Apple crushed its quarterly earnings this afternoon but shares of the stock have fallen severely after the company guided a lower outlook for next quarter.
Shares of the company are down in after hours trading to $300, after hitting as high as $319 during regular trading hours.
For the Q3, Apple topped $20 billion in revenue, whilst earning $4.31 in net profit. Analysts had expected lower profit and revenue.
Revenue surged 67 percent year-on-year from $12.2 billion and income jumped 70 percent from $2.53 billion during the same period last year.
The most impressive number from the earnings report was iPhone sales, which doubled year-on-year and jumped 60 percent from last quarter. Sales of the popular smartphone were 14.1 million for the quarter compared to 8.4 million in a relatively slow Q2. iPhone revenue accounted for $8.6 billion of the company’s revenue for this quarter.
iPad sales increased to 4.19 million, for a total of 7.46 million lifetime sales.
On the downside of the report gross margins fell to 36.9 percent from 41.8 percent year-on-year thanks to lower sales of iPods, the company’s most profitable device.
Result for: impressive number
According to new data from Net Applications, the Apple iPhone controls 66 percent of total mobile browser share, demolishing all the competition for amount of time people browse the Web from their phone.
In second place was JavaME at 9 percent market share, followed by Windows Mobile at 7 percent and Symbian and Android at 6 percent. Somewhat surprisingly, Palm and BlackBerry brought up the rear, with under 5 percent combined.
The numbers are even more impressive considering there are much fewer iPhones on the market compared to, lets say, Windows Mobile phones, and is a testament to the rather enjoyable experience of browsing the Web using an iPhone.
Android-based phones, which were only just released last year also put up impressive numbers, especially considering there are only 1 million units on the market.
Result for: impressive number
Apple has announced that its popular iTunes platform has hit yet another milestone, 5 billion songs purchased since the store’s launch in April 2003.
The latest milestone shows that sales are picking up at an impressive clip especially considering it took 3 years for the store to hit its first billion. It took the store just 3 months to go from 4 billion to 5 billion sold.
Apple had an even more impressive number to announce however. The company says that movies are being purchased or rented from the store at a rate of 50,000 a day, a huge increase that can mostly be attributed to Apple’s recent deal to begin renting movies. That deal was struck in January of 2008. Doing some simple math shows us that Apple is selling or renting 1.5 million movies per month, and the company now claims iTunes is the world’s most popular online movie store. I’m sure no one will refute that claim if the numbers are true.
