iWorld
Q4-16: Apple Services clocks 24 per cent growth, Other Products revenue falls
BENGALURU: Apple Inc (Apple) Services product recorded a 24.4 percent year-over-year (y-o-y) growth in revenue for the quarter ended 30 September 2016 (Q4-16, current quarter) amidst a 9 percent y-o-y fall in total revenues. Apple Services includes revenue from Internet Services, AppleCare, Apple Pay, licensing and other services.
Apple Services reported revenue of $6,325million for Q4-16 versus $5,086 million in the corresponding year ago quarter, while Apple Total revenue in Q4-16 was $46.852 million versus $51,101 million in Q4-15.
However, across sequential quarters, Apple Services revenue increased only 5.8 percent in Q4-16 from $5,976 million as against 10.6 percent growth in total revenue from $42,358 million during the same period.
Apple Services contribution to overall revenue grew to 13.5 percent in the current quarter from 9.9 percent in the corresponding year ago quarter, but was slightly lower than 14.1 percent in the immediate trailing quarter.
Apple’s “Other Products’, which include sales of Apple TV, Apple Watch, Beats products, iPod and Apple-branded and third-party accessories saw a 22.1 percent y-o-y decline in revenue to $2,373 million in the current quarter from $3,048 million. Across sequential quarters (q-o-q), ‘Other Products’ recorded a 6.9 percent growth in Q4-16 from $2,219 million.
‘Other Products’ contribution to overall revenue declined to 5.1 percent in the current quarter from 5.9 percent in the corresponding year ago quarter and 5.2 percent in the immediate trailing quarter.
Major Products
Apple’s major Product is the iPhone which saw y-o-y declines of 5.3 percent and 12.6 percent in number of units sold and revenues respectively in Q4-16. iPhone sales revenue in the current quarter was $28,160 million (60.1 percent of total revenue) versus $32,209 million (62.5 percent of total revenue) in Q4-15. 40.513 million iPhones were sold in the current quarter versus 48.046 million in the corresponding year ago quarter.
During sequential quarters, iPhone sales witnessed growth rates of 12.7 percent and 17.1 percent in number of units sold and revenues respectively in Q4-16. iPhone sales revenue in Q3-16 was $24,048 million from 40.399 million units.
Among Apple’s other well-known products, the iPad witnessed y-o-y and q-o-q declines in number of units sold and revenues, while the Apple Mac recorded q-o-q declines.
Geographical split
Apple’s segments are Americas, Europe, Greater China, Japan and Rest of Asia Pacific (APac), with the America’s contributing more than 42 percent in terms of revenue.
Revenue from the Americas declined 7.1 percent y-o-y to $20.229 million (43.2 percent of total revenues) from $21,773 million (42.3 percent of total revenues. Across sequential quarters, revenue from the Americas increased 12.6 percent in the current quarter from $17,963 million (42.4 percent of total revenues).
Revenue from the European segment grew 2.5 percent y-o-y and 12.4 percent q-o-q to $10,842 million (23.1 percent of total revenue) from $10,577 million (20.5 percent of total revenue) and from $9,643 million (22.8 percent of total revenue) respectively.
Revenue from the China segment declined 29.8 percent y-o-y and declined 0.7 percent q-o-q to $8,785 million (18.8 percent of total revenue) from $12,518 million (24.3 percent of total revenue) and from $8,848 million (20.9 percent of total revenue) respectively.
Revenue from the Japan segment grew 10.1 percent y-o-y and 22.5 percent q-o-q to $4,324 million (9.2 percent of total revenue) from $3,939 million (7.6 percent of total revenue) and from $3,529 million (8.3 percent of total revenue) respectively.
Revenue from the APac segment declined 1.2 percent y-o-, but grew 12.5 percent q-o-q to $2,672 million (5.7 percent of total revenue) from $2,704 million (5.3 percent of total revenue) and grew from $2,375 million (5.6 percent of total revenue) respectively.
Profits, Apple’s board declares dividend
Apple posted a 19 percent y-o-y decline in net income at $9,014 million (19.2 percent margin) for Q4-16 versus $11,124 million 21.6 percent margin). Earnings per diluted share declined to $1.68 in the current quarter from $1,96 in Q4-15.
Apple’s board of directors has declared a cash dividend of $0.57 per share of the Company’s common stock. The dividend is payable on November 10, 2016 to shareholders of record as of the close of business on November 7, 2016.
Company speak
“Our strong September quarter results cap a very successful fiscal 2016 for Apple,” said apple CEO Tim Cook. “We’re thrilled with the customer response to iPhone 7, iPhone 7 Plus and Apple Watch Series 2, as well as the incredible momentum of our Services business, where revenue grew 24 percent to set another all-time record.”
“We are pleased to have generated $16.1 billion in operating cash flow, a new record for the September quarter,” said Apple CFO Luca Maestri. “We also returned $9.3 billion to investors through dividends and share repurchases during the quarter and have now completed over $186 billion of our capital return program,” added Cook.
eNews
How short, addictive story videos quietly colonised the Indian smartphone
A landmark Meta-Ormax study of 2,000 viewers reveals a format that is growing fast, paying slowly and consumed almost entirely in secret
CALIFORNIA, MUMBAI: India has a new entertainment habit, and it arrived without anyone really noticing. Micro dramas, those short, cliffhanger-driven episodic stories built for the smartphone screen, have quietly embedded themselves into the daily routines of millions of Indians, discovered not by design but by algorithmic accident, watched not in living rooms but in bedrooms, on commutes and in the five minutes before sleep.
That, in essence, is the finding of a sweeping new audience study released by Meta and media insights firm Ormax Media at Meta’s inaugural Marketing Summit: Micro-Drama Edition. Titled “Micro Dramas: The India Story” and based on 2,000 personal interviews and 50 depth interviews conducted between November 2025 and January 2026 across 14 states, it is the most comprehensive study of the category in India to date, and its findings are striking.
Sixty-five per cent of viewers discovered micro dramas within the last year. Of those, 89 per cent stumbled upon the format through social media feeds, primarily Instagram and Facebook, without ever searching for it. The algorithm did the heavy lifting. Discovery, as the report puts it bluntly, is algorithm-led, not intent-led.
The typical viewer journey begins with accidental exposure while scrolling, moves through a cliffhanger-driven incompletion hook that makes stopping feel unfinished, and is reinforced by algorithmic repetition until habitual consumption sets in. Only then, when a platform asks for an app download or a payment, does the viewer pause. Trust, not content quality, determines what happens next, and many simply return to the free feed rather than pay. It is a funnel with a wide mouth and a narrow neck.
The numbers on consumption tell their own story. Viewers spend a median of 3.5 hours per week watching micro dramas, spread across seven to eight sessions of roughly 30 minutes each, peaking sharply between 8pm and midnight. Daytime viewing is snackable and low-commitment, squeezed into morning commutes, work breaks and coffee pauses. Night-time is where the format truly lives: private, uninterrupted and, for many viewers, socially invisible. Ninety per cent watch alone, compared to just 43 per cent for long-form OTT content. Half the audience watches during their commute, well above the 37 per cent figure for streaming platforms, a direct reflection of the format’s low time investment advantage.
The audience itself breaks into three segments. Incidental viewers, comprising 39 per cent of the total, are passive consumers who stumble in and rarely seek content actively. Intent-building viewers, the largest group at 43 per cent, are beginning to form habits and seek out episodes but remain cautious. High-intent viewers, just 18 per cent, are the ones who download apps, tolerate ads and occasionally pay: skewing male, younger and urban.
What audiences want from the content is revealing. The top three genres are romance at 72 per cent, family drama at 64 per cent and comedy at 63 per cent, precisely the same top three as Hindi general entertainment television. The format rewards emotional familiarity over complexity. Romance in particular thrives because it demands low cognitive investment, needs no elaborate world-building and plays naturally into the private, pre-sleep viewing window where inhibitions lower and emotional intimacy feels safe.
The most-recalled shows, led by Kuku TV titles such as The Lady Boss Returns, The Billionaire Husband and Kiss My Luck, share a common narrative DNA: rich-poor conflict, hidden identities, power imbalances, melodrama and cliffhangers that make stopping feel physically uncomfortable. Predictability, the research warns, is fatal. Each episode must re-earn attention from scratch.
The terminology question is telling. Despite the industry’s embrace of the phrase “micro drama,” viewers have not adopted it. They call the content “short story videos,” “short dramas,” “reels with stories” or simply “serials.” One respondent from Chennai said bluntly that “micro sounds like a scientific word.” The category is at the stage that OTT occupied in 2019 and podcasts in the same year: widely consumed, poorly named and not yet crystallised in the public imagination.
Platform awareness remains alarmingly thin. Only three platforms, Kuku TV at 78 per cent, Story TV at 46 per cent and Quick TV at 28 per cent, have crossed the 20 per cent awareness threshold. The rest languish in single digits. This creates a trust deficit that directly throttles monetisation: viewers who cannot remember which app they used are hardly primed to enter their payment details.
Yet the appetite is clearly there. Sixty-five per cent of viewers watch only Indian content, drawn by the TV-serial familiarity of the storytelling, the comfort of Hindi as a shared language and the sight of actors they half-recognise from decades of television. South languages are rising fast: Tamil, Telugu and Kannada together account for 24 per cent of first-choice viewing. And AI-generated content, still a novelty, has landed better than expected: 47 per cent of viewers call it creative and unique, with only 6 per cent actively rejecting it.
Shweta Bajpai, director, media and entertainment (India) at Meta, called micro drama “a category that is rewriting the rules of Indian entertainment,” adding that the discovery engine being social distinguishes this wave from previous content formats. Shailesh Kapoor, founder and chief executive of Ormax Media, was characteristically measured: the format, he said, is showing “the early signs of becoming a distinct content category” and, given how closely it aligns with natural mobile behaviour, “has the potential to scale very quickly.”
The format’s fundamental mechanics are working. It enters lives quietly, through boredom and a scrolling thumb, and burrows in through incompletion and habit. The challenge now is monetisation: converting a category of highly engaged but deeply anonymous viewers into paying customers who trust the platform enough to hand over their UPI credentials. The story, as any micro-drama writer knows, is only as good as the next cliffhanger. India’s platforms had better have one ready.
