Amazon Shines During Apple’s Off-Season
Global Market Intelligence. That makes delivering significant new growth numbers a challenge that has lately been afflicting both. Amazon has posted single-digit year-on-year revenue growth for five of the last six quarters—a major slowdown from the mid-20% range the company averaged even before its pandemic sales boom.
Apple’s revenue has been in actual decline for the past two quarters. But June quarter reports from the two on Thursday afternoon showed some divergence. Amazon posted revenue growth of 11% from a year earlier, compared with the 9% Wall Street was anticipating, according to FactSet.
Revenue also beat projections across all the company’s segments, including the vital cloud computing business known as AWS. But an even bigger surprise was Amazon’s operating income of $7.7 billion, which more than doubled from the same period last year and beat analysts’ targets by 58%. Apple, meanwhile, is still in a lull.
Revenue fell 1.4% on-year to $81.8 billion. That narrowly beat Wall Street’s projections thanks to a pickup in growth for the company’s services arm. But iPhone sales fell short of projections, even in what is typically the weakest seasonal period for the iconic smartphone.
Apple also projected a similar overall revenue decline for the September quarter, missing projections calling for a slight gain. That would make for four straight quarters of revenue declines—a streak not seen by Apple since 2001, according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence. Amazon, meanwhile, gave a surprisingly sunny outlook for the same period.
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