For the upcoming fourth quarter of 2021, Apple expects lower revenue growth than the $81.4 billion revenue in the June quarter. The primary reason for the low revenue forecast is the possible impact of the prevailing global chip shortage on iPhone and iPad sales.
Apple estimates lower revenue growth in the September quarter of 2021
The company’s CFO Luca Maestri shared that the current revenue might not continue in the September quarter of 2021. Although expecting strong double-digit Y-o-Y revenue growth in the September quarter, the revenue projection will be lower than June quarter because of three reasons.
- The foreign exchange impact on the Y-o-Y growth rate might be three points less in the fourth quarter.
- The growth in Service during the June quarter is expected to return to a typical lower level because the services which benefited during lockdown will see a decline with lifestyle coming to normalcy after COVID-19 vaccination.
- Primarily, the supply chain constraints are expected to impact iPhone and iPad sales in the coming quarter.
“We expect gross margin to be between forty one point five 41.5 and five 42.5 percent, we expect OpEx to be between 11.3 and 11.5 billion dollars. We expect ONIE to be around zero, excluding any potential impact from the mark to market of minority investments and our tax rate to be around 16 percent.”
Referring to the supply chain shortage as an industry, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook further elaborated that the company does not only faces supply chain-related shortages but also because of higher than expected demand.
The majority of the constraints are of the variety that others are seeing. I would classify it as industry shortage. We do have some shortages in addition to that where the demand has been so great and so beyond our own expectation that it’s difficult to get the entire set of parts within the lead times that we try to get those. It’s a little bit of that as well. As I said before, the latest nodes, which we use in several of our products, have not been as much of an issue. The legacy nodes are where the supply constraints have been, on silicon.
In the current quarter, the Cupertino tech giant reported $81.4 billion in revenue across products and services. iPhone sales, alone, accounted for $39.6 billion in revenue for the June quarter of 2021. Mr.Cook accredited the strong demand for iPhone 12 series to 5G network support, fast performance delivered by A14 Bionic chip, and major camera improvements. Read the complete report here.
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