Can a graph be as informative as summary statistics?

Let´s see it with an Apple sales vs Dividends graph.

As some may know, Apple got so famous because of the Iphone. It had some great products before, but definitely the Iphone made most of the job.

It´s common to see Apple stock price go up and down just before/after an Iphone release, that´s understandable given the fact that investors always keep an eye on the star product. So, what will happen to Apple when Iphone sales go down? They don´t have it as easy as before when there were not as many competitors as now; some people don´t like to accept this, but Samsung has done a very good job gaining a relevant portion of the market share.

As you will see on the next graph it actually happened, Iphone sales have become stagnant (in some quarters decreased), so we can actually say that given the importance of the Iphone, the company might start to become unprofitable.



The reality is different, Apple´s dividends keep going up and so do shares of the company. That might say that Apple has managed to diverse its income with other products, let´s say Macbooks, Ipads and services like Icloud, Apple music, etc., or maybe they have become more efficient. It´s hard to tell, but they have managed it well.

On the next graph you will see clearly that despite Iphone sales drop, dividends keep going up. So, will you stop investing in Apple stocks if you hear that Iphones are not selling as much as they used to? Maybe before seeing this graph you would. Actually, in 2015 the stock price of the company began to decrease and it took almost a year to recover the bullish path.



Did we need to make some complicated statistics and get into correlations to know what really is happening? Actually not, that´s the power of data visualisation.

Don´t get me wrong, I´m not saying statistics are not useful, because they are, but visualising data can sometimes save us time; you don´t need to code in R as I did, you can do it in Excel.


Data

The data was gathered from Statista and Yahoo Finance