Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Shannon Cross: Okay. Thank you. And then can you talk a bit about your shift of manufacturing and diversification of manufacturing footprint? I’m curious. Obviously, you have a very tight network in China. So how is it going to move to some of these other regions? Are you seeing any impact from a margin perspective or just any thoughts you have on what you’ve seen as you started to shift more and more outside of China? Whether it’s growth or it’s actual production? Thank you.

Tim Cook: Our supply chain is truly global and we’re investing all over the world. We’re investing in the US. We’re investing in a number of other countries as well. So we make products everywhere. We’ll continue to invest everywhere, and we’ll continue to look for ways to optimize the supply chain based on what we learn each and every day and week and so forth, to ensure that we can deliver the best products and services for our customers. If you sort of step back and look at how we’ve performed over the last three years on the supply chain, despite this parade of horribles, if you will, between the pandemic and the chip shortages and macroeconomic kind of factors, the supply chain has been incredibly resilient, and we feel good about what we are and what our plans are.

Operator: Our next question is from Wamsi Mohan of Bank of America.

Wamsi Mohan: Yes. Thank you. Tim, you had called out on December quarter earnings that Pro models were significantly constrained. Do you see a catch up on the Pro model specifically in the March quarter? And was the mix better than typical? And do you see that mix renormalizing here in the June quarter? And maybe you can comment on the channel inventory levels as well for iPhones, and I have a follow up.

Tim Cook: Sure. It’s hard to quantify Wamsi, but we do believe we did recapture some amount of sales in the March quarter, and obviously we had to set the channel at the right levels. And we’re very comfortable with the channel inventory that we have on a forward basis. So we do think there were some, but it’s difficult to quantify it.

Wamsi Mohan: Okay. Thanks, Tim. And Tim, as a follow up, you launched so many services around Apple Pay most recently, you mentioned Buy Now Pay Later high yield savings account. Where do you see the expansion and the payments ecosystem over time? And do you look at the payments ecosystem as a standalone revenue opportunity? Or is it more about making the devices even more inseparable from us? Thank you.

Tim Cook: What we’re trying to do with our payments work is that sort of like we’ve done on the watch, where we’re focused on helping people live a healthier day on our financial products. We’re helping people have a better financial health and so things like the Apple Card and the fact that it has no fees, like the savings account, which has, as you mentioned, it’s very attractive yield. So we’re trying to help our users, but these things have to stand on their own, obviously. But we’re very user focused, and so we’re listening to them at what things provide them pinch points and orchestrate our roadmaps around that. Buy Now Pay Later is another one that we’ve just gotten out of the shoot. But on the savings account specifically, we are very pleased with the initial response on it. It’s been incredible.

Operator: Our next question is from David Vogt of UBS.

David Vogt: Great. Thanks for taking my question. Tim, I just wanted to go back to maybe kind of dig into the restocking of inventory in the channel versus what we’re hearing from a demand perspective that appears to be a little bit softer in the March quarter from some of your larger carriers. That exhibited relatively weak upgrade rates. So I just want to kind of get a sense for where you’re seeing demand signals today vis-à-vis how you were thinking about it maybe a month ago or even three months ago. And is there sort of an acceleration in demand or any sort of signals that you might want to share with us at this point? And then I have a follow up.

Tim Cook: I don’t want to go into what we’re seeing in Q3 other than the guidance that Luca has given. But for Q2, I think you’re probably referencing primarily US carriers. And if you look at our geographic distribution of our performance, it was lower in the Americas, which is primarily predominantly the United States. And a part of that is, I believe it’s macroeconomic. A part is that there was more promotional activity in the year ago quarter. And so I think that’s what you’re seeing there, where our results were really stellar during this quarter, was really in the emerging markets, and we couldn’t be prouder of the results that we had there.

David Vogt: Great. That’s helpful. And then just quickly on Services, are you seeing anything in terms of consumers behavior other than sort of the macro that you mentioned and tough comps on digital advertising and mobile gaming? Are you seeing users of all the disparate services change and what they’re using and how they’re using it and time spent with an Apple Service? Now that we’re technically, hopefully fully past COVID, with China almost fully reopened, I’m just trying to get a sense for how user or consumer behavior has changed over the last three to six months. Thanks.

Luca Maestri: David, it’s Luca. As you said, of course we got the issue around the macroeconomic environment, particularly in advertising and in mobile gaming, but outside of those areas the behavior of customers continues to be pretty consistent. We are doing particularly well, obviously in some of the services that we’ve launched more recently, like payments where our growth rates are very strong as the adoption of Apple Pay and Apple Card and now the new services that Tim mentioned, the adoption continues to increase. Cloud is an area that continues to grow very consistently. Users want to store more photos and videos and more content on their devices and so they adopt our cloud services and in general the model in the App Store around paid subscriptions continues to grow very strongly.

I mentioned we now have more than 975 million paid subscriptions on the platform and that’s almost twice as much what we had only three years ago. So obviously, the growth in subscriptions is very strong.

Operator: Our next question is from Samik Chatterjee of JPMorgan.

Samik Chatterjee: Hi, thanks for taking my questions. I guess maybe I can follow up on David’s question here on services. And in the past, pre-pandemic the growth rate there was more about sort of mid-teens. The growth rates today, where you stand, even if I back out FX impact is more about low double digit. So one of the questions that we get often from investors and want to get your thoughts on is even as the installed base growth seems to have accelerated, are these more cyclical drivers that are depressing growth at this point from returning to that level or do you see more of a rollout on the monetization that you have need to do to get back to those growth levels. and I have a follow up, please.

Luca Maestri: Samik, that the areas where we are seeing the impact on the macroenvironment, as I mentioned, is digital advertising. As you know, obviously the macroenvironment is not helping on that front. And mobile gaming, where we’ve seen a bit of a slowdown, partly due to the macroenvironment, partly due to the fact that we had very elevated usage during the COVID years. But outside of those areas, we continue to see very healthy growth rates.