Apple and the growth of services: a job well done
I was interested to see Apple’s results on August 4, especially since I have been using the company as a case study for many years now in my innovation courses, and I’m extremely familiar with its numbers.
For me, it’s not so much the results themselves that’s so attention-grabbing: $81.8 billion in revenues and $19.9 billion in profits with a gross margin of 44.5%, which barely meet the analysts’ forecasts, but one specific figure: the 8% growth the company achieved in the services business, which consolidates sustained progress since the company moved into this area. Or more correctly, since it decided to focus on it in March 2019.
In 2011, Tim Cook took over a company valued at under $1 billion and which was worryingly dependent on a single product, the iPhone. Since then, he has managed to triple its value to $3 billion in lats June, and to build a services business pretty much from scratch that already accounts for more than a quarter of the company’s revenue and has more than a billion subscribers. For all intents and purposes, Apple is now a company where services are more important than products like the Mac (which still continues to grow its market share for the sixth year in a row while the PC market keeps falling), the iPad or the full line of wearables and accessories. Furthermore, the company is perfectly aware of this…
