Apple Purees the Street!
I mean, they turned it to mush! All the analysts were upping their predictions before Tuesday’s announcement of the 3rd Quarter earnings by Apple. To my knowledge, not a one of those “experts” came close to the most spectacular financial performance from Apple, EVER. That statement—“best financial performance ever”—says it all.
Apple reported profits of $7.31 billion (do you remember when their total SALES were less than their quarterly profit?) on sales of $28.57 billion for the three-month period. The earnings per share was an astounding $7.79 when the “street’s” consensus number was $5.85. It is no wonder that Apple stock shot up over $20/share in after hours trading and broke $400/share for a short time.
The year-over-year numbers are also unparalleled. For the same three-month period only one year ago, Apple posted sales of $15.7 billion (and yes, it was a record then, too) and a profit of $3.25 billion or $3.51 per share. Nearly double the sales and over double the profit. You simply cannot do any better than this without the wheels falling off of this speeding race car.
It is a real testament to Apple management and staff that they were able to pull off this amazing quarter and dust themselves off and get ready for these new products and a new operating system. Apple has the strongest management team in place of any corporation and they seem to be firing on all cylinders!
Here are some highlights from the quarterly results:
- iPhone and iPad drove the wagon! They sold over 20 million iPhones and 9.25 million iPads in the quarter
- Operating Margin @41.7% was the highest ever
- iTunes store has over 225 million accounts—that is simply an amazing money machine
- If you count all the iOS devices, they have sold over 222 million to date
- Almost 4 million Macs were sold which is the best ever for a June quarter. Asia Mac sales were up over 57%
- iPod touch is driving the iPod business and Apple continues to own the MP3 music player business. The iPod touch accounts for half of the 7.5 million iPods sold
- 62% of their sales came internationally
Steve Jobs said, “We’re thrilled to deliver our best quarter ever, with revenue up 82 percent and profits up 125 percent. Right now, we’re very focused and excited about bringing iOS 5 and iCloud to our users this fall!”