Thanks to the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, Apple has just reported its best second quarter earnings in the company’s history. Indeed, the iPhone snagged the majority of the spotlight during Apple’s Q2 earnings calls Monday evening (April 27). An influx of sales led to a 33 percent increase in its quarterly profit, year over year. Apple posted a quarterly revenue of $58 billion and net profit of $13.6 billion.
“We are thrilled by the continued strength of iPhone, Mac and the App Store, which drove our best March quarter results ever,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said in the company’s earnings statement.
With growing demand in China and an influx of users switching their devices to the iPhone, Apple naturally touted this stellar performance. But the hype also came with the news that iPad sales fell by 23 percent in the quarter, missing forecasts by 1.32 million units.
While the figures represented the fifth-straight quarter of downward iPad sales, Cook reiterated Apple’s devotion to the product, especially in the workplace.
“Clearly we are seeing cannibalization from iPhone and from the Mac,” he said during the earnings call, in reference to depressed iPad performance. “As we make some continued investments in our product pipeline, between that and inventory playing out, and enterprise taking over, I think the iPad business is an extremely good one over time.”
Backing up this optimism, Apple released the results of a recent Changewave survey, which found that 77 percent of corporate respondents that planned to purchase a tablet in the next six months said they were likely to purchase an iPad over competitors’ tablets.
Apple noted that as its partnership with IBM progresses, the company has struck partnerships with other companies to launch the iPad into corporate hands. “We are seeing very high interest in companies who want to use iPad to transform how work gets done,” Apple’s CFO Luca Maestri said during the earnings call. “In addition to IBM, we are working with more than two dozen other companies to bring a broad range of solutions.”
The existing collaboration with IBM has so far focused on solutions for health care providers through the Apple health care service software, HealthKit. The two are also collaborating on Data-as-a-Service solutions that aim to aggregate the data from HealthKit and other software and analyze it for health care workers. The platform through which Apple and IBM will sort this data is Watson Health Cloud, which the companies revealed only days ago.
Cook said the company is “incredibly inspired” by the momentum behind the health care solutions already developed.
The Apple Watch — which now supports 3,500 apps, Cook said – was a hot topic with analysts who focused their comments on supply and demand.
“We were able to deliver more customers on Apple Watch over the weekend than we had initially anticipated,” Cook said. “We’re generally happy that we’re moving on with the ramp. It is a new product for us, and with any type of new product you end up taking some time to fully ramp. Having said that, we’re in a good position and sometime in late June we currently anticipate we’d be able to sell the Apple Watch in additional countries…From a demand point of view, it’s hard to gauge when you don’t have products in stores. We’re filling orders completely online at the moment…We’re far ahead where we expected to be in terms of an application point of view.”
The company has remained mum about specific sales figures, but the launch of Apple’s latest innovation also has the enterprise world alight with talk of how employees could put the Apple Watch to good use in the office. At the device’s launch last month, Apple simultaneously announced the release of several new apps for enterprise use in partnership with CRM provider Salesforce, developed specifically for the Apple Watch.
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