Apple earnings surge on blow-out iPhone sales

[yeti]

Apple earnings surge on blow-out iPhone sales
Forecast for March quarter ahead of Wall Street’s estimates
Dan Gallagher, MarketWatch, 24 January 2012

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Apple Inc. saw earnings more than double for its first fiscal quarter, reporting results on Tuesday afternoon that blew past Wall Street’s estimates, primarily from a huge jump in sales of the iPhone.

Shares of Apple AAPL +7.82% jumped nearly 8% in after-hours trading immediately following the results. The period included the launch of the iPhone 4S, and Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer said “tremendous popularity” of the 4S model led iPhone sales growth across all of the company’s segments during a conference call following the report.

The company, which tends to be conservative in its outlook, issued a forecast for the current quarter that was ahead of Wall Street’s projections.

“This is even better than expected,” said Mike Walkley of Canaccord. “It’s remarkable that the iPhone 4S with Sri created such a huge upgrade cycle.”

For the quarter ended Dec. 31, Apple reported net income of $13.1 billion, or $13.87 per share, compared with net income of $6 billion or $6.43 per share for the same period the previous year.

Revenue jumped 73% to $46.3 billion.

Analysts were expecting earnings of $10.08 per share on revenue of $38.85 billion for the quarter, according to consensus forecasts from Thomson Reuters.

Apple said it shipped 37.04 million iPhones for the quarter, far ahead of the average analysts’ forecast for just more than 30 million units sold. Shipments of the iPad totaled 15.43 million units; analysts were expecting about 13.8 million units. Mac shipments came in at 5.2 million units, in line with forecasts.

For the current quarter, Apple projected revenue of $32.5 billion with earnings per share of $8.50, adding that the quarter includes 13 weeks. Analysts were expecting revenue of $32 billion with earnings per share of $8.02, according to consensus forecasts.

Dan Gallagher is MarketWatch's technology editor, based in San Francisco.

[yeti]

When was the last time Apple paid out a dividend? The amount of cash they have on hand breaks several laws. They are not allowed to keep that amount of cash without paying it to their shareholders - but hey, when was that ever a reason for Wall St. law enforcement to get of their ass?

[Hans Olo]

The shareholders apparently don't care. They are fine with the price of the share going up.