cook's opening remarks
Tim Cook
Good afternoon and thanks to all of you for joining us today. This has been an exciting and productive quarter for Apple. In my letter to investors at the beginning of January, I wrote that one of Apple's great strengths is our culture of flexibility, adaptability, and creativity. This quarter featured some important announcements that speak to the power of our commitment to innovation and long term thinking. I'd like to start with some top line highlights and then move into greater detail with you. I'll get started with financial results. Our revenue was $58 billion, toward the high end of our guidance range. We see this result as a positive outcome in light of ongoing headwinds from weaker foreign currencies relative to the US dollar. In constant currency, our year over year revenue performance would have been 200 basis points better than our reported results indicate. We had great results in a number of areas across our business. It was our best quarter ever for services, with revenue reaching $11.5 billion. We had a blockbuster quarter for iPad, with revenue up 22% from a year ago — this is our highest iPad revenue growth rate in six years. And it was another sensational quarter for wearables, with growth near 50%. This business is now about the size of a Fortune 200 company, an amazing statistic when you consider it's only been four years since we delivered the very first Apple Watch. I'll talk more about these categories later.
While we grew year over year in developed markets, and while we had record March quarter results in a number of major markets, including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Japan. We did experience a revenue decline in emerging markets, but we feel positive about our trajectory. Our year over year revenue performance in Greater China improved relative to the December quarter and we've seen very positive customer response to the pricing actions we've taken in that market, our trade-in and financing programs in our retail stores, the effects of government measures to stimulate the economy, and improved trade dialogue between the United States and China. Our App Store results are still reflecting the impact of the slowdown in regulatory approval of gaming apps in China, but we're encouraged by the recent increase in the pace of approvals. We believe strongly in our long-term opportunity in China thanks to our robust ecosystem, our talented developer community, and the country's growing population of tech savvy consumers who value the very best products and services.
For iPhone, while our worldwide revenue was down 17% from a year ago, declines were significantly smaller in the final weeks of the March quarter. Looking back at the past five months, November and December were the most challenging so this is an encouraging trend. We like the direction we're headed with iPhone and our goal now is to pick up the pace. Importantly our active installed base of devices continues to grow in each of our geographic segments and set a new all-time record for all major product categories. That growing installed base is a reflection of the satisfaction and loyalty of our customers and it's driving our services business to new heights. In fact, we had our best quarter ever for the App Store, Apple Music, cloud services, and our App Store search ad business. And we set new March-quarter revenue records for Apple Care and Apple pay. Apple Pay transaction volume more than doubled year over year and we're on track to reach 10 billion transactions this calendar year. Apple Pay is now available in 30 markets and we expect to be live in 40 markets by the end of the year. More and more transit systems are accepting Apple Pay and New York's MTA system will begin the rollout in early summer. As we've seen in places like London, Tokyo, and Shanghai, contactless entry into transit systems helps to spur broader Apple Pay adoption and we believe this will get even more people using Apple Pay in the United States. And TicketMaster has just announced that they will be accepting Apple Pay for ticket purchases on the web and through the Ticketmaster app and over 50 of their entertainment and sporting venues are launching contactless tickets this year, including the vast majority of NFL stadiums. Subscriptions are a powerful driver of our services business. We reached a new high of over 390 million paid subscriptions at the end of March, an increase of 30 million in the last quarter alone. This was also an incredibly important quarter for our services moving forward. In March we previewed a game-changing array of new services, each of them rooted in principles that are fundamentally Apple. They're easy to use; they feature unmatched attention to detail; they put a premium on user privacy and security; they're expertly curated, personalized, and ready to be shared by everyone in your family. These features aren't just nice to have, they actually helped to eliminate the boundary between hardware, software, and service creating a singularly exceptional experience for our users. First, building on the great momentum of Apple News which is already the number-one news app in the United States and the United Kingdom, we launched Apple News+. It will bring together over 30 popular magazines, leading newspapers, and digital publishers into a beautiful, convenient, and curated experience within the Apple News app. Apple News+ builds on our commitment to supporting quality journalism from trusted sources while providing the best magazine and news-reading experience ever for mobile devices. Advancing our vision to replace the wallet, we announced Apple Card built on principles Apple stands for like transparency, simplicity, and privacy. Apple Card is integrated into the Wallet app and delivers all new experiences that only Apple can provide, integrating our hardware, software, and services in an elegant solution, it places the customer at the center. It's the first card to encourage you to pay less interest, eliminate fees, and give you daily cash on all your purchases, and customer interest to date has been terrific. We also previewed Apple Arcade, the world's first game subscription service for mobile, desktop, and the living room. With over 100 new games all with no ads or ad-tracking, no additional purchases, and respect for user privacy, we've created a service for players of all ages — kids to teens to adults — and one that families can enjoy together.
The App Store is already the world's biggest gaming platform and we think Apple Arcade is a way to unleash the creativity of the game developer community with a collection of new games not available on any other mobile platform or in any other subscription service. We can't wait for our customers to experience it for themselves beginning this fall. We were thrilled to provide a peek at what's new for TV. Beginning in mid-May, the all new Apple TV app will bring together the different ways to discover and watch shows, movies, sports, news, and more in one app across iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Mac, smart TV's, and streaming devices. And users can subscribe to and watch new Apple TV channels like HBO, Showtime, and Starz, paying only for services they want — all on-demand available on and offline. And coming this fall, Apple TV+ will be the new home for the world's most creative storytellers, featuring exclusive original shows, movies, and documentaries.
We also had several major product introductions during the quarter. We launched a new, more powerful iMac with dramatic increases in both compute and graphics performance, making it a great update for consumers and pros alike. For our Mac business overall, we faced some processor constraints in the March quarter, leading to a 5% revenue decline compared to last year, but we believe that our Mac revenue would have been up compared to last year without those constraints and don't believe this challenge will have a significant impact on our Q3 results. For iPad, we were very happy to return to growth in Greater China while generating strong double-digit growth in each of our other geographic segments. Our great iPad results were driven primarily by strong customer response to iPad Pro. Late in the quarter, we launched an all new iPad Air with an ultra-thin design, Apple Pencil support, and high-end performance powered by Apple's A12 Bionic chip. In addition, we introduced a new iPad mini — a major upgrade for iPad fans who love an ultra-portable design and, like the new iPad Air, it delivers the power of the A12 bionic and support for Apple Pencil. Last month, we introduced new AirPods, the second generation of the world's most popular wireless headphones, and demand has been incredible. This is nothing less than a cultural phenomenon. With a new Apple-designed H1 chip, the new AirPods deliver faster connect times, more talk time, and the convenience of hands-free "Hey Siri." Our retail and online stores continue to be a key point of innovation. As we mentioned in January, we've been working on an initiative to make it simple to trade in a phone in our store, finance the purchase over time, and get help transferring data from the old phone to the new phone. As part of this initiative, we rolled out new trade-in and financing programs in the U.S., China, the UK, Spain, Italy, and Australia. The results have been striking. Across our stores, we had an all-time record response to our trade-in programs and with more than four times the trade-in volume of our March quarter a year ago. With each passing quarter, we're more inspired by the impact our products are having on people's fitness and health. This quarter we brought the ECG app on Apple Watch Series 4 to Hong Kong and 19 European countries including France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK. Just like when the ECG app launched in the United States, there's hardly a day that goes by that I don't get a letter or an email from a customer in one of these countries talking about how this feature has significantly changed their life. We believe we're really just beginning to tap in to what we can do to help our users actively manage their health and well-being. For example, last month Stanford Medicine reported results of the Apple Heart Study, the largest study ever of its kind, which enrolled over 400,000 participants from all 50 states in a span of only eight months. And hundreds of institutions are now supporting Health Records on iPhone with recent additions including Michigan Medicine and UT Health Austin. In February, we announced that we are working with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to make Health Records on iPhone available to veterans. This will be the first records-sharing platform of its kind available to the V.A. which is the largest medical system in the US, providing service to more than 9 million veterans across more than 1,200 facilities.
Apple's innovation extends beyond the impact we have in the lives of our customers to the impact we leave on the world around us. We recently marked Earth Day with several major announcements about our efforts to lead the world better than we found it. We have completed the allocation of our $2.5 billion Green Bond proceeds across 40 environmental initiatives around the world to projects ranging from solar power generation, to water conservation, to development of custom alloys for our products made from 100% recycled aluminum. We've announced a major expansion of our recycling programs, including quadrupling the number of locations where US customers can send their iPhones to be disassembled by Daisy, our recycling robot. Each Daisy can now disassemble 1.2 million devices per year, allowing recovered materials to be recycled into the manufacturing process. And we've partnered with a record number of our suppliers to follow our lead and transition to 100% clean energy. With the help of these 44 suppliers, we will exceed our goal of bringing four gigawatts of renewable energy into our supply chain by 2020, with over one additional gigawatt projected within that timeframe. In the last calendar year alone, the partners that have joined this effort have generated enough clean energy to power over 600,000 homes in the United States. We're very proud of the progress that we and our partners are making and hope our actions will inspire other businesses to do what they can to protect the world that we share.
We are as excited as ever about our great pipeline of hardware, software, and services, and we're looking forward to sharing more information about the future of our four software platforms at our Worldwide Developers Conference, now less than five weeks from now. Everyone here is hard at work to prepare for WWDC and it's always a privilege to get to share the future of our platforms with the community of world-changing developers who bring it to life. You are not going to want to miss this one.
We're in the fortunate position of generating more cash than we need to run our business and invest confidently in our future, so today we're announcing the latest update to our capital return program, including an increase to our share repurchase authorization and our quarterly dividend. For more details on that and our March quarter results, I'll turn the call over to Luca.
Luca Maestri provides more detail on the quarter
Luca Maestri
Thank you, Tim. Good afternoon, everyone. Revenue in the March quarter was $58 billion, near the high end of the guidance range that we provided 90 days ago and down 5% from last year. Our revenue decline reflects 200 basis points of negative foreign exchange due to the strength of the US dollar. Overall products revenue declined 9%, driven primarily by iPhone, while services revenue grew 16% to a new all-time record. We also set a new March quarter record for wearables, home, and accessories, and we recorded our best iPad growth rate in six years. Company gross margin was 37.6%, in line with our guidance. Products gross margin was 31.2%, down about 310 basis points sequentially due to the seasonal loss of leverage and headwinds from foreign exchange. Services gross margin was 63.8%, up 100 basis points sequentially, due to a different mix and leverage from higher revenue. Net income was $11.6 billion, diluted earnings per share were $2.46, and operating cash flow was $11.2 billion. Let me provide more color for our various revenue categories. iPhone revenue was $31.1 billion. We've seen positive customer response to recent pricing actions in certain emerging markets as well as enhancements to our trading and financing programs and our year over year performance improved relative to our December quarter results in greater China, in the Americas, and in Japan. Our active installed base of iPhone reached a new all-time high at the end of March. This growing installed base reflects the industry-leading satisfaction and loyalty of our customers. The latest survey of U.S. consumers from 451 Research indicates customer satisfaction of 99% for iPhone XR, XS, and XS Max combined and among business buyers who plan to purchase smartphones in the June quarter, 81% plan to purchase iPhones. Turning to services, as Tim said, it was our best quarter ever with $11.5 billion in revenue, an increase of 16% from last year. We generated double-digit revenue growth across the App Store, Apple Music, cloud services, Apple Care, Apple Pay, and our App Store search ad business, and we set all-time services revenue records in four of our five geographic segments. We're very happy with this performance. As you can see from our new disclosures, services accounted for 20% of our March quarter revenue and about one-third of our gross profit dollars. Customer engagement in our ecosystem continues to grow — the number of transacting accounts on our digital content stores reached another new all-time high during the quarter with a number of paid accounts also setting a new all-time record and growing by strong double digits over last year.
And we now have over 390 million paid subscriptions across our services portfolio, an increase of 120 million versus just 12 months ago. All subscription categories are growing strong double digits, and as we mentioned a quarter ago, we expect the number of paid subscriptions to surpass half a billion during 2020. On the App Store, our subscription business is extremely diversified and is growing strongly around the world. In fact, the number of paid third-party subscriptions increased by over 40% compared to last year in each of our geographic segments. And across all third-party subscription apps, the largest accounted for only 0.3% of our total services revenue. Next I'd like to talk about the Mac. Revenue was $5.5 billion compared to $5.8 billion a year ago, with the decline driven primarily by processor constraints on certain popular models. In spite of this challenge, we generated double-digit Mac revenue growth in Japan and Korea, setting new all-time Mac revenue records in both markets. On a global basis, nearly half of the customers purchasing Macs during the quarter were new to Mac and the active installed base of Macs reached a new all-time high. We had great results for iPad with $4.9 billion in revenue and growth accelerating from the December quarter to 22%. iPad revenue grew in all five of our geographic segments, with a return to growth in Greater China and strong double-digit growth in all other segments. We had our best March quarter ever for iPad in Japan and we were especially pleased by performance in Korea, Thailand, and Mexico where revenue more than doubled over last year. In total, over half of the customers purchasing iPads during the March quarter were new to iPad and the iPad active installed base also reached a new all-time high. iPad revenue growth has been fueled primarily by the great customer response to our new iPad Pros. These completely redesigned iPads with full-screen Liquid Retina displays, Face ID, a powerful A12 Bionic chip with Neural Engine, and support for the new Apple Pencil and Smart Keyboard make iPad Pro the perfect PC laptop replacement for both consumers and professionals. The most recent surveys from 451 Research measured a 93% customer satisfaction rating for iPad overall. Among customers who plan to purchase tablets, 77% of consumers and 75% of businesses plan to purchase iPads. Wearables, home, and accessories revenue set a new March quarter revenue record of $5.1 billion, fueled primarily by the strong performance of our wearables business, which grew close to 50%. Within this category, Apple Watch is the best-selling and most loved smart watch in the world and produced its best results ever for a non-holiday quarter. It's reaching many new customers with three quarters of purchases going to customers who have never owned an Apple Watch before. Interest in AirPods has been off the charts and we are working hard to catch up with the incredible customer demand. Turning to our retail and online stores, we generated very strong double-digit revenue growth from Apple Watch and iPad. We also announced 50 new Today at Apple sessions during the quarter in three new and expanded formats — Skills, Walks, and Labs — free at our stores around the world. We're making important progress in the enterprise market, helping transform major industries. We're building on Apple's leading position in key functional areas to expand our reach and share within large accounts. Aviation is a strong example of this strategy at work. Across 450 airlines, iPad is overwhelmingly the preferred solution for the pilot's electronic flight bag. We've been making great progress expanding Apple's footprint beyond the cockpit into the cabin, where more than half of the top 50 airlines have now implemented iOS enhance the guest experience as well as enable a new use case with mobile point of sale. We're also seeing traction with other mission-critical airline functions in ground operations and flight maintenance. For example, one of the largest airlines in the world tells us that the adoption of iPad has cut maintenance delays in half. Apple services are also making their way onboard, including growing adoption of Apple Pay for food and beverage purchases and in-flight access to Apple Music. We're also seeing significant iOS traction with large enterprise platforms which are the face of complex backend systems to tens of millions of employees around the world. The end-user employee experience is vital to engagement and productivity and with the increasing mobility of today's modern workforce, those experiences are best on native iOS applications. We see great momentum through the growing number of iOS SDKs being delivered by the world's largest enterprise platforms. For instance, SAP's SDK for iOS continues to gain strong traction with their customers, growing by more than 40% in the last six months. And this past quarter, Salesforce released its SDK enabling developers to build native iOS applications directly on top of the Salesforce platform.
And finally, our enterprise channels continue to build momentum. In February, our Apple at Work initiative was launched with AT&T. This extension to our ongoing collaboration with AT&T will make it easy for more customers to choose the best Apple products for their needs in the enterprise and modernize their business. AT&T will enable business services for Apple products to help companies with their I.T. strategy including device management, security, productivity, and collaboration.
Let me now turn to our cash position. We ended out the quarter with $225 billion in cash plus marketable securities. We also had $101 billion in term debt and $12 billion in commercial paper outstanding for a net cash position of almost $113 billion. As a result, we're in a very strong position that allows us to invest confidently in all areas of the business while continuing to return value to our shareholders. Just last year we announced a commitment to contribute more than $350 billion to the US economy over the next five years, including the creation of 20,000 jobs. More recently we've announced a major expansion in Austin, Texas and in other cities across the country. All these efforts are essential investments to make sure that we're incorporating innovative ideas and top talent wherever they emerge. As we execute those initiatives, we were also able to return over $27 billion to investors during the March quarter. We began a $12 billion accelerated share repurchase program in February, resulting in the initial delivery and retirement of 55.1 million shares. We also repurchased 71.7 million Apple shares for $12 billion through open market transactions and we paid $3.4 billion in dividends and equivalents. Our priorities for cash have not changed over the years. Most importantly, we always want to maintain the cash we need to run our business, maintain strategic flexibility, and invest in our future. We're well on our way towards meeting the investment projections we laid out early last year. We also want to work towards a more optimal capital structure and as we said before, it is our plan to reach a net cash neutral position over time. Given our confidence in Apple's future and the value we see in our stock, our board has authorized an additional $75 billion for share repurchases. And because we know many of our investors value income, we are also raising our quarterly dividend for the seventh time in less than seven years to 77¢, an increase of about 5% from the previous amount. We've paid over $14 billion in dividends and equivalents over the last four quarters alone, making us one of the largest dividend payers in the world. Going forward, we continue to plan for annual increases in dividends per share. As we move ahead into the June quarter, I'd like to review our outlook which includes the types of forward-looking information that Nancy referred to at the beginning of the call. We expect revenue to be between $52.5 and $54.5 billion. This guidance range comprehends 300 basis points of negative foreign exchange impact year over year. Also, as a reminder, in the June quarter last year our services revenue included a favorable 236 million one-time item in connection with the final resolution of various lawsuits. We expect gross margin to be between 37% and 38%. We expect OpEx to be between $8.7 and $8.8 billion. We expect OINE to be about $250 million. And we expect the tax rate to be about 16.5%. Also reflecting the approved increase, today our board of directors has declared a cash dividend of 77¢ per share of common stock, payable on May 16, 2019, to shareholders of record as of May 13, 2019. With that, I'd like to open the call to questions.
Analyst questions
Tim Cook
Thanks for the question Shannon. We're seeing, in the iPhone space, we saw a better year over year performance in the last weeks of the quarter as compared to the full quarter or November and December which was sort of appears to be the trough. I think there's a set of reasons for this: One, we made some price adjustments — essentially backing out the weaker currency effect and then some; there's stimulus programs that the government has executed, including — and this happened in early April — VAT being reduced from 16% to 13%. So they've been aggressive in the stimulus side; three, our trade in and financing programs that we implemented in our retail stores have been very well received there. And I'm happy with the results to date there; and then four, there is an improved trade dialogue between the US and China and from our point of view this has affected consumer confidence on the ground there in a positive way. And so I think it's a set of all of these things and we certainly feel a lot better than we did 90 days ago.
Tim Cook
Yeah, thank you, Shannon. We're glad to put the litigation behind us and all the litigation around the world has been dismissed and it's settled. We're very happy to have a multi-year supply agreement and we're happy that we have a direct license arrangement with Qualcomm which was, I know, important for both companies. And so we feel good about the resolution.
Luca Maestri
Yes Katie, and keep in mind, by the way, we are reporting this guidance including a 300 basis point negative impact from foreign exchange, so actually in constant currency the numbers would be even stronger. At the at the product category level we expect that we will continue to have strong revenue growth from the non-iPhone categories as we've had for the first half of our fiscal year. We're also expecting a relative improvement in our iPhone performance on a year over year basis in Q3 versus the first half. As Tim said, March was the strongest month of the quarter on a year over year basis and so this has given the confidence to provide the guidance that you've seen. Geographically, of course you know as you've seen from our results, for the March quarter China is the geo where we have found some challenges but we believe that trajectory should improve over time.
Tim Cook
Katy, this is one that I'm going to largely punt on as you would probably guess. We look at a lot of things on different technologies and try to look at and select the right time that things come together and get those into products as soon as we can. And certainly from a cost point of view, the technologies have had cost pressure over the last couple of years or so, but on the flip side of that, there's a number of things in the commodity markets going in the other direction at the moment like DRAM and NAND. And so it's difficult to project what happens next, but it's the it's the aggregate of all of it that that really matters from a price point of view.
Tim Cook
Actually the product that's being traded in is all over the place, to be honest. It's 6, 6 Plus, 6s, 6s Plus, 7, 7 Plus, and then fewer 8 and 8 Plus but there's some of each of those and so you get customers that are on the two-year cycle, and some customers on a one-year cycle, and then customers, as well, on the three- and four-year cycles. And so it's really all over the place. In terms of the incentives, we're offering currently in our retail stores a trade-in value that is more than sort of the blue book of the device, if you will for lack of a better description, and so we have topped those up to provide an extra benefit to the user. The installments are different in each geography. I would say that at the moment the geography that is doing the best in installments would be China. And we have a bit of a unique offering there, I think, versus what you can get in the regular market and so that probably further helps us there. And so you can bet that we're learning on each of these finding the parts that the user likes the most. I think the key is we're trying to build something into the consumer mindset that it's good for the environment and good for them to trade in their current device on a new device and we do our best at getting the current device to someone else that can use that or, in some cases, if the product is at an end of life we are recycling the parts on it to make sure that it can carry on in another form.
Luca Maestri
As Tim has explained, we've reached this comprehensive agreement with Qualcomm. As part of this, we have agreed that we're not going to share the financial terms of the agreement. So we plan to honor that. What you see in our gross margin guidance for the June quarter, we guided 37% to 38%, fully comprehends the outcome of the agreement with Qualcomm.
Tim Cook
Yeah I would want to get into announcing things on the call, but obviously we're always working on new things. But right now we're really focused on getting these four out there — we have the News+ in the market today, we'll have the Apple Arcade and the Apple TV+ products in the market in the fall, and Apple Card will go out in the summer timeframe — and so we've got lots in front of us and we're very excited about getting these out there.
Tim Cook
It's growing very, very fast Mike. I think it was up around 70% over the previous year. We are expanding into new geographies, as well, and we still have more geographies out there that we think can move the dial further so it is definitely a business that is big and getting bigger.
Tim Cook
We're going to wait 'til we get these things out and what I can tell you right now is that we're taking sort of consumer interest on the Apple Card, and there's been a significant level of interest on that, and we're excited, as you know, gaming is the top category on the App Store and so the Apple Arcade will serve some of that market and it serves it with a different kind of game, which we think will be great for developers and great for users. The TV+ product plays in a market where there's a huge move from the cable bundle to over-the-top. We think that most users are going to get multiple over-the-top products and we're going to do our best to convince them that the Apple TV+ product should be one of them. And then we're working very hard to try to get everyone to give Apple News+ a look because we think it's a very unique product and I love magazines and we have really wanted to support the publishers. And so we're working very hard, but at the very beginning of the ramp there. We wouldn't do a service if we didn't think they'd be meaningful, so that's sort of the way I look at it. Yeah, these aren't hobbies.
Tim Cook
I think India is a very important market in the long term. It's a challenging market in the short term but we're learning a lot. We have started manufacturing there which is very important to be able to serve the market in a reasonable way. And we're growing that capability there and we would like to place retail stores there and we were working with the government to seek approval to do that and so we plan on going in there with sort of all of our might. We've opened a developer accelerator there which we're very happy with some of the things coming out of there. It's a long term play. It's not something that's going to be an overnight huge business. But I think the growth potential is phenomenal and it doesn't bother me that it's primarily an Android business at the moment because that just means there's a lot of opportunities there.
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