After the big uproar caused on Wednesday in the markets by the downward revision that Apple made of its iPhone sales expectations in the first fiscal quarter of 2019, the company tried today to control damages with positive data on the App Store and the iPhone itself.
On the one hand, the company based in Cupertino (California, USA) announced that its virtual app store, the App Store, achieved a “record” Christmas period in 2018, with 1.22 billion dollars billed throughout the world between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve.
In addition, the company of the bitten apple noted that on January 1, 2019 users bought products in the App Store worth 322 million dollars, representing the highest sales figure in a single day in the history of the platform .
Apple used these figures as an indicator of the apparent good performance of its commitment to services, which include the App Store itself as well as Apple Music, Cloud Services and Apple Pay, a business sector that the company hopes can counteract a possible slowdown in hardware sales in the future.
On the other hand, according to published specialized portals such as “The Verge”, the CEO of Apple, Tim Cook, who signed the letter to investors yesterday in which he lowered sales expectations, sent another letter today to his employees informing them of a “record” day in iPhones activations last Christmas.
In the letter, Cook argues that on December 25 activations of iPhone phones in the US and Canada “achieved a new record for Christmas Day” and was optimistic about the revenue forecasts in these two markets along with Mexico, Germany, Italy, South Korea and Vietnam.
The CEO reinforced the idea already stated in his letter to investors yesterday that the reduction in turnover is mainly due to the slowdown in the Chinese market, while in other parts of the world Apple phones are still living a sweet moment.
Cook did not clarify, however, what iPhone models were activated on Christmas Day, which led several experts to speculate whether, instead of dealing with their new and more expensive devices, it could be mostly models older and still very popular as the iPhone 7 or 8.
In his letter on Wednesday, the successor of Steve Jobs at the head of Apple said that in the first three months of his new fiscal year expect to raise 84,000 million dollars.
This figure is significantly below the 89,000 to 93,000 million previously forecast, a reduction that Cook attributed to less than expected billing in China (including Hong Kong and Taiwan).
Since the announcement was made late on Wednesday, the price of Apple in the stock market has plummeted, and past noon on Thursday their shares were left a 9.31% in New York parquet to reach 143.17 dollars per title.
