Apple App Store Earns $1.22B During Holidays, But Stock Still Struggles

Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing, announced that the company's App Store sold games and apps worth $1.22 billion between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve.

Furthermore, "New Year’s Day set a new single-day record at more than $322 million," according to Schiller, helping "drive Services revenue to an all-time record in the holiday quarter."

Apple's stock dropped 38% since October

Schiller also thanked for "the inspiring work of our talented developers and the support of our incredible customers around the world, the App Store finished off an outstanding 2018 and kicked off 2019 with a bang.”

Even though all other Apple services from Apple Music and Cloud Services to Apple Pay and the App Store’s search ad business also had a record-breaking holiday season, this did not stop Apple's stock from crashing more than 9% after Tim Cook's letter to the investors.

What's even more worrying is that the Apple stock took a severe 38% nosedive since October 3 when it was valued at 232.07 per share to an all-time low of $142.08 per share for the past 52 weeks, as reported by TechCrunch.

Greather China revenue drop blamed for Apple's revenue loss

In his Apple investors letter, Cook adjusted Apple's revenue estimate for the first quarter of the 2019 fiscal year, going down to approximately $84 billion from the approximation of between $89 billion and $93 billion presented in November 2018.

"Lower than anticipated iPhone revenue, primarily in Greater China, accounts for all of our revenue shortfall to our guidance and for much more than our entire year-over-year revenue decline. In fact, categories outside of iPhone (Services, Mac, iPad, Wearables/Home/Accessories) combined to grow almost 19 percent year-over-year," stated Cook.

Apple's CEO also said in his investor letter that the lack of carrier subsidies, the price increases due to US dollar strength fluctuations, and customers postponing an iPhone upgrade by replacing the battery in their old model are also other reasons behind the iPhone revenue decrease.