During Apple’s fiscal fourth quarter 2016 earnings call, Apple CEO Tim Cook noted the excellent growth the company saw in its Services category, which is up 24% year-over-year.
Services counted for 13% of quarterly revenue, compared to 12% for Mac and just 9% for iPad. That is likely to change on the Mac side, with the introduction of the new Mac models, later this week.
For fiscal Q4 2016, the company’s services segment, (AppleCare, Apple Music, Apple Pay, the App Store, iTunes, iCloud, and more), brought in $6.3 billion, a $1.3 billion increase over the same quarter one year ago. The Cupertino firm has seen Services revenue nearly double over the last four years, and the company expects the category to reach the size of a Fortune 100 company in 2017.
Cook noted during yesterday’s call that the growth in Services is being driven by ever-increasing App Store revenue and the increasing popularity of Apple Music. The streaming music service’s revenue was up 22% in the fourth quarter, while the App Store experienced its fifth consecutive quarter of growth.
Apple Pay is also showing great growth, with transactions up 500%. The contactless payments system’s transaction tally for September amounted to more than across all of fiscal 2015.
As pointed out by 9to5Mac, one major benefit of the income from the Services category for our favorite iPhone maker is that the income stream is spread out relatively evenly throughout the year, helping even out Apple’s cash flow a bit during the year. This is a valuable asset for a company that traditionally has one to two quarters showing a revenue spike during the yearly introduction of the new iPhone models.
