1/Notes from my quick interview with Apple CFO Luca Maestri. A thread:.
“It’s clear to us our products are very relevant to our customers lives and the pandemic has them more relevant than ever before”
“Working from home, online learning — both trends are helpful.”
2/ “We grew revenue in every product category... Records for Mac, wearables, services ... and each geographic segment.”
3/ “What went better than expected for us was iPhones and Wearables. In both cases April was a tough month for us, very much impacted by C19.” May and June saw a resurgence and the iPhone SE proved successful.
4/ Apple said its “installed base” of active devices hit a new record. Mr Maestri declined to give a number but in January Apple said the figure had risen 100m in the prior 12 months to more than 1.5bn devices and more than 900m users.
5/ Apple has announced a 4-1 stock split, first since 2014. Maestri:
“We want to make sure apple stock is accessible to a broad range of investors.... it may be difficult for some retail investors to own a share, so we cut down the price”
6/ No Q4 guidance, why not?
“There isn’t [guidance] because of the uncertainty that we’re seeing.”
Not certain what sort of economic stimulus in the US.
“On the call we will provide some colour on the product categories.”
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Millions of American and European smartphone users are unknowingly sending user, device and IP address information to servers in Russia.
From there, researchers worry it might be accessed by the Kremlin.
Wait whhaaaat???
*Tweet thread follows*
Here's how this is happening: Yandex - aka Russia's Google - has embedded "free and unlimited" coding software into tens of thousands of apps, which collects user data and stores is in servers in Finland and Russia. Yandex confirms this, but says it's not used for surveillance.
The software coding is a 'software development kit,' or SDK. Think of SDKs as the building blocks of apps.
A majority of apps use Google SDKs, for instance, to avoid building mapping tools or advertising tech from scratch.
*New*: @Apple’s privacy settings caused an estimated $9.85bn of revenues to evaporate in the second half of this year at @Snap, @Facebook, @Twitter and @YouTube, as their advertising businesses were shaken by the new rules
Average impact on revenue: -12%
*Thread*
Lost revenues will extend into the next quarters as the advertising groups rebuild using a privacy-centric paradigm.
“New tools and frameworks need to be developed from scratch and tested extensively before being deployed to a high number of users,” says @eric_seufert
.@apple, meanwhile, reported a “record” quarter for its advertising business on Thursday, as its services segment beat revenue estimates by $700m to reach $18.3bn.
Finance chief Luca Maestri tells the @FT that supply constraints cost the group $6bn last quarter.
"components shortage" and "manufacturing disruptions in Southeast Asia caused by Covid," he said.
*Thread*
No guide for Q1 but Maestri says “demand is very, very strong”.
"We expect to set a December quarter record in spite of the fact that these supply constraints - the way we see them right now - **we believe they're going to be greater than the September quarter, the $6bn**.”
Q4 Revenues were slightly below forecasts and Apple shares fell 5% on the results.
Not a big miss but in prior 3 quarters Apple blew away forecasts.
First Snap question is about Apple.... Wants to know if it'll take a quarter, multiple quarters or years to set a new-normal:
"This has definitely been a frustrating setback for us," @evanspiegel says.
1/?
"With these new Apple changes, those tools were essentially rendered blind," @evanspiegel says. "You can only really measure your advertising results using the success parameters that Apple's already defined. The reporting is delayed for a significant period of time ...
and (it's) often unavailable if you don't hit a certain threshold of conversion. Very hard to see performance on a creative level...
So what we've done is built our own solution called Advanced Conversions that allows people to do much more sophisticated things.
*Breaking* @Snap blames @Apple privacy changes for Q3 earnings miss and says Q4 revenues will come in between $1.16bn and $1.2bn, versus consensus estimate of $1.4bn.
*a Thread*
Chief executive Evan Spiegel says: "the new Apple-provided measurement solution did not scale as we had expected, making it more difficult for our advertising partners to measure and manage their ad campaigns for iOS."
Snap chief of business Jeremi Gorman dismissed Apple's tool (SKAdNetwork), calling it "unreliable as a standalone measurement solution." He said measurements "diverge meaningfully from the results we observed on (other measurement solutions)."