Apple earnings rise by 36%, mac leads in revenue contribution

Apple’s revenue grew 43 per cent for its fiscal second quarter ended March 29. Apple said its gross margin, a raw measure of the company’s profitability, declined to 32.9 per cent from 35.1 per cent a year ago.

APPLE’s iPhone and iPod indeed gets most of the limelight, but it is company’s old Macintosh computer business that defied a broad slowdown in consumer spending to deliver a 36 per cent increase in profit. Apple’s shares plummeted during the first few months of the year on concerns that its relatively pricey products could suffer because of softening consumer spending, but they have rebounded more than 30 per cent since the beginning of March as those concerns ebbed, and investors became more bullish about the prospects for future Apple products, including new iPhones.

In contrast, shipments of new PCs worldwide grew by only 12 per cent, according to research firm Gartner. While it is still a niche player compared with PC titans like Dell and Hewlett-Packard, Apple’s strength is helping it to gain share on rivals. Apple commanded 6.6 per cent of US domestic PC sales during the first three months of the year, up from 5.2 per cent a year earlier, according to Gartner.

The Mac business is benefiting from several factors, including a family of sleek, critically praised desktops and laptops. Apple’s computers now also easily run Microsoft’s Windows operating system, which has helped Apple in a long-running campaign to persuade Windows users to switch to Macs. Apple said it sold 1.7 million iPhones in the quarter, in line with what many analysts were projecting. The product, from which Apple earns revenue from hardware sales and fees shared by wireless carriers, isn’t a big contributor to Apple’s current results, because Apple defers much of the revenue from the product over a 24-month period.

Apple shipped 2.3 million Macintosh computers, a 51 percent rise in units and 54 percent revenue growth from the year-ago quarter. It sold 10.6 million iPods, a 1 percent growth in units and 8 percent growth in revenue from a year ago. iPhone sales for the quarter were 1.7 million.

click icon to boomark