Apple’s first quarter financial results are in! And it’s another record-breaking quarter for Jobs & co. Number crunching time. Apple posted a $6 billion profit on $26.74 billion in revenue. Compare this to one year ago, that’s up from a profit of $3.38 billion on $15.68 billion in revenue. Says CEO Steve Jobs: “We had a phenomenal holiday quarter with record Mac, iPhone and iPad sales. We are firing on all cylinders and we’ve got some exciting things in the pipeline for this year including iPhone 4 on Verizon which customers can’t wait to get their hands on.”
Now let’s break it down by product category. Apple sold 4.13 million Macs during the quarter (representing a 23 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter); 16.24 million iPhones (representing a 86 percent unit growth); and 19.45 million iPods (representing an 7 percent unit decline). This is the second quarter that includes iPad sales, and how did they do? 7.33 million iPads were sold and that’s way up from the total sold last quarter (3.27 million, in case you’re wondering).
Looking ahead to the second quarter, Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer expects revenue of about $22 billion and diluted earnings per share of about $4.90.
Unfortunately the earnings call administered by Oppenheimer and COO Tim Cook did not shed light on the health of Steve Jobs who decided to take a medical leave of absence from the company yesterday. However, the call did bring to light an interesting news bite. Cook spilled that Apple has invested a ton of money to secure a “very strategic” component for its products. Though he failed to mention the mystery component, most sources are pinpointing it on the development of extremely high-resolution displays for future iterations of the iPhone and iPad.
Also during the call, Cook commented on iPad’s competitors. “If you look at what’s out there today, there’s not much,” said Cook. “There’s the ones that use Windows, they’re generally big and heavy and expensive. They have weak battery life, they require a keyboard or a stylus as an input device, customers are frankly just not interested in them. Then you have Android tablets, and the varieties that are out shipping today, their operating system wasn’t designed for tablets. Google has said this, this isn’t just Apple saying this. That means you have the size of a tablet that just isn’t reasonable for what we call a ‘real tablet experience.’ That’s just a scaled-up smartphone, which is a bizarre product category. If you do a side-by-side with an iPad, you’ll pick an iPad.” He went on to uphold Job’s stance on Android from last quarter’s call: “We firmly believe that our integrated approach is better than the fragmented approach.”