Apple slightly misses Wall Street expectations; iPhone sales down too

Apple reported $52.9 billion in revenue and $2.10 earnings per share for the second quarter of 2017 in its earnings report causing the shares to fall more than 2 percent in after hours trading. Wall Street was looking for earnings of $2.02 per share on revenue of around $53 billion.

The company managed to sell around 50.8 million iPhones as compared to expectations of 51.4 million iPhones. That figure is even lesser than Q2 2016 (51.2 million), and also lesser than Apple’s second 2015 quarter, when the company shipped a record 61.2 million iPhones.

As for iPads, the Cupertino giant sold 8.922 million iPads in the second quarter of its fiscal year 2017 which is down 13 percent from a year ago.

Interestingly, it is the Services portfolio that's increasingly playing a bigger role in driving the company's total revenue. This year, for instance, revenue from services stood above $7 Billion and comprised of over 13 percent of Apple’s total revenue. The sector is increasingly filling the voids created between iPhone sales every consecutive year and with an increase in consumable, premium content, this can be expected to only rise with the time.

“It’s well on its way toward being the size of a Fortune 100 company,” Cook said during the earnings call. Cook also said Apple is trying to double its services business in the next four years.

As for other growing segments, Apple’s mobile payments wallet 450 percent from the same period a year ago. One reason for this could be that Apple Pay expanded to a number of new international markets in 2016. Though, Cook didn’t reveal the number of Apple Pay users, revenue from Apple Pay, or the value of those transactions, but said that Apple Pay is accepted at 20 million locations worldwide, including 4.5 million in the US.

Apple doesn’t report unit sales or revenue numbers for the Apple Watch, lumping it in with “Other Products” that include accessories and AirPods. But the numbers suggest that Watch sales had a solid quarter. Total Other Products revenue for the quarter was $2.8 million.

Finally, Apple gave some encouraging guidance numbers for the June-ending quarter, predicting between $43.5 and $45.5 billion in revenue