Mac sales were strong last quarter, according to IDC data
Apple will report fiscal second-quarter earnings results in May.
A positive surprise for Apple investors was buried in quarterly personal-computer data released Monday: The tech giant saw its biggest growth in Mac unit shipments in at least two years.
Market-research firm IDC said overall PC unit shipments saw a slight boost in the first calendar quarter, rising 1.5% year over year. That should not have been difficult, since the first quarter of 2023 was the worst in PC history, as unit shipments tumbled 28.7%.
With this easy comparison, Apple Inc. saw unit shipments of the Mac jump 14.8% in the first calendar quarter, IDC said, making it the fastest-growing company among the top five PC makers. No. 1 Lenovo of China saw shipments grow 7.8% and maintained the top spot. Apple also gained market share in the quarter, jumping to 8.1% of the global market, up from 7.1% a year ago.
This should be good news for Wall Street. According to FactSet, the analyst consensus for quarterly Mac sales is for revenue of $6.820 billion, down 4.85% from year-ago revenue of $7.168 billion. In the December quarter, typically the strongest for consumer sales, Mac sales were nearly flat at $7.780 billion, from $7.735 billion a year prior. Unless Apple has been engaged in fierce price cutting, the IDC unit shipment data should be a good barometer for the March quarter’s revenue.
Apple will report results from its fiscal second quarter, which ended in March, on May 2.
IDC said that Apple’s strong growth for the first calendar quarter was due also “due to an outsized decline in the prior year.”
Apple investors either did not notice the positive news or simply shrugged it off in the wake of a lot of bad news in the past month. Apple’s shares fell 0.67% on Monday to $168.45. Among its current woes: The iPhone maker is the target of a Justice Department antitrust lawsuit; it plans to lay off over 600 employees after pulling the plug on its secretive electric-vehicle efforts; it is seen by some as falling behind in artificial intelligence; and computer maker Dell Technologies Inc. has outperformed it over the past five years.
Investors might want to take note of the IDC data, because the next catalyst for Apple — barring some surprise news — will be its Worldwide Developers Conference beginning June 10, when the company is expected to make some announcements in the AI realm. But until then, there is not much else to get excited about with the stock.
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