Apple outpaces sales expectations as it continues to battle surging memory chip costs

The iPhone maker posted fourth-quarter revenue of $114.5 billion, more than what Wall Street analysts had expected. Its profit was $30.7 billion. iPhone revenue came in at $57.58 billion. Both figures were also higher than projections. Its services revenue, which includes iCloud, the App Store, and other services, was $31.57 billion.

Shares in the company were trading slightly down in after-hours trading.

Ternus said in a written statement that iPhone revenue reached a September quarter record and Services posted an all-time high, “capping off our best fiscal year ever.”

“We’re closing the year with our most ambitious lineup yet,” he said. “Together with the all-new Siri AI, it’s an incredible lineup to carry us into the holiday season.”

Many investors have been watching the impact of rising memory chip prices on Apple and how it will weigh on margins. Apple signaled in July that the issue would put pressure on its business. Nonetheless, Apple’s fourth quarter gross margin rose to 47.9% from 47.2% a year earlier, landing near the high end of its forecast range. Gross margin declined from 50.1% in the preceding quarter. Apple said tariff refunds added approximately 1 percentage point to the latest quarter’s margin, compared with about 2 percentage points in the June quarter.

Ternus has marked his first couple of months at Apple with a slew of product releases that have helped the engineer savant show off Apple’s latest innovations and ease into the new job. That has included the September launch of the foldable iPhone Duo, followed by new home products, and last week’s unveiling of Apple’s first touchscreen MacBook Pro.

Apple’s earnings followed financial reports from its Big Tech peers. Meta, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon all revealed their latest earnings in the last two weeks. While the companies generally had positive results, shares in the Nasdaq Composite have sunk in recent days as investors have weighed Big Tech’s positive growth, especially in cloud computing demand for AI services, against the hundreds of billions Microsoft, Amazon, and others are spending in AI infrastructure.