In the first of August, Apple reported its earnings and according to Alex Webb of Bloomberg News revenues were very good. The company expects to have sales to be between $49 and $52 billion for July, August and September. The previous quarter Apple sold 41 million phones to have sales of $45.4 billion. A key statistic for anyone owning Apple shares is Apple generates almost 2/3s of its revenues from the iPhone.

The issue with a heavy reliance on iPhones and the higher margins iphones are sold at is the smart phone market is becoming saturated and competitors offer many of the same features at lower prices. Apple is adding a 3-D sensor to enable facial recognition in the phone and hopes the feature will spur more sales.

Sales of Apple Music and iCloud gained 22% and brought in $7.3 billion in the quarter. The app store continued to be a driver of performance, President Tim Cook said.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, Apple phones are still considered to be the best of the smartphones which is why people continue to buy them, as an investor you have to ask will they continue to buy them in similar numbers for 2/3 of the revenues of Apple is connected to the iPhone margins. While Apple continues to be the dominant company, the competitors are not far behind and in a year or two margins could fall, although unlike the competition Apple has billions in accounts outside the US waiting for the President to lower taxes before it comes back to the US.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.