31 July 2026
If you are covering Apple or Amazon's latest financial results please find below comments from Quilter Cheviot's Ben Barringer, head of technology research, and Mamta Valechha, consumer discretionary analyst:
Speaking about Apple, Barringer commented:
"Tim Cook's last set of earnings for Apple will not have been the way he wished to have departed, with the share price being especially volatile in afterhours trading. Cook has served Apple very well over the years he has been at the helm, but the company is now being squeezed by its big tech competitors and is arguably getting crowded out by the AI trade.
"On the surface, these were some great numbers delivered by Apple. Revenues were up 18%, with the iPhone and Mac Mini doing particularly well. The Services business was weak, although Apple TV had a very difficult comparison to 2025 when the F1 movie was dominating both big and small screens in the summer. The latest series of Ted Lasso comes out shortly, and management will be channelling some of his optimism in the hope it can help give Apple TV a timely boost.
"Year to date, Apple has been a fairly defensive tech company and has proved its credentials in the recent sell off. Less capex and a continued focus on hardware have given some investors a place to shelter while concerns around the AI trade have grown. However, some of this is also to the company's detriment as Nvidia is now clearly TSMC's largest customer and is pushing Apple to the sidelines. It is constrained by both capacity and pricing from memory, and as such these will be headwinds for the foreseeable future.
"This is no longer Tim Cook's battle to fight against, so while he leaves Apple in good shape, the market has certainly evolved rapidly to leave it a little on the outside looking in."
Commenting on Amazon, Valechha said:
"Amazon’s group revenues were up almost 20%, and operating profit increased 43%, with the margin accelerating to 13.7%, with all three metrics ahead of expectations. AWS continues to lead the way with strong growth, but the results have also been helped to some extent by North America retail as a result of the US prime day falling in June, and some tariff related refunds.
"But, this quarter was all about AWS with revenue growth accelerating by 37%, and the margin expanding to 38% on efficiency and capacity optimisation offsetting significant investments, which should be reassuring for investors. The backlog grew 150% year-on year or 36% sequentially to around $496bn, on stronger demand for both the core AWS business and AI adoption.
"There is of course a high correlation with AWS and AI revenue, with management highlighting that AWS is benefiting from enterprises accelerating their migration to the cloud and expects strong demand for core AWS services as more AI workloads move into full-scale production. Capex guidance for 2026 was upped by 10% to $220bnm due to higher memory costs, but much of the narrative around these earnings was about return on investment, so that should help ease those fears. Amazon also confirmed that it is pursuing its own frontier model with the near-term focus on its own consumer applications, but eventually offering it externally.
"In ecommerce, North America revenue grew 16% and International up 15% on the year. Delivery speed for Prime members continues to accelerate, with more than 40% of items delivered same-day or overnight. The grocery business continues to grow quickly across perishables and non-perishables with the number of monthly active perishables customers up 50% since the start of the year.
"As for guidance for the third quarterQ3, revenue came in 2% below expectations at the midpoint, however, if we exclude the impact of Prime Day as this year it shifted to June, growth would be 4% higher."
