One of the surprises of yesterday’s Apple earnings — beyond the fact that record revenue and record profit simply wasn’t good enough for Wall Street — is that Apple has re-cast how it is reporting its revenue to separate hardware from services and software.
The six new categories are iPhone, iPad, Mac, iPod, iTunes (with software and services), and Accessories. All of them are billion-dollar businesses in their own right, but of course they’re not all the same size. iPhone revenues were $30 billion, 15 times the accessories business, and dwarfing every other business category.
The new iTunes category, which came in at $3.687 billion for the first quarter of 2013, includes all the revenue from music sales, app sales, software sales via the Mac app store, and any other media sales (such as books and movies. Apple has also stuffed a few random items into iTunes that might otherwise fit in a “miscellaneous” category: AppleCare extended warranty revenue, licensing revenue, and services revenue.
But essentially, if Apple has a good iPhone and iPad quarter, Apple has a good quarter. 76 percent of Apple’s revenue, which totals $41.42 billion, comes from those two segments alone.
Two numbers are particularly interesting.
One is digital media, in the iTunes segment. Revenue from digital media is now almost worth more to Apple — top-line revenue — than all its iMac, MacBook and other Mac hardware sales. That will likely only grow. The second is Accessories, which also is almost worth more to Apple than iPod sales.
Both are signs of the future.
photo credit: Hans and Carolyn via photopin cc
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