Not. Enough. iPhones. Apple Loses Value as Sales Drop

The world's largest tech companies are rolling in dough, though not everyone is celebrating.

It was earnings season these past few weeks, which meant each of your favorite (or unfavorite!) tech companies told shareholders how much money they made in the preceding quarter and by all accounts, results were.. largely good?

Except for Apple, whose stock took a bit of a beating because the company failed to sell as many iPhones as shareholders would have liked. Now, if you were to look at the company's financial results, its sales were down by 1% year-over-year, which doesn't sound like a lot — until you realize that at the scale of Apple, 1% in monetary terms is literally a billion dollars.

That's right, Apple's fiscal third quarter sales of $81.8 billion were just $1 billion shy of the $82.9 billion the company generated in the same period a year ago. Digging deeper, the company's results showed that iPhone sales were down to $39.6 billion from $40.6 billion in the same quarter last year, while both Mac and iPad sales also saw a drop in revenue.

The bright spot in Apple's financial results was the Services segment, which hit an "all-time revenue record .. driven by over 1 billion paid subscriptions," CEO Tim Cook said in a statement. Of course, the $21.2 billion generated by the Services segment was not nearly enough to stop a 4.8% decline in the company's stock, wiping around $144 billion in Apple's market value following its earnings release.

The bad news didn't end there, though. With the Vision Pro nowhere in sight, the company has already warned that its sales will probably continue to decline in the current quarter. Not to worry, though — Apple is still totally the world's most valuable company by market cap and will remain so for the foreseeable future..

In contrast, Amazon, also one of the top five most valuable companies in the world, reported a jolly good time. Amazon's investments in new warehouses paid off, with the company delivering items quicker — prompting costumers to shop more often, Reuters reported. But that's not all! The company also launched its own service to counter Google and Microsoft's dominance in artificial intelligence, while its cloud computing division performed better than expected.

The result? An 11% year-over-year increase in net sales to $134.4 billion during the quarter, and a return to profitability ($6.7 billion) after booking a loss ($2 billion) during the same period last year.

So impressed was Wall Street with Amazon's results, that the eCommerce giant's shares went up by 8% — which, given the scale of the company, added more than $109 billion to its market value.

Anyway, Apple ranked #7 on HackerNoon's __Tech Company Rankings__this week. Amazon was ten spots below at the #17 spot.

In Other News.. 📰

• Tesla rival Xpeng’s head of autonomous driving quits, rumored to join Nvidia — via TechCrunch.
• A new AI-Driven cyberattack can steal your data just by listening to you type — via Gizmodo.
• Tesla CFO Zach Kirkhorn steps down — via CNBC.
• Google moves forward with plan to delete inactive accounts — via CNN.
• In game demo, AI generates dialogue on the fly — via Axios.

And that's a wrap! Don't forget to share this newsletter with your family and friends! See y'all next week. PEACE! ☮️

— Sheharyar Khan, Editor, Business Tech @ HackerNoon