Apple smashes Q3 revenue expectations despite pandemic

Comment

Tim Cook, chief executive officer of Apple Inc., speaks during the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference seen on a laptop computer in Arlington, Virginia, U.S., on Monday, June 22, 2020. Apple will walk into its annual development conference facing one of the biggest backlashes from its giant community of creators since the App Store started almost 12 years ago. Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Image Credits: Bloomberg (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

COVID-19 isn’t keeping Apple down.

The company smashed Wall Street expectations, delivering Q3 revenue of $59.69 billion, beating down the $52.25 billion analysts had expected. The company also announced earnings per share of $2.58 compared to Wall Street expectation of $2.04 EPS.

Despite the coronavirus pandemic, Apple’s overall revenue was up nearly 11% year-over-year, reflecting the boom that broader tech stocks have seen as of late. The company’s year-over-year revenues were up in every geography it measures and every product category it measures.

Apple’s stock was up as much as 5% in after-hours trading as investors reacted to the earnings release.

“Apple’s record June quarter was driven by double-digit growth in both Products and Services and growth in each of our geographic segments,” said CEO Tim Cook in a statement accompanying the release. “In uncertain times, this performance is a testament to the important role our products play in our customers’ lives and to Apple’s relentless innovation.”

Alongside the news, Apple detailed that they would be doing a four-for-one stock split, indicating that investors who already own one share of Apple stock will receive three more. This doesn’t materially change much for investors, but does ensure that single shares of Apple stock will be more affordable when the stock split is carried out toward the end of August. This isn’t a first for the company; they’ve done it several times, most recently back in 2014.

This was Apple’s first quarterly earnings report that fully felt the damage of COVID-19 and worldwide changes to in-person retail amid wide shelter-in-place mandates by governments. These seismic shifts have clearly not damaged Apple’s stock, which hit an all-time high this month and already appears on its way toward breaking through a $2 trillion market cap.

The company had its first fully remote developer conference earlier this summer, where they debuted the next wave of their device operating systems. The company is expected to release a flurry of new mobile devices in upcoming months, as per their historic device release schedule.

Yesterday, CEO Tim Cook was Zoom-summoned to an antitrust hearing in Washington, D.C. where he was questioned about anti-competitive practices alongside other Big Tech CEOs.

More TechCrunch

The official launch comes almost a year after YouTube began experimenting with AI-generated quizzes on its mobile app. 

Google is bringing AI-generated quizzes to academic videos on YouTube

Around 550 employees across autonomous vehicle company Motional have been laid off, according to information taken from WARN notice filings and sources at the company.  Earlier this week, TechCrunch reported…

Motional cut about 550 employees, around 40%, in recent restructuring, sources say

The keynote kicks off at 10 a.m. PT on Tuesday and will offer glimpses into the latest versions of Android, Wear OS and Android TV.

Google I/O 2024: Watch all of the AI, Android reveals

It ran 110 minutes, but Google managed to reference AI a whopping 121 times during Google I/O 2024 (by its own count). CEO Sundar Pichai referenced the figure to wrap…

Google mentioned ‘AI’ 120+ times during its I/O keynote

Here are quick hits of the biggest news from the keynote as they are announced.

Google I/O 2024: Here’s everything Google just announced

Google Play has a new discovery feature for apps, new ways to acquire users, updates to Play Points, and other enhancements to developer-facing tools.

Google Play preps a new full-screen app discovery feature and adds more developer tools

Soon, Android users will be able to drag and drop AI-generated images directly into their Gmail, Google Messages and other apps.

Gemini on Android becomes more capable and works with Gmail, Messages, YouTube and more

Veo can capture different visual and cinematic styles, including shots of landscapes and timelapses, and make edits and adjustments to already-generated footage.

Google gets serious about AI-generated video at Google I/O 2024

In addition to the body of the emails themselves, the feature will also be able to analyze attachments, like PDFs.

Gemini comes to Gmail to summarize, draft emails, and more

The summaries are created based on Gemini’s analysis of insights from Google Maps’ community of more than 300 million contributors.

Google is bringing Gemini capabilities to Google Maps Platform

Google says that over 100,000 developers already tried the service.

Project IDX, Google’s next-gen IDE, is now in open beta

The system effectively listens for “conversation patterns commonly associated with scams” in-real time. 

Google will use Gemini to detect scams during calls

The standard Gemma models were only available in 2 billion and 7 billion parameter versions, making this quite a step up.

Google announces Gemma 2, a 27B-parameter version of its open model, launching in June

This is a great example of a company using generative AI to open its software to more users.

Google TalkBack will use Gemini to describe images for blind people

Firebase Genkit is an open source framework that enables developers to quickly build AI into new and existing applications.

Google launches Firebase Genkit, a new open source framework for building AI-powered apps

This will enable developers to use the on-device model to power their own AI features.

Google is building its Gemini Nano AI model into Chrome on the desktop

Google’s Circle to Search feature will now be able to solve more complex problems across psychics and math word problems. 

Circle to Search is now a better homework helper

People can now search using a video they upload combined with a text query to get an AI overview of the answers they need.

Google experiments with using video to search, thanks to Gemini AI

A search results page based on generative AI as its ranking mechanism will have wide-reaching consequences for online publishers.

Google will soon start using GenAI to organize some search results pages

Google has built a custom Gemini model for search to combine real-time information, Google’s ranking, long context and multimodal features.

Google is adding more AI to its search results

At its Google I/O developer conference, Google on Tuesday announced the next generation of its Tensor Processing Units (TPU) AI chips.

Google’s next-gen TPUs promise a 4.7x performance boost

Google is upgrading Gemini, its AI-powered chatbot, with features aimed at making the experience more ambient and contextually useful.

Google reveals plans for upgrading AI in the real world through Gemini Live at Google I/O 2024

Veo can generate few-seconds-long 1080p video clips given a text prompt.

Google’s image-generating AI gets an upgrade

At Google I/O, Google announced upgrades to Gemini 1.5 Pro, including a bigger context window. .

Google’s generative AI can now analyze hours of video

The AI upgrade will make finding the right content more intuitive and less of a manual search process.

Google Photos introduces an AI search feature, Ask Photos

Apple released new data about anti-fraud measures related to its operation of the iOS App Store on Tuesday morning, trumpeting a claim that it stopped over $7 billion in “potentially…

Apple touts stopping $1.8B in App Store fraud last year in latest pitch to developers

Online travel agency Expedia is testing an AI assistant that bolsters features like search, itinerary building, trip planning, and real-time travel updates.

Expedia starts testing AI-powered features for search and travel planning

Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech! This week, we look at the drama around TabaPay deciding to not buy Synapse’s assets, as well as stocks dropping for a couple of fintechs, Monzo raising…

Inside TabaPay’s drama-filled decision to abandon its plans to buy Synapse’s assets

The person who claimed to have stolen the physical addresses of 49 million Dell customers appears to have taken more data from a different Dell portal, TechCrunch has learned. The…

Threat actor scraped Dell support tickets, including customer phone numbers

If you write the words “cis” or “cisgender” on X, you might be served this full-screen message: “This post contains language that may be considered a slur by X and…

On Elon’s whim, X now treats ‘cisgender’ as a slur