How Large Can Apple’s Services Grow?

In a recent post, I discussed that Apple has to grow outside of tech to continue growing. I also mentioned that the reason why Google and Amazon continue to grow is because, although they are tech companies, what they are selling is actually non-tech products to non-tech audiences (they are selling stuff like advertising slots, books and diapers).

So even as we see Apple’s services growing at 20%, and that it makes more money from services than from Macs, I think the more important trend to look for is how much they are positioned to earn from non-tech products.

To clarify,

1. Sales from the App Store are nice, but we have to be aware that the vast majority is from games, and most money comes from a small number of “whales” (online game junkies). It is overly optimistic to expect this segment to continue 20% growth in the mid-term. More likely, we will see a flattening of growth from games and maybe a slight increase do to healthy growth of the non-game segment (which will however not contribute too much to the total).
2. Music is unlikely to grow rapidly.
3. Other cloud business (probably mostly additional iCloud storage) may grow rapidly for a short time, but few people really need Terabytes of storage, and prices are likely to drop heavily with competition.
4. Apple Pay is more interesting because people might use it to pay for all kinds of stuff, including non-tech stuff. It is easy to envision Apple Pay being used to purchase advertising slots, books and diapers for example. We know that VISA has revenues of almost 14 billion USD (and obviously, from its business model, a lot of that is profit).

In summary, to understand the growth potential of Apple’s services, I think it is important to look at the non-tech markets and to see how Apple could add a thin layer of their services on these. Apple Pay is a typical case, but I would not be surprised if they decided to play a more direct role in e-commerce, for example. In the long term, I expect that these will be the main contributors to Apple’s service revenue, not the App nor Music stores.

Update

Matt Richman has done a similar but much better analysis of the non-tech service opportunities for Apple.