Apple’s giving the recession the finger as they coast through their fiscal Q3 with massive earnings. Everyone expected them to post big earnings from new iPhone sales, but most folks put Mac in a slump. In fact, a lot of analysts expected the company as a whole to be down on last year’s earnings. Instead, Apple blew past last year’s figures to post some relatively impressive numbers.
One the whole, they’re up 13% over fiscal Q3 of last year. How’d they get there? Well, they sold 5.2 million iPhones this quarter, a solid 7 times what they sold in the same period last year. Overall you’re talking about a $1.23 billion net profit, compared to a meager $1.07 billion from last year.
Even the Mac line, where analysts predicted Apple would be slowest (and ineed they were) is up 4% in sales numbers over last year. Revenues from Mac are down 8 percent though, as the company lowered prices in this quarter to shore up sales in the face of competitive advertising and falling educational sales.
The company’s most impressive figure was their new iPhone/iPod touch installed base, which is sitting somewhere around 45 million. That’s a massive base for a wildly popular device, particularly in such a short period of time. And we can only expect that number to grow. Apple plans to have an iPhone in China within a year.
The letdown of this story? No appearance from Jobs, who has yet to show up publicly since his return. Granted, this was a conference call earnings report, but still, it would be nice to…hear him?
Source: Reuters
