Apple CEO: Our March Quarter Is a Revolutionary and Magical One Literally Five Years Ahead of Any Other Fiscal Quarter
I wonder if Apple’s latest earnings report is available exclusively in Rich Text Format …
Apple posted blockbuster earnings for its fiscal second quarter on Wednesday, proving once and for all that its iPod music player isn’t so much a cash cow as a vast, horizonless Texas beef ranch. Apple shipped 10.5 million iPods in the quarter, up from 8.5 million a year earlier. And that was just the beginning. Mac sales were up as well. The company shipped 1.52 million of them, helping bolster sales 21% to $5.26 billion. Wall Street was expecting net income of 54 cents to 56 cents a share for the quarter. Instead, Apple gave it 87 cents, up from 47 cents a share in the same period a year earlier.
“The earnings number was unbelievable,” Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster told The Wall Street Journal. “It’s a hardware company with software company margins.”
As CEO Steve Jobs might say: “Boom.“
So what’s Apple going to do with all that money? Subsidize the iPhone? That’d be nice, but there are certainly other good uses toward which those funds could be put. An Apple venture-capital division, for example. “I can’t count how many times a software start-up has come to me, shown me a great idea, and then said ‘We’ll build a Mac version eventually,’ ” writes BusinessWeek’s Arik Hesseldahl. “The most widely cited reason is that the company can’t afford to develop both a Windows and Mac version at the same time, and Windows is where the market volume is. An investment stake from Apple would go a long way toward bridging this gap by helping small companies hire more developers, some of whom could be dedicated to Mac development. This might mean more simultaneous releases of Windows and Mac versions of cool new applications.”
Sounds like a great idea to me. Your thoughts?