Looking ahead to Apple’s Q4 results news November 2

Apple says it will announce its Q4 FY2023 results a few days later than it normally does on November 2. The company hasn’t explained why there is a slight delay, but the quarter it will discuss already closed in September. Meanwhile, Apple’s biggest iPhone supplier, Foxconn says it sees strong year-end holiday sales after September quarter sales slumped.

Better times are coming?

Foxconn said September sales slumped 19.7% year on year but added that they increased 60.1% month on month. The company doesn’t just make iPhones, or work for Apple, but the news suggests continued decline across the smartphone market.

It also hints that September’s iPhone 15 generated strong sales. Apple should be able to book some (but not all) of those pre-orders and first retail sales into Q4, though these sales will really feature in Q1 FY24.

That’s how it usually works.

Up and down, and up and down

During its last quarterly results announcement, Apple predicted a relatively flat September. CFO Luca Maestri said: “We expect our September quarter year-over-year revenue performance to be similar to the June quarter, assuming that the macroeconomic outlook doesn’t worsen from what we are projecting today for the current quarter.”

Now for a quick flurry of numbers:

The company achieved $81.8 billion in revenue in its just gone quarter. At present, analyst average estimate sits at $1.41 per share, according to Marketbeat, up from $1.26 per share in the last quarter. Apple achieved reported EPS of $1.29 per share in Q4 2022.

Let your mind go, let yourself be free

We think Apple has experienced good reaction to the iPhone 15 range of devices, and it appears that the company has once again managed to upsell consumers to the high end iPhone 15 Pro range.

That’s promising for the future, and seems to be confirmed by Foxconn, which said in a statement that it expects its operations to “ramp up sequentially” during the rest of the year.

Over summer, we’ve seen big weakness across PC, smartphone, and consumer electronics markets. Apple has been impacted by this, but still seems to be gaining market share at the expense of competitors.

This implies that Apple’s revenue in the current quarter will to some extent hinge on how successfully it convinced customers to upscale their investments. By which I mean services income and accessory sales will help support the quarter’s results.

Services, of course, benefit from high profit margins, which means Apple books higher revenue per dollar than it achieves with hardware or software sales.

Wide awake in the dark

All the same, at time of writing there seems to be a lot of wavering investor sentiment on continued tensions with China, accelerating regulation and all the other challenges faced by the Apple business.

News that execs including CEO Tim Cook recently sold millions of dollars in shares at about the same time as the announcement of its results announcement in four weeks’ time may also spook the stock a little.

We’ll get better insight November 2 as the company inevitably accelerates toward introduction of Vision Pro, which may spice things up again.

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