Apple misses $6 billion due to delivery problems, breaks sales record anyway

Apple believes delivery problems cost the company about $6 billion in revenue in the past quarter. Still, the company posted revenue of $83.4 billion, a record third quarter.

CEO Tim Cook says in an explanation of the quarterly figures that the delivery problems have two reasons, Seeking Alpha writes. On the one hand, Apple continues to suffer from chip shortages. This mainly concerns legacy nodes, i.e. the relatively large nodes in which there is a lot of competition. According to Cook, there is less competition at leading edge nodes, so the smaller, advanced nodes for socs, for example.

Cook says that he mainly uses such leading edge chips, but the larger chips are still needed. That is why ‘practically all’ Apple products suffer from chip shortages, which means that the company cannot meet demand everywhere. This problem will persist and will only grow; According to Cook’s expectation, the loss of revenue in the next quarter will exceed the 5.1 billion euros that Apple lost in the third quarter.

The second supply problem lies with factories in Southeast Asia that were able to produce less due to the corona pandemic. These “disruptions” improved throughout October, Cook says. He therefore expects chip shortages to be the biggest supply problem for Apple in the last quarter of the calendar year.

Despite those delivery problems, which were worse than Apple expected, the company managed to break the quarterly record. Apple had a turnover of 71.5 billion euros in the past quarter; 29 percent more than a year earlier. The iPhone, iPad and Wearables, Home and Accessories businesses also set quarterly records, totaling 30 percent growth. The company’s Mac and Services businesses even set all-time revenue records.

iPhones remain the company’s main source of income; Apple achieved revenue of $38.9 billion in the past quarter. This is followed by the Services branch with $18.3 billion. In third place is Mac with $9.2 billion, followed by Wearables, Home and Accessories with $8.8 billion. The iPads come last, netting the company $8.3 billion in the quarter. Net profit was $20.6 billion, 62.2 percent higher than a year earlier.