Apple’s financial results for its fiscal 2019 second quarter showed overall revenue of $58 billion (£44.5bn), down 5% year-on-year. The result was impacted by currency fluctuations.
But the tech giant’s services division – which includes Apple Music – reached a new high of $11.45bn (£8.78bn) for the three months ending March 31, an increase of 16.2%. For the six-month period, services reached $22.33bn (£17.1bn), a 17.6% year-on-year increase.
During the earnings call, CEO Tim Cook said: “We had our best quarter ever for the App Store and Apple Music.”
Across all its services, Apple has 390 million subscribers. Recent reported figures for Apple Music showed the streaming platform had around 56m subscribers, though that number is from late 2018. Cook said Apple Music experienced double-digit revenue growth in Q2 compared with the prior year quarter.
“Subscriptions are a powerful driver of our services business,” said Cook.
Spotify this week reported it has 100m subscribers.
Apple also announced it has signed up Ticketmaster as an online and venue partner for Apple Pay.
International sales accounted for 61% of the quarter’s revenue for Apple.
“Our March quarter results show the continued strength of our installed base of over 1.4 billion active devices, as we set an all-time record for services, and the strong momentum of our wearables, home and accessories category, which set a new March quarter record,” said Cook. “We delivered our strongest iPad growth in six years, and we are as excited as ever about our pipeline of innovative hardware, software and services.”
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