Apple’s Services Leader Becomes Latest Executive to Leave Company

Apple’s vice president of services is reportedly leaving the company.

The responsibilities of Peter Stern, who currently is the business leader for the company’s TV+, iCloud, Apple One and News+, will be divided up between several executives, Bloomberg reported Tuesday (Jan. 10).

Apple did not immediately reply to PYMNTS’ request for comment.

Stern has been a key figure in the company’s building of its services business, which now accounts for about $80 billion of its revenue annually, according to the report.

His departure follows that of several other Apple executives, including top players in industrial design, privacy, information systems, online store, procurement and hardware and software engineering, the report said.

It was reported Nov. 1 that the heads of Apple’s online retail and information-systems were leaving the company, part of what was already a series of high-profile departures from the tech giant.

In October, the services business was showing signs of a slowdown as it faced headwinds that included both foreign exchange (FX) and the challenge of lapping the strong growth the business had seen in years past.

As PYMNTS reported Oct. 27, at the time of the company’s most recent earnings call, Apple’s revenue from the services segment was up 5% during its fiscal fourth quarter, but that growth rate had been handily in the double digits in previous quarters.

Investors were less than enthused with the numbers, sending the shares down as much as 5% at the time.

More recently, Apple started the new year with a market capitalization that had dropped below $2 trillion a year after hitting $3 trillion.

That marked the first time since 2021 that the company’s market valuation dripped below $2 trillion. It happened a year to the day after Apple became the first firm to hit that $3 trillion landmark.

Apple was not alone in seeing a falling valuation over the previous 12 months. The top 10 tech stocks — the tech companies that were the biggest in terms of their market cap at the end of 2022 — lost a combined $4.6 trillion in market valuation last year, Seeking Alpha reported Dec. 31.