Apple Inc.: would “revenue grows by at least 5 percent a year” have held?

It would have broken in 3 years of 9: FY2019, FY2023, FY2024.

Tested against Apple Inc. (AAPL, NASDAQ) as the company filed it: revenue growth in each fiscal year, recomputed from the annual statements, compared against 5%. Nothing here is a forecast. Every verdict is about a document that has already been filed.

Year by year, against the filings

Revenue grows by at least 5 percent a year, tested against every fiscal year of Apple Inc. on file. Each row names the submission the figure was read from.
Fiscal yearRevenue growthAgainst 5%FiledSubmission
FY2016n/anot filed2016-10-26 10-K0001628280-16-020309 on the SEC archive (opens in a new tab)
FY20176.30%held2017-11-03 10-K0000320193-17-000070 on the SEC archive (opens in a new tab)
FY201815.86%held2018-11-05 10-K0000320193-18-000145 on the SEC archive (opens in a new tab)
FY2019-2.04%broke2019-10-31 10-K0000320193-19-000119 on the SEC archive (opens in a new tab)
FY20205.51%held2020-10-30 10-K0000320193-20-000096 on the SEC archive (opens in a new tab)
FY202133.26%held2021-10-29 10-K0000320193-21-000105 on the SEC archive (opens in a new tab)
FY20227.79%held2022-10-28 10-K0000320193-22-000108 on the SEC archive (opens in a new tab)
FY2023-2.80%broke2023-11-03 10-K0000320193-23-000106 on the SEC archive (opens in a new tab)
FY20242.02%broke2024-11-01 10-K0000320193-24-000123 on the SEC archive (opens in a new tab)
FY20256.43%held2025-10-31 10-K0000320193-25-000079 on the SEC archive (opens in a new tab)

9 of the 10 filed fiscal years could be tested. A year the figure is missing from counts as neither held nor broken, which is what the nightly check does with the same gap: a missing number is a condition of the data, not evidence about the company.

Where 5% comes from

A convention, not an estimated boundary. Growth is compared between consecutive filed fiscal years, so the earliest year on file has no prior year and is never evaluated.

The threshold is the reader's to choose. This page reports what this particular one would have done, and says so in the past tense because that is all a filed document can support. It is not a view on Apple Inc. and it is not a recommendation.

What this page leaves out

Evaluated over 10 filed fiscal years, FY2016 to FY2025. The figure could be computed in 9 of them; a year without it counts as neither held nor broken. Accounts filed before this company began tagging its statements in XBRL are not machine-readable and are outside this page. No share price is involved in any figure here, so nothing on this page is limited by the depth of our price archive.

Figures on this page are recomputed from statements filed with the SEC, and each row names the submission it came from. Filings can be mis-tagged upstream and companies restate, so check a number against the filing before you rely on it. To find out whether a company you own can be answered this way at all, use the coverage checker.

Related

Ask it about your own company

This page is one threshold on one company, chosen by us. The same question, on the company you own and at the number you would actually use, is one form away and needs no account: open this question in the retro-test tool and change either half of it.

The product behind both is the same test run every night on the rules you write for the companies you own, against the newest filed data, and one email on the day a rule stops holding. Silence when nothing breaks.

What it costs | Whether we cover your companies