Apple expected to report first decline in full year-on-year revenue in 15 years

Apple Store, Zorlu Centre, Instanbul

Apple is due to announce its fiscal Q4 (calendar Q3) earnings today at 2pm PT/5pm ET, and the news isn’t expected to be good.

The company’s own guidance calls for a third consecutive quarter of year-on-year declining revenue. That would mean total revenue for its 2016 fiscal year of around $215B, 8% down on the previous year – making it the company’s first year-on-year decline since 2001 …

Re/code reports that the analyst consensus expectation is for quarterly revenue of $47B based on around 45M iPhone sales, 5M Macs and 8.5-9M iPads. This is toward the high end of Apple’s own guidance of $45.5-47.5B.

The forecast follows yesterday’s report showing that analysts were expecting Mac sales to have fallen more than 10% from the previous year.

The expected numbers are likely to be the reason Apple rescheduled the earnings call: getting the bad news out of the way first in the hope that they will be quickly overshadowed by the excitement of all-new MacBook Pro models on Thursday.

There is expected to be better news next year, most analysts expecting the iPhone to return to growth in 2017.

We’ll of course be bringing you the actual numbers as soon as they are released.