Apple announced yesterday that it made $6.62bn in the July-September quarter, an increase of 54% on last year and a record for the company. Revenue for the period was $28.27bn, a rise of 39% on the year ago quarter.
Mac sales rose by 26% from last year, making a total of 4.9m worldwide, a quarterly record. That gave Apple 5% of the total PCs sold during the quarter, a figure it hasn’t hit for many years.
‘We are thrilled with the very strong finish of an outstanding fiscal 2011, growing annual revenue to $108 billion and growing earnings to $26 billion,’ said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO.
The company sold 20m iPhones during the quarter, 21% more than last year, but fewer than in the April-June period. During a conference call with analysts after the figures were released, CFO Peter Oppenheimer blamed the lower than expected iPhone sales on the fact that Apple launched the previous iPhone in June 2010 and there was speculation about a new model throughout the July-September quarter. That may have resulted in many customers delaying a purchase.
CEO Tim Cook told analysts that Apple would ‘set an all-time record’ for iPhone sales in the October-December quarter. Apple is normally conservative about guidance for sales figures, but given that the iPhone 4S sold four million units in its first three days, the Christmas quarter is always the strongest for sales, and this Christmas quarter is a week longer than normal, due to the need to catch up with the calendar (Apple does this once every six years), Cook will have felt he was on safe ground.
Apple sold 11.1m iPads during the quarter, and increase of 166% on last year.
In after-hours trading, the company’s stock price fell by 5.8%, after a week of rises, reflecting the market’s disappointment with iPhone sales. Most analysts, however, were relaxed about iPhone sales failing to meet their expectations. Piper Jaffrey’s Gene Munster said: ‘We see this as a disappointment, but given the strong start to iPhone 4S sales, we believe it is clear that units were pushed from the Sept. quarter into the Dec. quarter as customers waited for the “iPhone 5,”‘
And Katy Hunerty of Morgan Stanley told clients that ‘We believe the Street underestimated the degree to which September was a transitional quarter for the iPhone but with strong iPhone momentum out of the gate in October, we don’t see the light iPhone shipments as a cause for concern.’
