The Apple income statement Sankey, explained (and how to make your own)
Every quarter, hours after Apple reports, a single image does the rounds on X and LinkedIn: Apple's income statement drawn as a Sankey. Popularized by accounts like App Economy Insights, it turns a dense earnings release into one flowing picture — hundreds of billions of dollars entering on the left and branching through costs until net income emerges on the right. If you've ever wondered how to read it, or how to make one yourself, this is the breakdown.
How to read the Apple Sankey
Read it left to right. On the far left, revenue enters — usually split into its two big trunks, Products (iPhone, Mac, iPad, Wearables) and Services (App Store, iCloud, Apple Music and the rest). Those merge into a single Total revenue node, and from there the flow immediately forks: one ribbon peels off to Cost of sales, and the remainder continues as Gross profit. The width of each ribbon is the dollar figure, so the gap between what iPhone brings in and what Services brings in is visible at a glance.
Gross profit then splits again: operating expenses branch off — research and development and selling, general and administrative — leaving Operating income. From operating income, provision for income taxes peels away in red, and what survives all the way to the right edge is Net income, drawn in green. In one image you can see Apple's gross margin, how much it plows into R&D, and how much of every dollar of revenue actually lands as profit.
- Revenue enters left, usually split into Products and Services.
- Cost of sales forks off first, leaving gross profit.
- R&D and SG&A branch from gross profit, leaving operating income.
- Taxes peel off in red; net income continues to the right in green.
Why this format won
A traditional income statement is a column of numbers that hides proportion. The Sankey makes proportion the whole point: you don't have to divide gross profit by revenue to feel the margin — you just see how thick the surviving ribbon is. That's why the format jumped from finance Twitter into earnings coverage and investor decks. It's the same reason it works for any company, not just Apple.
How to make one for any company
You don't need to be App Economy Insights to make these. Grab any public company's income statement from its 10-K or 10-Q — revenue segments, cost of sales, gross profit, R&D, SG&A, operating income, taxes and net income — and turn each line into a flow with a source, a target and an amount. Paste those figures straight in, or drop in a plain income-statement block and let the AI copilot infer the structure.
Open the income statement generator →Then apply the same conventions that make the Apple chart readable: costs and taxes in red, net income in green, the revenue trunk neutral. Split revenue by segment to show the mix rather than a single bar. Export a crisp SVG for a deck or a PNG for a post, watermark-free on paid plans, and save it so next quarter is a two-minute update.
Build a company income statement Sankey →The Apple Sankey isn't magic — it's a disciplined mapping of a public income statement onto a flow chart. Learn to read the ribbons and you can decode any company's earnings in seconds; learn to build them and you can publish your own the minute the numbers drop.
Frequently asked
Where do the numbers come from?
Apple's published 10-Q and 10-K filings. Every ribbon in a good earnings Sankey should be traceable to a line in the filing.
Why is revenue grey rather than green?
Revenue is not profit. A neutral trunk keeps green meaning money you actually kept, all the way across the chart.