Apple’s iPhone just had its best year ever

“Apple’s iPhone product category has fundamentally reshaped the company over the past 11 years,” Ashraf Eassa writes for The Motley Fool. “Thanks in large part to this product franchise, Apple is the most valuable publicly-traded company in the world, commanding a market capitalization of roughly $1 trillion.”
“In fiscal year 2018, Apple’s iPhone business had its best year ever — at least in terms of the most important metric,” Eassa writes. “In its fiscal year 2018, Apple shipped 217.7 million iPhones, just a smidgen higher than what it shipped in fiscal year 2017 and almost 3% more than what it shipped in fiscal year 2016. You’ll note, though, that this is still below the unit shipments record that the company set during its fiscal year 2015 [231.2 million].”
“While Apple wasn’t able to top its fiscal-year 2015 iPhone shipments in its fiscal year 2018, it did manage to set an all-time record for iPhone revenue at $166.7 billion — up about 7.5% from the fiscal-year 2015 peak,” Eassa writes. “A significant increase in the company’s iPhone average selling price allowed Apple to do this without shipping a record number of units.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We’ll never know if Apple is able to eclipse 2015′ unit sales record with devices such as iPhone XR, but it really doesn’t matter. The unit sales are stable. Until the next groundbreaking product (vehicles, AR glasses, etc.), Apple’s Services business deserves to be the focus of analysts and investors.
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