Today Apple announced their 3rd quarter results for fiscal year 2009. As expected, Apple has reported higher than expected earnings.
Apple announced revenue of $8.34 billion, with a net profit of $1.23 billion. The same quarter in 2008 showed revenue of $7.46 billion, and a net profit of $1.07 billion. These figures are an increase of 11.8% in revenue and 14.9% increase in net profit. These compare to the same quarter of 2008.
As for the adjusted (GAAP) accounting practices, Apple reported $9.74 billion in ‘Adjusted Sales’ and $1.94 billion in ‘Adjusted Net income’.
The actual sales figures for each group look quite interesting. Desktop sales, which includes iMac, Mac Mini, Mac Pro and Xserves saw a decline of 10% to 849,000 units in Q3 2009 from 943,000 in the Q3 of 2008. Revenue amongst desktops was down 18% overall.
Should this really be a big surprise? No, it shouldn’t. The trend within the computing industry is desktops are on their way out as the primary computer device. There are those of us who do like to have both a desktop and a laptop, but many consumers are choosing laptops over desktops entirely.
The portable sales include the MacBook, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro lines. These resulted in a mixed blessing. While unit shipments were up 13% to 1.75 million units, up from 1.55 Million in Q3 of 2008, revenue dropped by 2%. In Q3 2008, Apple revenue from portables was $2.23 billion while in Q3 of 2009 it is only $2.20 billion.
I’m not entirely sure what this means for Apple’s portable sales. It obviously means that their sales went up, but it looks like their profits per unit dropped quite a bit.
iPod sales were not too terribly surprising, at least to me. Q3 of 2008 showed sales of $11.01 million, and revenue of $1.67 billion. While Q3 of 2009 only showed sales of $10.21 million and revenue of $1.49 billion. This is down 7% in unit sales, as well as 11% down for revenue.
The only thing I can speculate about the iPods is that the economy played a factor in this, as well as cannibalizing some iPod sales in order to favor the iPhone.
The final piece to the whole puzzle, and the biggest whopper of them all is iPhone. iPhone sales in Q3 of 2008 were a mere 717,000 units, while unit sales of the iPhone in Q3 of 2009 were a whopping 5.20 million units. That’s a humongous jump of 626% in just pure sales. Which Q3 o 2008 was the tail end of the original iPhone sales.
Revenue, as one might expect also went up year over year. The revenue generated in Q3 of 2008 for iPhone was $419 million. While Q3 of 2009 showed a revenue of $1.68 billion. A whopping 303% increase in total revenue. This all but makes up for the lacking in desktop and portable sales.
One of the most interesting changes that occurred is actually in the sales figures for Europe and Japan. For Europe, unit sales for Q3 2008 were 576,000 while revenue was $1.64 billion. In Japan, sales were 102,000 with revenue of $365 million. While in Q3 2009, sales in Europe jumped 50,000 units to 626,000 and revenue jumped $358 million to $2.00 billion in revenue. Japan saw somewhat less of an increase, yet still impressive. Sales jumped 6,000 units for a 6% gain, while revenue jumped $51 million to $416 million; or a 14% increase in revenue.
Overall, it was another good quarter for Apple. According to Apple, it was the best non-holiday quarter in their history. Now, it will be interesting to see what Apple manages to do for Q4 2009. If they manage to release a tablet, like many are speculating, I predict a rather stellar quarter. Unless it is released in October, then Q1 of FY2010 will be spectacular.
