Apple’s annual revenues fall for the first time in 15 years

Apple’s annual revenues have fallen for the first time in 15 years, amid slowing hardware sales.

The Cupertino-based tech giant released its full-year earnings yesterday, revealing that its revenues have shrunk by $4.6 billion to $46.9 billion, from $51.5 billion at the end of its last financial year.

iPhone sales also fell by over 2.5 million units year on year, marking the third consecutive quarter that this has happened, although the iPhone 7 was only released last month, meaning it has had little time to make an impact on Apple’s bottom line.

Graphic from Statista.

The company also cited record revenues from its services business, which grew by 24%, reaching a total of $6.3 billion.

“We remain very confident about the future of our services business given the unmatched level of engagement, satisfaction and loyalty of our growing installed base,” CEO Tim Cook said in a conference call transcribed by Seeking Alpha.

“We have almost doubled the size of our services revenue in the last four years, and as we’ve said before, we expect it to be the size of a Fortune 100 company in fiscal 2017.”

App Store revenue is still growing, Cook stated, and Music revenue went up by 22%. “In fact,” he said, “JD Power recently announced that Apple Music enjoys the highest customer satisfaction rating in the streaming music market.”

Apple Pay is also performing well for the company, with a year-on-year growth of almost 500% for the September quarter.

While the company’s annual revenues have gone down, CSS Insight’s chief of research, Ben Wood, said this shouldn’t be taken as a sign that the company is in trouble.”Some reports will focus on Apple having a weak quarter, which ignores the fact that it continues to be the most profitable device maker on the planet, and there seems little evidence that will end any time soon,” he said.