AAPL

Apple signals a recovery from the tech industry’s slump with a rebound in its flagship product, iPhone sales, to a new quarterly record. Overall, Apple revenue exceeds analysts predicted, though the sales fell in the period. Apple expressed its own confidence in the company's future  by announcing plans for $90 billion in stock repurchases — the same as last year’s plan.  Dividend payout has a 4% increase.

Regardless of the positive performance, revenue dropped across for iPad, Mac, as well as the home, wearables, and accessories division.  While revenue is accelerating for its services business, which includes iCloud, Apple Music, the App Store, and the TV+ streaming.

iPhone revenue increased by 2% during the quarter, indicating that the issues on supply-chain woes and part shortages have finally subsided.

With overall revenue and growth in China dropped, Apple stakes future growth on emerging markets, starting with India. The company recently opened its first two retail stores there, in Mumbai and Delhi. India is perhaps Apple's biggest focus and is betting that these market will provide more opportunities for growth, with their youthful populations and relatively few iPhones. The multinational is also committed to shifting production from China to India, though it will take quite some time.

To sum up, consistent demand for its high-end iPhone products and company’s brand successfully offset other weaknesses in the business. Apple’s most critical profit center is the iPhone, which makes up at least 50% of total revenue. Overall, the year-on-year fall in revenue is due mostly to the macroeconomic conditions and foreign currency rates fluctuation. The foreign exchange headwinds had a 5% impact on revenues. Otherwise, Apple would have posted a 2% gain if without such issues. It seems that constant growth is the goal in our current economic model. I am looking forward to Apple’s next set of upcoming improvements, as they always do.

As for Qs. 2, I would choose to buy Apple stock. This is in view of the Apple is still the largest publicly traded company in the world with a market cap of $2.09 trillion and  currently has an impressive 23% market share of global smartphones.

Rumours are swirling that Apple will release a new product category in 2023 in the form of a new AR/VR headset that would allow users to become immersed in the all-digital environment for movies and gaming. It is expected that the market will be very bullish about this idea and likely to react positively to such major product launch by Apple around late 2023, as this could be a real game changer. This is much needed to retain the strength of Apple stock. Particularly, Apple has not created a new major product category since they introduced the Apple Watch back in April 2015.

So, yes, i believe these positive outlook indicate Apple’s stock price will increase in the next few years despite the minor setbacks they have faced lately due to regulatory and production issues. Ultimately, Apple’s brand positioning and marketing with the alignment of product quality will be an edge to the competition.