We're going to be covering the Apple earnings call live at 5pm ET / 2 pm PT, now that the earnings report is out ($1.16 per share, hot hot hot!). To listen in on the call, you can pick up the QuickTime stream here. Remember, for ongoing coverage of AAPL be sure to check out our sister site BloggingStocks.
Posts with tag earnings
Apple's $18 billion stash
Where's all that cash that Apple made from the iPhone and all those iPods, Macs, and iTunes downloads last year going? Why, right into Apple's mattress. According to the Financial Times, Apple currently has $18 billion sitting on their balance sheet, doing nothing much at all. And they're OK with that -- Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer recently said in the Q1 conference call that they like having that "flexibility." And after all, you never know when you might need to drop $18 billion on something important.All that money doing nothing isn't so great for Apple's investors though, some of whom apparently want a piece of the pie. They might like to see dividends, stock buybacks, or even actual spending come out of that on Apple's part (later in the piece, I'm surprised to see that Apple only spends 3% of their sales on R&D, while Microsoft spends 14%). But no -- Apple is flush with cash from all their big sales numbers, and they want to apparently stay that way.
[Via Ars]
Wall Street to AAPL: Get bent
OK, I get it. Equity investments are bets on the future, not rewards for the past, and a stock like Apple's with such stratospheric growth over the past 12 months is vulnerable to gloomy outlooks in a way that more plodding investments might not be. Still and all: another record quarter. Best sales, best revenue in Apple's history. More than 2.3 million Macs sold, and nearly as many iPhones (!). Over twenty-two million freakin' iPods. Year over year, the December quarter gained almost 2.5 billion dollars in revenue -- my goodness, it was a 9.6B quarter, which would have been a spectacular entire year for the Apple of recent memory. Apple beat the internal guidance by $0.34 a share... there's no way to describe this financial performance except "stunningly good" -- unless you're Doug Krizner of Marketplace Morning Report, who characterized the results today as "less than stellar." Man, I am so happy they made that guy stop signing off with "Make it a good day," because the way he said it made me want to get back in bed and hide my money under a mattress.But I digress. With these results in mind, why would after-hours traders respond with the fiscal equivalent of "Go crawl in a hole and die, you hippie freaks?" Granted, Apple's CFO is anticipating earnings per share for next quarter around a dollar, which is less than analysts were hoping for and may point to some drag on the business from deteriorating economic conditions. It still seems to me that with iPhone revenue growing (remember, it takes two years to extract all the profit from those iPhone sales, so there's an upslope out there as the sales and new markets accumulate) and new streams coming in from iTunes rentals and the so-hot-it's-untouchable retail operation, we've gone from irrational exuberance to a gang initiation beatdown.
Oh well. If I wanted peace and quiet I probably should have bought Dell stock.
Disclaimer: I hold shares in AAPL. Bought them at a split-adjusted $13. Not selling, either.
TUAW liveblogs the Q1 2008 earnings call at 5PM ET
Apple will be reporting its 2008 Q1 financial results today at 5 PM EST. After yesterday's worldwide market plunge (U.S. exchanges were closed for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day), Apple shares dropped as much as 8% as the markets opened this morning. Though the stock has largely rebounded (thanks to the Federal Reserve's surprise emergency cuts in lending rates), this will certainly make for an interesting backdrop for today's earnings call.We'll be live-blogging the call (it is streaming live via QuickTime here) and trying out the CoverItLive service to see how it performs.
Join us back here at 5 PM EST for all the action.
Why the iPhone should tank
Doctor Macenstein has a very good commentary up: even though he's a happy iPhone owner, he wants the iPhone to fail. Fail miserably. In fact, he was cheering on the news during the earnings announcement yesterday that Apple completely missed Or is he? He makes good points-- lower-than-expected iPhone sales might make Apple nervous enough to get in gear on pushing new software features and updates out, and get that price point dropping for the rest of us. And on the price point Doc's especially got a point-- when Apple was asked if there was going to be a lowered price point, they actually cited customer satisfaction as the reason not to drop it. In other words, if people are happy with the iPhone (and Apple is convinced that they are), there's no reason to change it.
With AAPL doing so well, Apple has a chance to sit back on their laurels and let the AT&T payments roll in. But any self-respecting iPhone user shouldn't let them take it. With a happy customer base, Apple has less incentive to fix those "little" problems like copy and paste and a missing iChat Mobile.
Update: My good colleagues point out that the iPhone missed analysts' goals, not Apple's.
AAPL opens strong after earnings report
Even as the market at large turned downward at the open today, AAPL moved up in a big way. With overnight trading taking the stock on a roller-coaster ride (up over $150, settling down at about $145, almost $8 over the closing price Wednesday), the stock opened this morning at 146, a record high open and intraday record high.If you listened to yesterday's earnings call (or followed the highlights on our liveblog) you heard a lot of interest about the initial days of iPhone sales, which barely made it into the June quarter numbers; Apple's not even recognizing revenue from AT&T subscription sharing until the September quarter. Meanwhile, the Mac and iPod businesses are, as they say in Pittsburgh, "ahn fahr" -- 32% Mac unit sales growth over the year-ago quarter, and nearly 10 million iPods sold in the quarter. Check out Georges Yared and his colleagues over at our sister shop BloggingStocks for more on the earnings story.
Disclaimer: I am long on AAPL, and short on temper.
Liveblogging the Apple earnings call
We're on the line live for the Apple FY07 Third Quarter earnings call, starting up in just a few minutes at 5pm Eastern. Apple is expected to announce some big numbers, and we should get an idea of what they expect from the iPhone in the next quarter or so. More updates as we post them.If you want to join in, Apple's got a quicktime link, so hit it and let the big numbers hit your ears at the same time they do us.
5:08pm: Welcome to the conference call. Here we go.
5:10pm: Peter Oppenheimer: record-breaking max sales and continued strong demand for iPod. Net income up 73%, huge numbers overall.
5:11pm: Apple's growth rate more than 2 1/2 times the predicted growth rate for the quarter. Mac notebooks up 42%. 9.8 million iPods, 31% growth over the quarter.
5:12pm: 71.5% share of MP3 players are iPods. iTunes surpassed Amazon and Target.
5:13pm: 270,000 iPhones sold, 146,000 iPhones activated. Some problems during the first week, and we would like to apologize. Since then, AT&T has corrected the cause, and we are experiencing high percentage of problem-free activation.
More after the break.
Disney sells 2 million movies, 23.7 million TV shows on iTunes
Forbes reports that Disney's iTunes sales have been doing especially well. Net profits for the quarter ending March 31st this year were up 27%, boosted by strong iTunes sales including about 23.7 million TV episodes and 2 million movies. The article doesn't say but I'm pretty sure that those numbers reflect total historic iTunes sales rather than just sales for this past quarter. If they were, they'd deserve a fully upper case WOOT rather than the modest woot I issue on this news.Apple Financials Q2 2007
Curious as to how Apple is doing? Want to know how many Apple TV units they will admit to having sold? Need to know about product refreshes and the latest state of Leopard and the iPhone? Mark your calendar. Apple's 2nd Quarter 2007 Financial Results conference call webcast will begin at 2PM PT on Wednesday 25 April 2007. All you need to join in and listen is a copy of QuickTime. The Apple Financial Results web page will provide a link on the day of broadcast.
Estimated 1.8 Million Macs sold during Q4 '06
Forget about iPods, for a moment. MacDailyNews reports that Apple sold a healthy 1.8 million Macs during the "holiday quarter" ending 2006 and of that number, about 1.1 million units were laptops. This apparently beat Apple's "already aggressive targets", with strong sales at the Apple store. Due to these strong sales Goldman Sachs estimates the fiscal 2007 per share earnings at $2.85, slightly higher than the "Street consensus" of $2.76. Let's pause for a moment for a hearty fanboy squee at the news of Apple's further progress towards total world domination. And, oh yes, the iPod sold very nicely too.
TUAW Podcast #13
This week's podcast involves Dan Pourhadi and the C4 developer shindig he attended, those exclusive Leopard screenshots we nabbed, iPod viruses and the corporate blame game, and we round off with Apple's preliminary 4th quarter earnings results. Dan and I kept things short this time around, as the podcast rounds off at just over 20 minutes and 18.6MB.As usual, you can grab the podcast via a direct link, our podcast RSS feed or in the iTunes Store podcast directory. Enjoy the show.
Update: It seems there's a bug in our iTS feed preventing from getting this latest episode, though our other links for accessing the podcast are working just fine. We'll keep you posted.
Nasdaq warns Apple of non-compliance
Following reports of possible stock option improprieties by Apple executives and continuing internal and external investigations of these concerns, Apple has announced that it will delay the filing of its Q3 quarterly earnings reports until it is satisfied that the issues have been properly accounted for and addressed. Delay of the filing puts Apple out of compliance with Nasdaq regulations, and continued non-compliance without taking proper measures are grounds for Nasdaq to cease listing of Apple shares.
Apple has said it's stock will remain listed pending a hearing and decision by the Nasdaq listing qualifications board.
Despite these issues, perhaps because Apple itself–and not a third party, uncovered the irregularities, Apple stock has remained fairly stable.
Apple reports second highest earnings in its history
That's right, boys and girls, Apple reported their earnings for their third quarter today, and things are looking good. Apple had its second highest earnings and sales ever this quarter, which is very impressive if you think back to Apple's meteoric climb early in its history. Apple posted a revenue of $4.37 billion with a profit of $472 million. That's a lot of iPods, about 8,111,000 iPods, with sales of 1,327,000 Macs (75% of which were Intel Macs). This represents a 12% growth in the sales of Macs and a 32% increase in iPod sales.
Check out the press release for full details.
