Apple has closed its fiscal year 2024 (the year that runs from October 2023 to September 2024), and thus leaves us with a whole new year in which we can see the company’s trajectory.
The return to growth path, with a modest 2%, hides a slow but profound transformation.
Why is this important?. This growth marks the end of the era of explosive expansion in favor of a new era in which stability and diversification mark its strategic direction.
panoramic. The iPhone is still king with more than $200 billion in revenue, but an upheaval was taking place at the edge of Cook’s administration. Services are already close to 100 billion dollars annually, while Mac has suggested a new zone in the range of 30 billion dollars.
In figures.
- Total revenue: 2% growth after falling to 3% in 2023.
- iPhone: 600 million products compared to 2023.
- Services: on track to exceed 100,000 million annually.
- Mac: established at 30,000 million annually.
- Wearables, Home and accessories: first drop after eight years of growth.
Here is a different view: the weight of each division in the total income of the company. The dashed yellow line indicates that 50% of the iPhone jumped when Jobs was still CEO.
Between the lines. The maturity of the consumer technology market, which also affects Apple, is forcing change in the company I’m not looking for the “next iPhone” (the goal cannot be reached, of course), but deeper into the concept of building an ecosystem of complementary products and services.
It probably means Mac a brilliant reinvention of the story. After a boost from Apple Silicon and atypical years of the pandemic, it found a new fund at 30 billion annually. Its historical importance is twofold. The iPad, despite the number of consecutive cases, the levels are higher than in any year after 2014. It states that it is not bad.
Go deeper. The company continues to be a strategic bet to sustain growth in the future. It is growing steadily and substantially (11 billion this year), and proves that Apple is successfully making its transition from a hardware manufacturer to something like an integrated experience provider. A way of talking about connecting that hardware, software and services in which not only the first direct sale results.
Wearables, Home and Accessories, a division that suffered its first fall in eight years, despite the small extra arrival of the Vision Pro, leaves a clear lesson: Apple needs to rethink its product strategy in this type of emerging technology.
In short. Apple succeeded in its first major transformation with the launch of the first iPhone. Build a future where success does not depend on a single innovative product, but on an interconnected ecosystem of hardware, services and software. He articulates the money from the first two and the third.
It is less spectacular and flashy, but also less volatile and more stable and predictable, which investors love. That will also be Tim Cook’s legacy.
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Featured image | Xataka with Studio Mockuuups