Apple’s latest earnings were a mixed bag filled with slipping iPhone sales and countered by rising revenue.
Reporting after the bell Thursday, the iPhone maker’s overall revenue in the first quarter of 2025 beat Wall Street expectations, with a 4% bump to $124.3 billion over the same time last year.
Apple reported net income of $36.33 billion, up 7.1% from $33.92 billion in the same year-ago period.
The increase came even as the company missed iPhone estimates, while experiencing an 11.1% sales drop in China, down to $18.51 billion. It’s the largest drop in this key region since a nearly 13% dip in Q1 2024.
The world’s largest smartphone market has proven increasingly difficult for the company, owing to more intense competition from domestic manufacturers, including Oppo and Vivo. Huawei, which saw a massive drop in sales as trade restrictions were imposed by the first Trump Administration, has since surged in its home country.
In a conversation with CNBC, CEO Tim Cook placed some of the blame at the feet of Apple Intelligence — which isn’t currently available in China — along with several other key markets. Apple’s small model generative AI platform is, by far, the biggest selling point for the iPhone 16, which debuted late-last year.
“During the December quarter, we saw that in markets where we had rolled out Apple intelligence, that the year-over-year performance on the iPhone 16 family was stronger than those markets where we had not rolled out Apple intelligence,” Cook said.
The AI platform is currently available in English (Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, UK, or U.S.). Chinese is among the languages coming later this year, but Apple has yet to announce whether the feature will ultimately arrive in mainland China.
Regulat …