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04-11-2023
CUPERTINO/ CALIFORNIA: Apple sales have continued to fall, despite strong demand for its iPhones and services like streaming platform Apple TV+.
The tech giant says revenues dipped 1% to $89.5bn (£73.3bn) in the three months to 30 September when compared with the same period last year.
Sales of its Mac computers and iPads struggled after a post-lockdown surge in interest.
It marks the fourth quarter in a row where sales have fallen year on year.
In an update to investors, the firm said that profits had reached $23bn, helped by a new record for iPhone sales in the three-month period.
The amount it took from services such as iCloud and Apple Music also hit a high, bringing in $22.3bn for the California-based firm, up 16% from a year before but it cited concerns over potential supply chain issues hampering deliveries of its new iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max devices.
Apple chief executive Tim Cook said it was “working hard to manufacture more”.
“We do believe that later this quarter, we’ll reach a supply-demand balance,” he said.
Cook said he felt the firm had its “strongest line-up of products ever” heading into the key Christmas trading period.
The latest update suggested, however, that other Apple items had been failing to capture the customer’s imagination more recently.
Its Mac computers, for example, saw sales drop to $7.6bn for the quarter, down from $11.6bn the year before.
The company revealed its latest iPhone line-up in September at a highly anticipated conference.
It announced that the iPhone 15 would not feature its proprietary lightning charging port, after the European Union forced the change. Instead, it uses a USB-C cable as the “universally-accepted standard”.
It has also faced challenges elsewhere, with economic uncertainty weighing on consumers in the Chinese market.
On Thursday, the company said that sales in China had dipped by 2.5%, although Cook said that after accounting for foreign exchange rates its business there had grown year on year.
The executive made a surprise visit to China last month, meeting gamers in the city of Chengdu.
It marked his second visit to China, a key market for Apple, this year, as the firm’s operations in the country have been complicated by COVID restrictions and US-China tensions.
In March, Cook said he felt Apple had a “symbiotic” relationship with China, a key manufacturing base.
Chinese tech giant Baidu revealed on Tuesday that it had released the latest version of its Ernie AI model.
Ernie 4.0 was, it claimed, a match for OpenAI’s GPT-4 system
At a launch event led by Baidu chief executive Robin Li, the AI was shown writing a martial arts novel and creating advertising posters and videos.
China now has a number of domestically developed large language models, but AI developers face tight restrictions. (Int’l News Desk)
