Apple sells 7.4M iPhones. Posts best quarter ever

October 20, 2009

Welcome back Steve Jobs. It was with great anticipation today we waited to hear the report from Apple. According to Apple, the company shipped 7.4 million iPhones in its fiscal fourth quarter, the most it has ever sold, besting the 6.9 million it shipped in the quarter following the launch of the iPhone 3G last year. The iPhone figures pushed it to a new record: helping Apple post it’s most profitable quarter ever.

WHAT’S HOT
Apple’s iPhone shipments include its 3G device, launched last year with AT&T for $99 and the new 3GS iPhone introduced July and priced from $199. Apple said it sold over 1 million units of the iPhone 3GS, which added video and MMS capabilities, in its first weekend of availability.

Further, Apple executives indicated that the company struggled to meet demand throughout the quarter, implying the company could have sold more iPhones than it reported, had it been able to meet a demanding consumers’ smartphone appetite.

“I would have liked to have had more, honestly, because we were still short in some countries at quarter end. As I indicated, it was early October before we were able to get supply and demand balanced in some countries,” said Apple executive Timothy Cook in the company’s conference call with analysts, according to a transcript from Seeking Alpha.

FINANCIAL DATE
The company had a net profit of $1.67 billion, up 47 percent from the $1.14 billion profit it had in the year-ago quarter. The smartphone and computer maker also booked $9.87 billion in revenue, up 25 percent from $7.9 billion in the year-ago quarter. Apple’s gross margin was 36.6 percent, up from 34.7 percent in the same period last year.

And research firms appear to be backing up that claim. According to market research outfit According to researcher iSuppli, the iPhone is “dramatically outperforming” the overall smartphone market. The firm said worldwide smartphone unit shipments are set to rise by 11.6 percent this year over the previous year, while shipments of Apple’s iPhones are set to soar by 37 percent during the same period.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs noted that “We’ve got a very strong lineup for the holiday season and some really great new products in the pipeline for 2010.”

Finally, Apple execs had some choice words for competitors scrambling to cash in on smartphones such as Pre maker Palm, BlackBerry maker Research In Motion, Windows Mobile vendor Microsoft and Google via its Android platform. “Frankly I think that people are really just trying to catch up with the first iPhone that was announced two years ago, and we’ve long since moved beyond that,” Cook boasted.

In addition, last month Apple announced that it sold over 2 Billion iPhone Apps.