Where Apple's $54.5 billion in sales comes from

Apple reported earnings that were relatively flat over last year. But revenues were $54.5 billion, up from $46.3 billion a year ago.

Though its stock price plunged in after-hours trading (full disclosure: I own Apple stock), Quartz and The Atlantic have some interesting charts breaking down where its revenues come from.

The first, from Quartz, shows that iPhone sales make up the bulk of the sales:

And, as The Atlantic shows in a pie graph of the same data for just this last quarter, almost two-thirds of their sales are due to mobile products such as the iPhone and iPad.:

As the pie chart shows (and as Quartz points out), Macs are only a small fraction of Apple sales. In its quarterly earnings call Apple CEO Tim Cook said that part of the reason could be that the iPad is eating into sales of the Mac:

““I’ve said for the past three years that I believe the tablet market will be larger than the PC market at some point," Cook said. "Our base philosophy is to never fear cannibalization. If we do, somebody else will just cannibalize it.”

The Atlantic also notes that China now accounts for 13 percent of Apple revenues, putting it third behind the U.S. (31 percent), and Europe (23 percent). But since last year, revenue from the country grew 67 percent, indicating that it could be an even larger source of sales in the future.

So why was the stock down? Well, Apple's costs are also rising, eating into its profit margins: As the Wall Street Journal reports, "Late last year, the company warned that its aggressive product rollout schedule for the holidays, including new iPhones, iPads, iPods and a new iMac desktop would hurt profit as the company perfected manufacturing efforts. Manufacturing costs more in early stages until the company perfects production processes."

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via: Quartz, The Atlantic, Wall Street Journal

charts: Quartz and The Atlantic

This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com