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Apple delivered financial results during its summertime quarter that exceeded analyst projections, despite being caught in the crosshairs of a global trade war at the same time the trendsetting company is scrambling to catch up to its Big Tech peers in the artificial intelligence race.The performance announced Thursday was driven largely by strong initial demand for its iPhone 17 lineup that went on sale last month.Although the iPhone 17 lacks the AI wizardry featured in rival devices recently introduced by Samsung and Google, Apple spruced up its latest models with a redesign highlighted by a sleek “liquid glass” appearance on the display screens.Apple also largely maintained its pricing on its latest iPhones, despite being squeezed by the tariffs that President Donald Trump has imposed on the U.S. devices that the company mostly makes in India and China. The tariffs cost Apple $1.1 billion during the past quarter and are expected to cost another $1.4 billion during the final three months of the year.The formula apparently was enough to win over consumers, particularly in the United States and Europe, helping to produce iPhone sales totaling $49 billion during the July-September period, a 6% increase from the same time last year. That was slightly below the 8% jump in iPhone sales that had been anticipated by analysts, and less than the 13% bump in sales during the April-June period.IDC estimates that 58.6 million iPhones were sold worldwide in the July-September quarter, putting Apple second behind Samsung at 61.4 million of their Android-powered phones sold worldwide in the quarter.Buoyed by the iPhone results, Apple earned $27.5 billion, or $1.85 per share, nearly doubling its profit from a year ago. Revenue climbed 8% from a year ago to $102.5 billion. Both the earnings and revenue eclipsed the analyst forecasts that steer the stock market.Apple shares surged 3% in extended trading after the numbers came out.In a conference call with analysts, Apple CEO Tim Cook indicated his belief that the iPhone 17 lineup will continue to do well, predicting even more of the devices will be sold during the final three months of the year. “As we head into the holiday season with our most powerful lineup ever, I couldn’t be more excited for what’s to come,” Cook said. He cited the iPhone 17’s popularity in most parts of the world except China, where sales of the device dipped by 4% from a year ago.The Cupertino, California, company expects its iPhone sales to increase at least 10% from last year’s holiday season, according to projections provided by Apple’s chief financial officer, Kevan Parekh. Total revenue is expected to rise at a similar rate.Apple’s stock has been on a tear since a report earlier this month from the research firm International Data Corp. telegraphed the quarterly results with a preliminary analysis that concluded the company had set a new July-September record for iPhone sales. The rally catapulted Apple’s market value above $4 trillion for the first time earlier this week and now the stage is set for the shares to hit another new high during Friday’s regular trading session.But Apple has been widely seen as a laggard in the AI craze, one of the reasons that Nvidia a chipmaker whose processors power the technology became the first company to be valued at $5 trillion earlier this week.Apple had promised a wide array of AI features would be rolling out on last year’s iPhone models, but was only able to deliver a few of them. The missing upgrades included a smarter and more versatile version of its frequently flummoxed Siri virtual assistant a makeover that Apple now doesn’t expect to complete until next year.But Apple has a long history of late starts when technology starts to head in another direction before it finally catches up and emerges as a front-runner.If Apple can pull it off again by eventually implanting more AI features on the iPhone, Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives believes those breakthroughs could boost the company’s market share by another $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion, translating into $75 to $100 per share. Michael Liedtke, AP Technology Writer
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Who saw this coming? Bettors, apparently. Coinbase Global, one of the largest crypto exchanges on the market, announced its third-quarter 2025 earnings on Thursdaya relatively benign event by most measures. But it wasnt the revenue or profit numbers that caught many peoples attention. It was some specific comments and words spoken by CEO and cofounder Brian Armstrong. Armstrong, near the end of Coinbases earnings call, squeezed in a last-second barrage of keywords. I was a little distracted because I was tracking the prediction market about what Coinbase will say on their next earnings call, and I just want to add here the words Bitcoin, Ethereum, blockchain, staking, and Web3 to make sure we get those in before the end of the call. While that may not have meant a lot to most listeners, Armstrong was actually saying specific words that bettors on prediction markets had wagered he would say. Prediction market bettors on platforms such as Kalshi had made bets that Armstrong or other Coinbase executives would say certain keywords during the call, and up until that point, they had not. So by saying those words at the end of the call, Armstrong handed some bettors a win. That also meant that he handed others a loss. Unorthodox? You bet, but its all part of a burgeoning new world where sports betting is legal in many states, and American adults can make online bets on almost anything theyd likefrom the outcomes of presidential elections to, in this case, what executives of publicly traded companies will say during an earnings call. While it seems clear that there are going to be a lot of opportunities to rig or manipulate wagers such as these, this is likely the first time that the CEO of a large, public company has gone out of their way to decide the outcome of a wager in such a way. Fast Company has reached out to Coinbase for further comment, but has yet to receive a response. After the call, Armstrong replied via X to say, lol this was funhappened spontaneously when someone on our team dropped a link in the chat. One X user called out exactly what appeared to have happened: At the end of the Coinbase earnings call today, Brian Armstrong pulled up the mention market and rattled off all the words that weren’t said yet, summing it up as, What a wild time to be alive. Shares of Coinbase (Nasdaq: COIN) were up around 3.5% in early trading on Friday, with the stock up more than 27% year to date.
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E-Commerce
Amazon posted higher fiscal third quarter profit and sales compared with a year ago, fueled by accelerating growth in its cloud computing business and strong spending by its customers looking for low prices at a time when inflation is resurging.The results, announced Thursday, beat Wall Street expectations. The company’s prominent cloud computing arm also surpassed analysts’ expectations, rising 20%. But Amazon issued a cautious sales outlook for the fiscal fourth quarter.Shares, however, soared nearly 13% in after-hours trading.Analysts are analyzing Amazon’s results, along with other retailers’ earnings performances, to get insight into how shoppers are spending heading into the holiday season and how the online behemoth is managing cost increases from President Donald Trump’s tariffs.But Amazon, based in Seattle, is also under pressure to shore up confidence among investors that its computing arm Amazon Web Services is just as powerful as Microsoft’s Azure and Google’s Google Cloud platform. Amazon delivered better-than-expected 20% growth for AWS, following a 17.5% growth in the fiscal second quarter. Andy Jassy, president and CEO of Amazon, noted in a statement that AWS is growing at a pace it hasn’t seen since 2022.Last week Amazon grappled with a massive outage of AWS after a problem disrupted internet use around the world for most of the day, taking down a broad range of online services, including social media, gaming, food delivery, streaming and financial platforms.Jassy also noted Amazon is seeing strong momentum and growth across Amazon as artificial intelligence drives “meaningful improvements in every corner of our business.”Jassy also pointed out that in stores, Amazon continues to realize the benefits of innovating in its fulfillment network, and it’s on track to deliver to Prime members at the fastest speeds ever again this year, expand same-day delivery of perishable groceries to over 2,300 communities by end of year, and double the number of rural communities with access to Amazon’s same-day and next-day delivery.Amazon is rapidly automating its warehouses, raising big questions on how many workers it will need in the future.In fact, Amazon announced on Tuesday that it’s cutting about 14,000 corporate jobs as it ramps up spending on artificial intelligence and cuts costs elsewhere. Teams and individuals impacted by the job cuts were notified Tuesday. Amazon has about 350,000 corporate employees and a total workforce of about 1.56 million. The cuts amount to about a 4% reduction in its corporate workforce.Jassy told analysts that the announcement on job cuts wasn’t “really financially driven and it’s not even really AI driven.”“It’s culture,” he said. “And if you grow as fast as we did for several years, the size of businesses, the number of people, the number of locations, the types of businesses you’re in, you end up with a lot more people than what you had before, and you end up with a lot more layers.”Late last month, Amazon unveiled a new robotics system being tested in South Carolina for its warehouses that coordinates multiple arms to perform picking, stowing, and consolidating tasks simultaneously. This technology effectively collapses three assembly lines into one, the company said.Amazon is also testing an AI agent that helps human managers deploy workers and avoid bottlenecks. The system allows operators to spend less time analyzing dashboards and more time coaching teams, creating safer work environments, the company said.Amazon’s strategies seem to be powering its latest results.Amazon posted net income of $21.12 billion, or $1.95 per share, for the quarter ended Sept. 30. That’s up from $15.33 billion, or $1.43 per share, a year ago.Analysts had expected $1.57 per share for the quarter, according to FactSet.Amazon’s sales rose to $180.2 billion, up from $158.88 billion in the year ago period.Analysts had expected $177.91 billion, according to FactSet.The number of items that Amazon sold in the latest period increased 11%, the company said.In late July, Jassy touted its more than 2 million sellers in its third-party marketplace, all with different strategies of whether to pass on higher costs to shoppers. He also told analysts that it hadn’t seen “diminishing demand nor prices meaningful appreciating.”Amazon said it expects sales for the fiscal fourth quarter to be in the range of $206 billion to $213 billion. Anne D’Innocenzio, AP Business Writer
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