Today, Apple announced that the holiday season brought booming sales to most of its product lines, the lone exception being the iPod. Although the music players declined slightly to 21 million units from the year before, Mac sales shot up by 33 percent to 3.36 million, while iPhone sales doubled, hitting 8.7 million. Those sales, plus changes to accounting rules, helped the company book $3.38 billion dollars in profits.
For the past several quarters, the company has been reporting both GAAP revenue, in which iPhone and Apple TV sales were spread out over several quarters via a subscription model, and revenue based on counting those sales immediately. The Financial Accounting Standards Board has since changed the rules to allow the latter number to be reported as the official earnings. In its earnings release, the company used the new method for calculating the numbers for both this quarter and the one a year earlier, but analysts haven't accounted for the shift in their estimates, meaning these look even more wrong than usual.
In any case, the numbers were great. Revenue went up from $11.88 billion to $15.56 billion, and the profit was over a billion dollars higher ($3.67 per diluted share vs. $2.50 the year earlier). The company also benefitted from higher gross margins, which were up to nearly 41 percent, likely a product of the fact that it's been a while since any of its products received a major makeover. In case you've been living under a rock, Steve Jobs' statement mentioned that this would change "starting this week with a major new product that we’re really excited about."
Despite the good news, Apple stock has declined slightly in after-hours trading. Apparently, analysts had expected even higher iPhone sales, and good news from the Mac side of the business hasn't overcome this disappointment. In any case, the charts follow, and we're live-blogging the company's conference call now.
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