Apple Tops Sales Estimates Despite China Dip, Amazon Reports Cloud Unit Growth

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Oct 30, 2025

Ed Ludlow, a Bloomberg Tech co-host and commentator, dives into the recent performance of Apple and Amazon. He highlights Apple’s mixed results, with strong overall revenues but disappointing sales in China. Ludlow discusses the strategic challenges Apple faces in the competitive Chinese market and its reliance on services for growth. On the flip side, he analyzes Amazon's impressive AWS growth, attributing it to renewed investor confidence and discussing its AI ambitions, particularly with the development of custom chips.

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INSIGHT

AWS Reacceleration Restores Investor Confidence

Amazon's AWS returned to 20% year-over-year growth, marking its strongest expansion since 2022.
That rebound reassures investors worried AWS was losing ground to Google and Microsoft.

ADVICE

Use High-Margin Units To Fund Retail Growth

Maintain low consumer prices and invest in fulfillment to protect market share, even if it pressures margins short-term.
Use higher-margin businesses like AWS and advertising to offset retail investments.

INSIGHT

Custom Chips Signal New AI Revenue Streams

Amazon's Anthropic investment and custom Tranium 2 chip point to AI-driven revenue beyond core cloud services.
Management frames Tranium 2 as a multi-billion dollar opportunity to serve third-party AI workloads.

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Apple Inc.’s fourth-quarter revenue edged past analysts’ estimates despite a surprise sales decline in China, where it’s been struggling to stage a comeback.

Total sales rose 7.9% to $102.5 billion in the period, which ended Sept. 27, the company said in a statement Thursday. That slightly beat the $102.2 billion average estimate. The company benefited from stronger-than-expected services growth, helping offset the China slowdown. The Mac and wearables division also performed better than anticipated.

Revenue from greater China fell 3.6% to $14.5 billion, well short of the $16.4 billion that analysts projected. The results renewed concerns that Apple is losing ground in a former growth market.

The company faces mounting competition from local smartphone providers in China and has struggled to offer artificial intelligence features in the country.

Meanwhile Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud unit posted the strongest growth rate in almost three years, reassuring investors who were concerned that the largest seller of rented computing power was losing ground to rivals.

Amazon Web Services posted revenue of $33 billion, an increase of 20% from the prior year and the biggest year-over-year rise since the end of 2022. Analysts, on average, estimated 18% growth.

Investor expectations for the cloud business were relatively low heading into Thursday’s report after the company in recent quarters cited constraints in getting new data centers online. Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy and other executives had said they were optimistic about the business, though they stopped short of forecasting a reacceleration of growth.

Today's show features:

Bloomberg Intelligence Senior Analyst for E-Commerce and Athleisure Poonam Goyal, Bloomberg Tech Co-Host Ed Ludlow and Eric Clark, Chief Investment Officer at Accuvest Global Advisors, examine quarterly earnings from Amazon
Jay Goldberg, Senior Analyst, Semiconductors & Electronics with Seaport Research Partners, Bloomberg News Managing Editor for Global Consumer Tech Mark Gurman, and Bloomberg Tech Co-Host Ed Ludlow react to Apple earnings

Bloomberg News Health Reporter Jessica Nix on the fight between Novo Nordisk and Pfizer over the acquisition of Metsera
Caroline Freund, Dean of the UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy, on the latest meeting between US President Donald Trump and China’s Xi Jinping

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