Apple has just announced its fourth quarter results. They're pretty good. Actually, better than that.
Revenue: $6.22 billion, up 28.5%; net quarterly profit $904 million, up 66.7% (representing $1.01 per diluted share, up 38%). Gross margin was 33.6%, up from 29.2 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 40 percent of the quarter's revenue.
(The latter is interesting: despite the weak dollar, which you'd think would mean that international revenues would be bigger, but they're exactly the same as a year ago.)
Apple shipped 2,164,000 Macintosh computers (+34% on 4Q06), exceeding the previous quarterly record for Mac shipments - set in the previous quarter - by 400,000. It sold 10.2m iPods during the quarter (up 17% on 4Q06). 1.19m iPhones were sold in the quarter - so that's 1.389m sold in the year. Another 8.621m to go...
Here's the boilerplate:
"We are very pleased to have generated over $24 billion in revenue and $3.5 billion in net income in fiscal 2007," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. "We're looking forward to a strong December quarter as we enter the holiday season with Apple's best products ever."
Apple now has $15.4bn in cash, zero debt, and Peter Oppenheimer, the chief financial officer, forecasts revenues of $9.2bn for the first quarter of 2008 (which includes the Christmas period) and earnings per share of about $1.42.
In other words, they're rolling in it. Totals for the year just past: 5.9m Macs shipped, 51.5m iPods, profits total of $3.49bn on revenues of $24bn. And note that this is with one-and-a-bit quarters selling iPhones, and without Leopard, which is expected to goose sales of Macs in the coming months.
The interesting questions: -is the rise in Mac sales the vaunted "halo effect" so long predicted finally coming to pass? -are iPhones pushing up the profit margin, or depressing it? -will international revenues grow if the dollar falls any further?
Some have no doubt: "There's no question that Mac sales are still having a halo effect from the iPod and iPhone," Tim Bajarin, president of technology consulting company Creative Strategies, told Reuters.
Meanwhile shares of Apple rose 6% in after-hours trading.
Updated: some points from the conference call: Apple guesses that up to 250,000 iPhones went to unlockers or would-be unlockers. Japan is still the toughest market for Apple, but Asia-Pacific is the fastest-growing region for sales.
Europe has grown faster than the US for all four quarters (could be the dollar weakness?), and has risen by 47% (so how then is the international revenue only the same?). iPhone revenue in the fourth quarter was $118m, but for each phone sold its revenues are put together over 24 months.
Back-to-school sales resulted in the all-time high: it's those college (and some university) students doing it.
More: the full transcript is at Seeking Alpha.
