Apple Second Quarter Earnings Report Offers Insight on Apple Pay
While we know, at least anecdotally, that Apple Pay is one of the biggest new players in the mobile payments scene, we don’t know much about the exact numbers it’s generating.
That changed somewhat recently as Apple CEO Tim Cook took the stage to talk about Apple’s second quarter revenue numbers.
There are still plenty of gray areas on hand, but the information revealed had plenty to say in its own right.
Cook noted that Apple Pay is showing some impressive gains, around a million new users a week, and that transaction volume is up five times what it was a year ago.
That’s great on its own, but potentially much less spectacular than it sounds. While gains of a million users a week, even if stable for a month, means better than four million users total, the transaction volume, without numbers to back it, isn’t that great.
After all, if Apple’s transaction volume was two transactions a week a year ago, should we really be that impressed that the number is now up over 10 transactions a week?
This concept was underscored by word from Apple CFO Luca Maestri, who noted the company had yet to see a “meaningful revenue impact from Apple Pay,” but that such impact could be made eventually.
That’s something to note about Apple Pay, and it’s likely that the payment volumes aren’t increasing trivially thanks to the sheer number of new users coming in.
Even assuming catastrophically low volumes, a product gaining a million users a week must at least be gaining a million dollars every week.
Not everyone will use the product every week, but some will use it multiple days a week. Assuming even a simple distribution of users and payment volumes, the end result suggests some substantial gains.
But with Apple’s own CFO suggesting that nothing’s really gaining in terms of revenue, it may not be that cut-and-dried.
Apple Pay is still a force to be reckoned with in the mobile payments market, even if the specific numbers aren’t there yet.
Hopefully Apple will talk specifics soon, but for now, it’s good enough for the Apple faithful, and in the end, that’s probably all it really needed.