From $2 billion to $112 billion in annual profit: How Apple transformed its business

As John Ternus became CEO on Sept. 1, taking over the reins from Tim Cook, Fortune takes a look at the past 50 years and the data behind the shift from device dependency to recurring revenue, a global sales base, and profit growth that has rewarded patient shareholders beyond almost any comparable stock.

The iPhone remains Apple’s single most powerful engine, accounting for roughly half of 2025 sales. But the more revealing trend is services, which include the App Store, iCloud, Music, TV, payments, advertising, and more. It’s a division that barely existed 15 years ago and is now projected to generate more than a quarter of this year’s revenue. That’s the clearest evidence that Apple has successfully layered a high-margin, recurring-revenue business on top of its device sales, insulating it somewhat from the hardware upgrade cycles that worry investors.

Apple has truly gone global. While the U.S. remains its largest market, a substantial share of Apple’s sales now comes from Europe, Greater China, Japan, and the broader Asia-Pacific region. Its retail footprint tells a similar story: Apple now operates more than 500 stores worldwide.

The bottom-line trajectory is the starkest number of all: annual profit rose from roughly $2 billion in 2006 to about $112 billion in 2025, a nearly 60-fold increase in under two decades. The long-term performance of the stock has been even more remarkable: a $10,000 investment in Apple’s 1980 IPO, held through its subsequent stock splits and decades of growth, would be worth approximately $40.5 million by mid-2026, Fortune reported.

These figures form the financial foundation Ternus inherited from Cook, who built Apple into a $5 trillion company through supply-chain discipline and cash-flow strength rather than Steve Jobs-style stage presence. “Cook ultimately built his own respected legacy, not in spite of being unlike Jobs, but because of it,” Fortune’s Phil Wahba writes.

That inheritance now faces its sharpest test yet: while Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon, and Oracle pour tens of billions into data-center buildouts for the AI race, Apple has deliberately avoided the hyperscaler arms race, betting instead on privacy-first, on-device AI delivered through premium hardware. 

Whether that restraint proves prescient or costly will determine whether Ternus’s Apple keeps growing. You can view more of Apple’s history in charts here. Read more about Cook’s tenure at Apple here.

Sheryl Estrada
[email protected]

Leaderboard

John Landry was appointed CFO of CVRx, Inc. (Nasdaq: CVRX), a commercial-stage medical device company. Landry succeeds Jared Oasheim, whose resignation was previously announced. Landry will join the company on Oct. 12, and assume the CFO role on the day after the company files its Form 10-Q for the quarter ending Sept. 30. Oasheim will remain with the company for a transition period. Landry currently serves as CFO of Nyxoah SA. Before that, he spent 12 years at Vapotherm, Inc., most recently as SVP and CFO, where he led the company’s IPO.

Kian Granmayeh was appointed CFO of ZettaJoule Inc., an advanced nuclear energy company. Granmayeh has served as CFO of Tellurian Inc., a U.S. liquefied natural gas developer. Most recently, he was EVP, CFO and treasurer of Carriage Services Inc. Earlier in his career, he advised energy companies on mergers and acquisitions, restructurings and private placements as an investment banker within Lazard’s Energy Banking Group.

Big Deal

Numeric today is launching the Financial Data Platform (FDP), a rethink of the general ledger rather than an AI layer bolted onto legacy ERP software. The San Francisco-based startup, which has raised $89 million to date including a $51 million Series B in November 2025, argues traditional ledgers compress transactions into debits, credits and memo lines for GAAP reporting, which strips context and caps how much automation is possible.

CEO Parker Gilbert put it bluntly: “I view ‘AI-native ERPs’ largely as inheriting the prior generation of infrastructure, but with AI features bolted on. Same house, new paint.” FDP instead stores each transaction as a complete record, with debits and credits generated as one output of that record—making it function more like a data warehouse with accounting logic than a conventional ERP. 

For finance teams, Numeric said it’s offering a faster, query-friendly close: hours instead of weeks, automated transaction routing, and the ability to drill into cost and revenue data without exporting to FP&A tools. Built controller Asia McKnight called Numeric “an operating engine,” not “a legacy ERP system” or “accounting software.”

Going deeper

Overheard

“2030 is not going to be the end of the world. There is a 0% chance that’s going to be the end of the world.”

—Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a “CBS Sunday Morning” interview on Sept. 20 regarding predictions of an AI catastrophe by 2030. “I think that scaring people is unnecessary,” he said. “It is irresponsible.”