A 10% decline in iPhone sales sounds like a problem for Apple, considering the company counts on the devices for half its revenue.
But investors didn’t seem to mind Thursday, when Apple revealed the year-over-year drop in its fiscal second-quarter earnings report. The stock rose more than 6% after the market close, a rally that would be the steepest since November 2022 should it continue into regular trading Friday.
Instead of glaring too much at iPhone revenue, Wall Street chose to focus on the positive. Apple’s gross margin expanded to 46.6%, continuing an upward trajectory that reflects the company’s growing services business, which brings with it stout profits.
Apple also signaled overall revenue growth in the current quarter will be in the low single digits, after a 4% decline in the second period. Analysts were looking for third-quarter growth of 1.3%, according to LSEG.
Deepwater Asset Management’s Gene Munster described the guidance as a “relief” given the recent trajectory of the business.
“I was expecting this was going to be flat, some investors were saying it was going to be down a few percent in June,” Munster told CNBC’s “Fast Money” after the report. “I think that was a big part of this move higher.”
But perhaps the biggest catalyst for the pop was Apple’s announcement that it had approved $110 billion of share buybacks, the most ever for a public company. For the past three years, Apple has authorized $90 billion in annual repurchases.
The after-hours jump shows how much investors are valuing Apple’s massive cash flow and the company’s willingness to return more of it to shareholders. It’s a shift in the way Apple has been viewed by Wall Street over the years, away from a hits-driven gadgets business and toward a financial powerhouse.
“Our free cash flow generation has been very strong over the years, particularly the last few years,” Apple CFO Luca Maestri said on an earnings call.
Apple revealed earlier this year that it has 2.2 billion active devices, illustrating the mammoth reach of its customer base as the company rolls out new subscription services. Despite the 4% drop in revenue, Apple still recorded nearly $24 billion in profit, a slip of just over 2% from a year earlier.
Apple said iPhone sales suffered from a difficult comparison to last year, when sales were elevated after previous shortages. Still, investors are looking for future iPhone growth, and many analysts say a potential iPhone with artificial intelligence features could do the trick and help the company snag customers from Android. Annual iPhone revenue peaked in Apple’s fiscal 2022.
While Apple provided some guidance for total revenue, it avoided offering any sort of forecast for iPhone sales.
That’s a change, even for a company that’s been giving less forward guidance since the pandemic. Maestri typically provides trends on iPhone sales, and had for the past four quarters.
There’s no guarantee investors will be able to continue counting on increased buybacks from a company that’s been more aggressive in that department than any other. Apple says it’s trying to draw down its huge cash pile, which stood at $162 billion at the end of the quarter. When its debt is roughly equal to its cash balance — meaning the company is net cash neutral — Apple will evaluate what to do next, executives said Thursday.
As of the end of 2023, Apple had spent $658 billion on buybacks over the past 10 years, far ahead of second-place Microsoft, according to S&P Dow Jones Indices.
“For the last couple of years we were doing $90 billion and now we’re doing $110 billion,” Maestri said on the call.
In terms of what happens when Apple gets to net cash neutral, Maestri said, “let’s get there first. It’s going to take a while still.”
“And then when we are there,” he said, “we’re going to reassess and see what is the optimum capital structure for the company at that point in time.”
Chinese tech company Baidu announced Wednesday its Apollo Go robotaxi arm has entered a strategic partnership with PostBus in Switzerland.
Baidu
BEIJING — Chinese tech giant Baidu announced Wednesday that its robotaxi unit will start test drives in Switzerland in December, as firms race to get their vehicles on European roads.
The company’s Apollo Go unit will work with Swiss public transit operator PostBus through a strategic partnership, Baidu said.
By the first quarter of 2027, the companies aim to begin operating a public-facing fully driverless taxi service called “AmiGo” that uses Apollo Go’s RT6 electric vehicles, the press release said. Baidu added that once the robotaxis are up and running, the operators plan to remove the cars’ steering wheels.
Plans to start tests in December are the most concrete steps Baidu has announced so far in getting its robotaxis on public roads in Europe.
The Chinese tech company said in August that it would partner with U.S. ride-hailing company Lyft to deploy robotaxis in the U.K. and Germany starting in 2026. A month earlier, Baidu announced a partnership with Uber to deploy Apollo Go robotaxis on the ride-hailing platform outside the U.S. and mainland China later in the year.
Other robotaxi companies are also racing to expand into Europe and the Middle East, after building up operations in the U.S. and China.
On Friday, Chinese robotaxi operator Pony.ai announced it will work with Stellantis to begin tests in Luxembourg in the coming months, before expanding to other European cities next year.
U.S. rival Waymo, owned by Google parent Alphabet, last week also announced plans to start tests in London before launching the self-driving taxi service there next year. Uber in June said it would start trials in spring 2026 of fully autonomous rides in the U.K. with SoftBank-backed self-driving tech startup Wayve.
— CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal contributed to this report.
Cast and filmmakers hop on the KPop Demon Hunters-Sing Along Experience at Paris Theater on August 23, 2025 in New York City, U.S.
Roy Rochlin | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images
Netflix’s business leaders and investors probably aren’t enjoying a soda pop after the release of its third-quarter results. While the company’s revenue met expectations — though not beating them as it did the first and second quarters — earnings were taken down by a tax dispute with Brazilian authorities. Shares of Netflix fell around 6% in extended trading Tuesday stateside.
But it doesn’t look like any other media company will dethrone Netflix as the king of streaming in the near term. Warner Bros. Discovery said Tuesday it’s open to a sale — and Netflix is reportedly an interested buyer — even as Warner Bros. is going ahead with its split into two companies in the meantime. Elsewhere, Comcast’s NBCUniversal is currently spinning off its cable networks, which includes CNBC. Those moves suggest that legacy media is still finding its footing amid the era of streaming inaugurated by Netflix.
While there are many factors contributing to Netflix’s golden status, its shows are likely the main protagonists. “KPop Demon Hunters,” released in June, was a smash hit. It’s now the company’s most-watched film, hitting 325 million views and surely played a huge role in Netflix’s best ad sales quarter ever in the third quarter. Even as the streaming giant’s earnings stumbled during that period, Netflix is still showing other media companies how it’s done.
— CNBC’s Sarah Whitten contributed to this report.
What you need to know today
India is close to a trade deal with U.S., local media reports. As part of the agreement, the White House could slash tariffs on New Delhi to 15%-16% from the current 50%, according to Indian media outlet Mint on Wednesday. India could also reduce oil purchases from Russia.
Japan’s exports return to growth in September. However, the 4.2% year-on-year increase, which snapped four months of declines, was below the 4.6% rise expected by a Reuters poll of economists. Shipments to Asia climbed 9.2% from a year earlier, while those to the U.S. fell 13.3%.
[PRO] ‘Buyback aristocrats’ are outperforming the market. The term refers to companies that have reduced their share counts across a certain period of time — a portfolio of them has outperformed the equal-weight S&P 500 since 2012, according to Goldman Sachs.
And finally…
A large computerised display of the British FTSE 100 index.
Unlike in the United States, conglomerates — giant companies owning numerous businesses across different sectors — have more or less died out in Britain. This was reinforced when last Friday Smiths Group, the FTSE-100 engineering company, announced a major disposal as it sheds its conglomerate status.
The Smiths break-up marks the end of an era in which conglomerates dominated the ranks of Britain’s biggest companies. Yet traces of the old U.K. conglomerates are everywhere.
— Ian King
Disclosure: Comcast is the parent company of NBCUniversal, which owns CNBC. Versant would become the new parent company of CNBC upon Comcast’s planned spinoff of Versant.
A group of prominent figures, including artificial intelligence and technology experts, has called for an end to efforts to create ‘superintelligence’ — a form of AI that would surpass human intellect.
More than 800 people, including Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak and former U.S. National Security Advisor Susan Rice, signed a statement published Wednesday calling for a pause on the development of superintelligence.
In a statement published Wednesday, with over 800 signatories, including prominent AI figures and the biggest names in AI, ranging from Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak to former National Security Advisor Susan Rice, called for a pause on the development of superintelligence.
The list of signatories notably includes prominent AI leaders, including scientists like Yoshua Bengio and Geoff Hinton, who are widely considered “godfathers” of modern AI. Leading AI safety researchers like UC Berkeley’s Stuart Russell also signed on.
Superintelligence has become a buzzword in the AI world, as companies from xAI to OpenAI compete to release more advanced large language models. Meta notably has gone so far as to name its LLM division the ‘Meta Superintelligence Labs.’
But signatories of the recent statement warn that the prospect of superintelligence has “raised concerns, ranging from human economic obsolescence and disempowerment, losses of freedom, civil liberties, dignity, and control, to national security risks and even potential human extinction.”
The statement calls for a prohibition on superintelligence development until strong public buy-in and a broad scientific consensus that it can be done safely and controllably is reached.
In addition to the AI figures, the names behind the statement come from a broad coalition of academics, media personalities, religious leaders and ex-politicians.
Other prominent names include Virgin’s Richard Branson, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen, and British royal family member Meghan Markle. Prominent media allies to the U.S. President Donald Trump, including Steve Bannon and Glen Beck also signed on.
As of Wednesday, the list of signatories was still growing.
