Apple has confirmed that its iPhone sales have dropped as it struggles to create a case for their Apple Intelligence platform.
In Q4 of the US 2025 financial year, iPhone sales dropped 1% to A$111.16 billion.
Impacting sales was a major decline in China, according to Ming-Chi Kuo, an industry analyst, with Apple Intelligence yet to be launched in China, due to local regulatory restrictions.
Kuo predicts the fall in iPhone sales in the Chinese market could stay stagnent or fall in the future with some analysts highlighting the move to Huawei devices and their local Harmony OS.
Kuo claims that iPhone shipments in China fell by 10-12% year-over-year in December 2024.
One of the possible reasons for declining sales is that the iPhone 16 did not introduce major hardware innovations compared to the previous model.
The final quarter of 2024 was a bumper period for Chinese smartphone including the likes of Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo, Honor, Huawei, Lenovo, realme, Transsion, TCL, and ZTE.
This was the highest combined volume ever in a quarter, representing 56% of the global smartphone shipments in Q4,” said Francisco Jeronimo, vice president for EMEA Client Devices, IDC.
According to IDC, over the full year of 2024, Apple shipped a total of 232.1 million iPhones (down 0.9% year-on-year), followed by Samsung with a total of 223.4 million smartphones (a decline of 1.4% year-on-year), Xiaomi with 168.5 million units (an increase of 15.4% year-on-year), Transsion with 106.9 million smartphones (up 12.7% year-on-year), and followed by Oppo with 104.8 million units (an increase of 1.4% year-on-year).
Total revenue for Apple’s Q1 FY25 rose 4% to $124.3 billion (A$199.91 billion), only slightly above average analysts’ forecasts of $124.1 billion (A$199.59 billion).
Apple’s services division, which includes the App Store and Apple Music, brought in an all-time record of $26.3 billion (A$42.3 billion) and increased 14%.
Its Mac line generated sales of $8.99 billion (A$14.46 billion) in the quarter, and revenue from the iPad grew 15% to $8.09 billion (A$13.01 billion).
Its wearables, home and accessories category recorded a revenue of around $11.8 billion (A$18.98 billion).
