Apple's Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended 27 September 2025 reports total net sales of $416,161 million. That figure checks to the dollar. The sentence beside it, saying Greater China net sales decreased primarily due to lower net sales of iPhone, is management's attribution, filed in the same document and checkable only as something management stated. A forecast layered on top of either is a third kind of sentence, and the filing labels it in its own opening pages as a forward-looking statement within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.

Three lanes, and only one of them closes

Scroll sideways to see the full table →

LaneA sentence from the fiscal 2025 filingHow far it checks
Filed figureTotal net sales of $416,161 millionTo the dollar, in Item 8
Management attributionGreater China net sales decreased primarily due to lower net sales of iPhoneConfirms what management wrote, not the cause
Forward-looking statementStatements on the potential future impact of macroeconomic conditions and tariffsNot checkable today; the filing flags it as such

All three sentences sit in the same document, which is why sorting them is a reading task rather than a research task.

A filed figure closes because the arithmetic is on the page

Apple reports total net sales of $416,161 million for fiscal 2025 against $391,035 million for fiscal 2024 and $383,285 million for fiscal 2023, and prints the year-over-year change as 6 percent (Form 10-K, fiscal 2025). Subtract: $25,126 million. Divide by $391,035 million: 6.4 percent, which rounds to the 6 percent the table shows. The segment line closes the same way. Greater China fell from $66,952 million to $64,377 million, a drop of $2,575 million, or 3.8 percent, printed as 4 percent.

A figure that reconciles like that is evidence the company reported it under the certifications in the filing. Finding the document in the first place is its own short procedure.

"Primarily due to" marks where the document starts interpreting

The same filing states that Products gross margin percentage was 36.8 percent in fiscal 2025 against 37.2 percent in fiscal 2024, and attributes the decrease to a different mix of products and to tariff costs, partially offset by other favorable costs (Form 10-K, fiscal 2025). The 0.4 percentage point move is measurement. The clause after "primarily due to" is management assigning weight to causes, and the filing publishes no decomposition that lets a reader check the split.

The SEC's investor bulletin on reading a 10-K puts the boundary plainly: the company writes the document, the SEC sets the disclosure requirements and neither writes the filing nor vouches for its accuracy. The same bulletin covers the one place where a company has to show its work on a derived figure, requiring any non-GAAP measure to be presented against the most comparable GAAP figure.

Example: three sentences from one filing, sorted

Take three real sentences from Apple's fiscal 2025 Form 10-K and label each.

First, total net sales of $416,161 million. Filed figure. Item 8 carries the consolidated statements of operations, and the number reconciles against the prior-year column.

Second, Services net sales increased primarily due to higher net sales from advertising, the App Store and cloud services. The increase is measured, from $96,169 million to $109,158 million, which the filing prints as 14 percent and which reconciles to 13.5 percent. The three named drivers are management's attribution, and the filing gives no separate figure for any of them.

Third, the statements the filing itself lists as forward-looking, including those on the potential future impact of macroeconomic conditions and tariffs. Not evidence of anything except that the statements were made. A published performance record has the same layered structure, which is part of why a simulated result proves less than it looks.

A prediction sits under a different rule

When the forecast arrives from a brokerage firm rather than the issuer, a rule governs it. FINRA Rule 2210, whose content standards were last amended in 2019, requires member communications to be fair and balanced and prohibits any false, exaggerated, unwarranted, promissory or misleading statement or claim. Paragraph (d)(1)(F) bars communications from predicting or projecting performance, with narrow carve-outs for hypothetical illustrations of mathematical principles, investment analysis tools meeting Rule 2214 and price targets in research reports carrying a reasonable basis and the required disclosures.

That gives a practical sorting rule. A projection from a member firm is either one of those exceptions or a rule problem. A projection from anyone else carries no such constraint, and the comparison it rests on has to be checked on the same dates and the same basis before the number means anything.

Source references

Primary sources used for this guide. Follow the links for the original scope, definitions and conditions.