Tech round-up: Apple iPhone sales drop, Twitter sees mixed results and Facebook set to like latest financials

Apple said sales of its iPhone dropped for the first time in the device’s history as the tech giant also reported a fall in revenue for the first time since 2003.

The technology giant reported revenue of £34.7bn for the first three months of 2016, a drop of 13 per cent on the same period last year.

Meanwhile, iPhone sales fell for the first time since the device was launched in 2007, dropping from 61 million to 51 million.

Industry experts have suggested the decline in iPhone sales - which makes up more than half of Apple’s total revenue and is therefore crucial to their success - is down to an increasingly saturated smartphone market as competition increases from established rivals such as Samsung, HTC and Google, but also emerging Chinese firms such as Huawei.

To battle this, the firm updated their smaller 4in iPhone, last seen as the iPhone 5s in 2013, by launching the iPhone SE in March, aiming the device at emerging markets such as China and India.

Apple CEO Tim Cook said of the latest results: “Our team executed extremely well in the face of strong macroeconomic headwinds.

“We are very happy with the continued strong growth in revenue from Services, thanks to the incredible strength of the Apple ecosystem and our growing base of over one billion active devices.”

The other flagship products in Apple’s line-up - the iPad and Mac computers - both also recorded a decline in their sales for the first three months of the year.

Twitter missed analyst expectations on revenue but exceeded growth on monthly users as the social media site reported mixed results in its latest financial report.

The micro-blogging site reported revenue of £408m for the first three months of 2016, below the £416m forecast by industry analysts.

However, the site added five million average monthly users, with that figure climbing to 310 million compared to the 305 million recorded in December.

The site remains some way behind rival social platforms however, with Facebook’s active users currently at 1.6 billion, while messaging service WhatsApp has also passed the one billion mark.

Twitter has launched a handful of new features in recent months in an attempt to draw in new users, including re-designing the site’s timeline so that tweets no longer appeared in order of the most recent. Instead, those posts Twitter believed were of interest to users based on their activity would be pushed to the top of the timeline.

The move was questioned at launch but in their financial results Twitter said only 2 per cent of users had opted out of the change.

In a statement released alongside the earnings report, Twitter said: “As we outlined last quarter, we’re focused on what Twitter does best: live.

“Twitter is live: live commentary, live connections, live conversations. Whether it’s breaking news, entertainment, sports, or everyday topics, hearing about and watching a live event unfold is the fastest way to understand the power of Twitter.

“This is our first quarterly update after laying out our long-term strategy and priorities. As a reminder, we have five priorities for the year: refining our core service, live-streaming video, creators and influencers, safety, and developers.

“Each is critical to strengthening our platform and audience around live. We made meaningful progress across each in Q1.”

Facebook is expected to report strong financial results when it reveals its latest earnings after the US market closes tonight.

The social network’s founder Mark Zuckerberg recently revealed the company’s ambitious 10-year plan to connect the entire world and bring it online - a plan that includes live video, virtual reality and solar-powered drones carrying internet signal.

It is a position the company has been able to take thanks to strong and steady financial growth in recent times, something industry analysts expect to continue when the company’s figures for the first three months of this year are revealed.

As well as reporting on the health of the social media site itself, there are hopes Facebook may reveal some early figures on the performance of the Oculus Rift virtual reality system, the parent company of which Facebook bought for 2 billion US dollars in 2014.

Virtual reality is due to become a big trend in technology in 2016, with Oculus among three premium systems to be launched to consumers for the first time and analysts are keen to see how the public has taken to this new form of gaming and entertainment in the short space of time it has been available.

Facebook should also report on its vast user numbers, which currently stand at around 1.6 billion active each month, a huge distance ahead of fellow social media site Twitter.