Apple Vice President of Product Marketing Gregory Joswiak speaks during an event to announce new products at its headquarters in Cupertino, California, the United States, on March 21, 2016. Apple Inc. on Monday unveiled a new smartphone and a new tablet both having smaller screens in its efforts to retool its product lineup of iPhones and iPads. [Photo: Xinhua]

New figures show sales of Apple's iPhones, as well as overall corporate revenues, have declined for the first time since 2003.

Apple pulled in revenues of 50.6 billion U.S. dollars in the second quarter.

This is a 33 percent drop compared to the first quarter, and down 13 percent from a year earlier.

Around 51.2 million iPhones were sold during the second quarter.

This is down 16 percent year-on-year.

While the numbers are down, the market hasn't been shocked.

Apple sales are down by over 25-percent in the US market, which remains its largest.

Tech researcher Frank Gillett with Forrester says Apple is trying to cope with a number of factors.

"It looks to me like several issues coming together at the same time. Market saturation, competition from low-cost phones, and then this question of whether people are keeping their phones longer, I don't think you can say that there's one clear factor. But clearly, the dynamics are changing in terms of the volume that they're going to sell every quarter."

Apple released the iPhone SE, a smaller, 4-inch-screen phone featuring much of the company's latest technology, in March.

The iPhone 7 is due out later this year.

However, Gillett says the release of these two phones is unlikely to have a significant impact on Apple's overall revenues.

"The SE, to me, would provide a minor bump. You could argue that some of the slowdown we're seeing is from people waiting because they didn't want to upgrade from their small phones. So that's one of the uncertainties that I would point to and say, hey, you can't be sure whether in fact it'll beat or be below previous quarters and year-over-year sales, but it's not going to change the fundamental dynamic of a dampening growth curve."

Apple, in releasing its Q2 results, is also forecasting 3rd quarter revenues of between 41 to 43 billion US dollars, which would be down over 15-percent compared with the 2nd quarter.