Apple just announced the revenue figures for the company for the last four quarters and they are nothing short of amazing. Apple is still the company to beat in terms of revenue when it comes to smartphones and other products. It is also interesting to see that Apple has made even more profit in India than Xiaomi which is the No. 1 company currently. This is because Apple has kept their margins very high in the country as opposed to Xiaomi. As we all know, Xiaomi is known for entry-level, budget and midrange smartphones. Whereas Apple is a premium brand and their margins are 10x higher than Xiaomi too.
However, in a shock move to the Apple investors, the company made an announcement that it will no longer publish units sold data. This unit sales data will not be available for iPhones, iPads and Macs. This means that the metric which was used to analyze the sales of the latest Apple products will not be available anymore. Now, it will be even harder to judge the sales of the latest iPhones, iPads or Macs. Apple, however, will still publish products and services revenue. This move from Apple did not go down well with the investors as expected and the Apple shares went down almost 7% to close at $207.81.
For investors, Apple announced that they will publish cost-of-sales data for both its total product businesses and its total services business. This will let investors evaluate gross margin for both the departments. However, Analysts believe that Apple should be more transparent to their investors than this. Another analyst named Walter Piecyk from BTIG Research said “Companies typically stop reporting metrics when the metrics are about to turn. This is not a good look for Apple,”. All in all, this could mean that Apple is seeing a decline in unit sales figure year-on-year and have thus decided to stop publishing them in order to not lose investors.