Apple services are growing less than they could. With the number of paying customers increasing quarter by quarter, it might seem from the outside that Apple’s services are still growing and doing great, especially considering that revenue in this category currently ranks second. , immediately after those generated by iPhone. Yet, according to a new study Apple could achieve much more if only it were able to really convince its customers to subscribe.
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Official data tells us that Apple had 900 million subscribers in October, a number that corresponds to a 5% increase in revenue over the whole year and that in the fourth fiscal quarter alone it brought 19.19 billion dollars in company coffers. In perspective, it is almost half of the $42.63 billion generated by the iPhone segment, which as we said is Apple’s number one engine.
In the last five years, Apple’s services revenue has increased enormously, yet Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP) argues that the multinational would not be exploiting all the opportunities that would allow it to further increase revenues in this sector. That is, they say that Apple has all it takes to convince a greater percentage of iPhone, iPad and Mac users to subscribe and/or increase the number of subscriptions to its services.
At present – writes CIRP – iCloud subscriptions represent the most common subscriptions, so much so that 60% of those interviewed claim that they have activated one; in second place is Apple Music, with 36% of the users interviewed, while at the bottom of the podium there is 28% of interviewees who claim to have both an Apple TV and Apple Podcast subscription.
Instead, only 4% of respondents have Apple Care insurance for iPhones, while the percentage of those who have activated it for iPads rises to just 7%. These numbers – the analysts explain – are low also because there is a lot of competition on insurance, moreover almost 70% of iPhones in the USA are sold through a telephone operator or online.
Numbers to be taken with caution
When analyzing these numbers, however, there are a few things to keep in mind. First of all, people are not always aware that they could pay for a subscription: for example, there are those who know they have installed the Apple TV app or use Apple News thinking of paying them, instead they are only using the free version of the service.
Secondly, the CIRP in this case does not say what the number of respondents is: it could only be a few thousand people, a very small percentage when compared to the almost one billion existing subscribers.
Furthermore, 28% of Apple TV+ subscribers seems a bit too high compared to 36% of Apple Music subscribers, especially when you take into account the fact that previous studies on Apple TV+ speak of an overall market share which is around 6%.
