We’ve known for a while now that Apple was going to be putting more of an emphasis on services. As the technical leaps from one iPhone/iPad/Mac generation to the next become less dramatic, product revenue has started to shrink; in response, the company is focusing on driving forward on things like the App Store, iCloud, Apple Pay, Apple Music, and its soon-to-launch games and video offerings.

This shift is already playing out in the company’s financials. While product sales dipped a bit year-over-year — down from $51.3B in the quarter that ran from January to March 2018 to $46.6B in the same quarter of 2019 — revenue from the services business climbed from $9.9B to $11.5B.

In this fiscal Q2 quarter of 2018, Apple’s total revenue came in at roughly $61.1B; in the same quarter of 2019, it dipped to $58B. This works out to services accounting for 16.1% of Apple’s revenue in fiscal Q2 2018, but nearly 20% in fiscal Q2 2019. Apple CFO Luca Maestri says services now account for “one third” of the company’s gross profits.

A big part of Apple’s services business is monthly subscriptions — the things like iCloud, Apple Music, and Apple News that make money each month from the hardware they’ve already sold. Tim Cook says Apple now has 390 million paid subscriptions across its services. Cook didn’t dive into how that breaks down service-by-service, but that’s up roughly 30 million subscribers over last quarter. The company says it expects paid subscribers to surpass half a billion by 2020 (presumably fueled by the launch of its gaming/video services.)

via Click on the link for the full article

Slack has filed its S-1 registration statement with the SEC in preparation for its direct listing. One interesting dataset that usually comes out of these S-1s is the company’s actual fundraising history. Slack has raised eight main rounds (series A-H), and 15 rounds total when including individual tranches since it incorporated on February 25, 2009 according to Delaware records.

Now that we have data, we can ask: how did the tech press do in covering the company?

Arman and I investigated by looking at coverage of Slack’s individual rounds of capital on startup news sites and comparing those reported numbers to the data now offered in the S-1. For the most part, the tech press did decently well, except for one curious, $162 million gap.

The missing Form D

First, though, a note about Form Ds.

via Click on the link for the full article