It's no secret that the bulk of Apple's revenue comes from the iPhone. During the company's most recent quarter, for example, 53% of its $37.4 billion in quarterly revenue came from its iconic smartphone.
For as much as people like to talk about Apple having peaked, the company has a penchant for printing out boatloads of money quarter after quarter. While companies like Amazon can generate nearly $20 billion in quarterly revenue and still lose money, Apple's margins and overall profits remain extremely healthy.
Critics have long demanded Apple lower prices to increase market share, but Apple has stayed the course, realizing that market share for the sake of market share alone is a fool's errand. Although the iPhone doesn't account for the majority of smartphone sales total, it can generate cold hard cash like nothing else.
Providing some further context as to just how important and profitable the iPhone is to Apple, Jordan Weissmann of Slate put together this handy chart which compares how the iPhone, as its own business, compares to a number of blue chip companies. Revenue wise, we see that Apple's iPhone business makes as much money as McDonalds and Coca-Cola combined.
All the more impressive is that Apple's margins over the last 10 years have remained relatively and incredibly steady.
Very stable long-term gross margins. Painful contrast to rest of the industry. pic.twitter.com/XMNu7sM9xI- Benedict Evans (@BenedictEvans) July 22, 2014
- Key specs
- Reviews • 40
- Type Smartphone
- Operating system iOS (8)
- Screen size 4.7 inches
- Internal memory 16 GB
- Camera 8 megapixels
- Dimensions 5.44 x 2.64 x 0.27 in
- Weight 4.55 oz
- Released 2014-09-19