Hot on the heels of Google’s earnings call at the beginning of the week, today was Apple’s turn to publish their figures and, surprise surprise, they beat expectations and sold a whole load of bushed aluminium to mobs of doe-eyed consumers.
Specifically, the gang from Cupertino pulled in $24.67 billion in revenue, of which $5.99 billion was pure, delicious profit. As usual, once the money is changed into non-sequential dollar bills it will be delivered to Steve Jobs’ vault for him to take a swim in at a later date.
Apple beat iPhone sales estimates of 16 million, with total uptake of the eponymous handset for the first quarter of the year totalling 18.6 million. The company also hifted 3.76 million Macs, and 4.69 million iPads. Shockingly, Apple actually fell short of iPad shipment forecasts of 6.29 million – but don’t worry, it’s only because they couldn’t manufacture enough of them.
Apple’s iPod business continued its slow march to the grave, falling 17% year-on-year to just over 9 million.
Apple, in a self-congratulatory mood, mentioned the new records they’ve set for themselves no less than four times in the opening paragraph of their earnings press release.
With record quarter after record quarter, the only danger facing Apple at this point is being able to continue raising the bar again and again. Record quarters have become such a norm for the company that if they failed to beat analyst forecasts it would be a minor disaster. If they failed to grow their revenue or profits the world would very likely come to an end. Steve Jobs might drown himself in all his money.
One potentially sore point for Apple has to be Android’s continued growth. Google recently announced that their mobile operating system was seeing 350,000 device activations daily. The iPhone’s 18.6 million sales in Q1 2011 works out to around 207,000 device activations per day – so while it’s all roses for Apple on the financial front, it would seem Android is starting to open up an impressive gulf between it’s main rival and itself.
