Apple's 3Q23 in Three Charts

Hello everyone. Welcome to Monday and a new week. We will continue our Apple 3Q23 review.

Given how the past few quarters for Apple have contained similar themes, we are going to try something different for this quarter's review. We will focus on three charts that sum up Apple's 3Q23. As we will see, there is quite a bit of consistency on display with each chart. (We will cover all of the granular takeaways from Apple's 3Q23 earnings call in tomorrow’s update.)

Before jumping into today’s update, one clarification regarding Friday’s update. When talking about Apple’s hardware margins, the commentary was garbled. That part of the update should have read:

Products (HW) gross margin: 35.4% (vs. my 35.7%). My iPhone gross margin estimate was a tad bit too optimistic. On a year-over-year basis, HW gross margins were up by 85 basis points.


Apple's 3Q23 in Three Charts

Gross Profit Resiliency

3Q23 results: $36B gross profit (up 1.5% from 3Q22)

There has been much attention placed on Apple’s gross margins (and rightly so). Gross margin is cost of goods subtracted from revenue. Based on management commentary, the company will come close to reporting a 11-year quarterly high for gross margin percentage 1Q24. Management provided a 44.0% to 45.0% range. Gross margin percentages don’t tell the full story though. Instead, we need to look at gross profit in absolute terms to obtain a cleaner assessment of Apple’s business.

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