Luca Maestri - Apple, Inc.
Analyst · the information you'll hear during our discussion today will consist of forward-looking statements, including without limitation those regarding revenue, gross margin, operating expenses, other income and expense, taxes, and future business outlook. Actual results or trends could differ materially from our forecast. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in Apple's Form 10-K for 2016 and the Form 8-K filed with the SEC today along with the associated press release. Apple assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements or information, which speak as of their respective dates. I'd now like to turn the call over to Tim for introductory remarks
Yeah, Shannon, I'll take it. Obviously, within the Services business, we have a number of categories. The App Store is the one that is driving significant growth right now. I said in my opening comments that we grew 43% 13 weeks over 13 weeks, a little even more for the quarter, right. And what we like about the App Store is that it's truly a global platform. So we are seeing significant growth not only in the developed markets, where you expect to see a lot of transaction volume, but we see great growth in places like China, for example. And we know that there are parts of the world where we can do better. We can grow, for example, our developer community in a number of emerging markets. And so as we look, as I was explaining earlier, as we look at the number of people that transact growing double digits, we see the amount spent per paid account growing so well, we think that the App Store is going to be a significant driver of growth. On the music front, we are the market leader in digital music. Obviously now, by having the combination of the download business with the streaming service, which we didn't have until recently, we've been able to bring our music business back to growth. We've grown over the last three quarters, and we feel very good about that. Tim has talked about original content. We've had very good success with exclusives. So we know that it's another business that we can grow. Our iCloud storage business is growing very quickly, and so that is a business that also at a geographic level we can continue to grow significantly. Our AppleCare business is growing very well. A lot of it comes from the fact that our install base of devices around the world continues to grow very well, strong double digits. And as we've explained in the past, the vast majority of the services that we provide is not driven by what we sell during the last 90 days. It's much more driven by the install base, and that gives us a tailwind. We're also opening up several new markets because we are accepting new forms of payment. And therefore, it's easier particularly for international customers to take advantage of our services. You were asking about the margin profile. We said many times, in aggregate our Services business tends to have margins that are above company average. They are accretive, so they help us quite a bit from a margin standpoint. Within the Services business, we have very different margin profiles, also because, as you know, we account for some of these services in different ways. In some cases, we transact on a buy/sell basis. In other cases, we perform as agents, for example, to our developers, and that drives different margin percentages.