Apple Q3 - Profits slightly higher

Last night Apple reported 'meh' results, with both revenue and profits slightly higher than forecast, but forward guidance lighter than the market wanted. For the quarter, Apple reported revenue of $81.8 billion, down 1% from a year earlier. At their scale, it's hard to move the needle up or down.

Apple's annual revenue is just under $400 billion, more than South Africa's GDP! Of those sales, around 25% goes to shareholders as profit.

Sales of iPhones, Macs and iPads were down, but wearables and services saw good growth. The exciting news was that Apple now has over 1 billion paying subscribers for Apple services.

The company noted good demand in emerging markets, with the new store in Mumbai, India exceeding their expectations. There's good potential to sell more devices and services in poorer countries, while developed markets are closer to being saturated.

In years past, Apple's revenue consisted mostly of iPhone sales, with everything else rather irrelevant. The services business is now huge too, helping the company to have a more diversified business. For perspective, in this quarter just passed, iPhone sales were $39 billion and services sales were $21 billion.

Over the last nine months, Apple generated $88 billion in free cash flow, another mind-numbing number. $56 billion of that was used on share buybacks and $11 billion was paid out in dividends. Apple might not be seeing rapid growth like some other technology companies, but it is a stable cash-generating machine. We are happy shareholders.