Apple Beats Recession With Its Best Q2 Ever
Best quarterly earnings yet for Apple, but it's not because of Macs
Despite the doom and gloom all around due to the recession, Apple has posted its best second quarter earnings results in company history.
For its fiscal 2009 second quarter ended March 28, 2009 Apple posted revenue of $8.16 billion and a net quarterly profit of $1.21 billion. These results compare to revenue of $7.51 billion and net quarterly profit of $1.05 billion at the end of the same quarter a year ago.
Yes, Apple is making more money off each sale than it did last year. Gross margin was 36.4 percent, up from 32.9 percent in the year-ago quarter.
As much PC/Mac talk goes on here though, it wasn’t sales of computers that gave Apple its recession-beating numbers. In fact, sales of Mac desktops and notebooks at 2.22 million is a 3 percent decline from a year ago. iPods were up just 3 percent, selling an impressive 11.01 million during the quarter. The real growth came from the iPhone, selling 3.79 million, representing 123 percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter.
“We are extremely pleased to report the best non-holiday quarter revenue and earnings in our history,” said Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s CFO. “Apple’s financial condition remains very robust, with almost $29 billion in cash and marketable securities on our balance sheet. Looking ahead to the third fiscal quarter of 2009, we expect revenue in the range of about $7.7 billion to $7.9 billion and we expect diluted earnings per share in the range of about $.95 to $1.00.”

Is this the "Apple Tax" you pay with any Apple product? That would mean that their products are only worth 63.6 percent of their price...
But I could be misinterpreting it... :-)
We all know about Windows vs. OS X and iPod vs. Zune. So what's happening with all the Windows Mobile phones?
with signing your life away (that is, a contract to go along with the iphone) it's typically an average price compared to similar-level phones. Though I guess it's probable that the iphone success limits the ipod growth some, as for macs...apple really needs to get a clue and take a hard, subjective look at what they are trying to do and stop being so stubborn
Call me cynical, but if computer sales are starting to decrease, I highly doubt Apple will be able to sustain themselves on iPhone's alone. There's only so many they can sell....
Apple is doing good, but so is Microsoft. None of them met expectations, and that's without mentioning market share loss in the "PC" divisions.
To me, all your complaints only sound like a sore Mac fanboy crying ,who will never accept that Microsoft is doing good even after hard evidence and cold facts support that.
Sometimes, the truth hurts doesn't it? LOL
Actually I never complained about Apple doing well. I am well aware the all computer sales in general are down. I was simply pointing out that Apple has probably been making less profit in recent months immediately after the crash. Having the best second quarter is great, but how about all those other months since September 2008? Have they also been increasing their profit?
"Apple is doing good [things]" is not a fact. That is your opinion. We at Tom's Hardware value technology that gives us function and performance. Apple is clearly more concerned with the basic home user who only cares to browse the web, music, pictures and maybe some word processing. So to everyone here who uses their computer for high end tasks that require quad core processors and huge graphics cards, Apple is going to get a lot of flack here. Maybe Apple is doing good things for people who only have basic tasks, but that doesn't apply to anyone here.
This is an opinion, Apple makes machines that have done more High End tasks for a long time, more than likely most of the Movies and Music you watch/listen to were edited and rendered on an Apple product. If you don't watch movies or listen to music, then I guess that wouldn't apply to you. And if you have ever done any kind of this work you would know how CPU intensive this type of work is.
And some people are just ignorant.
Looks like I had some of my historical figures wrong. Looks like Apple had about 570 Million in Cash and Assets during it's lowest of times.
This should put a dent in mac haters.
I will probably never own one because its simply to annoying to type without a keyboard for me and its simply to pricey (both phone and plan). But by and large the people I know who do buy them not only claim to enjoy them but actually USE the different functionality present. As compared to many other smart phones that many people have that I know but don't fully utilize quite as often.
Granted there are exceptions galore to the picture as I just painted it but in general I believe its fairly accurate. Do you pay a lot for the device and service by comparison? Yep. But on the whole it works and encourages people who buy it to actually use the features it has.
That's a great step forward for the market as a whole. You don't have to like apple, or their product to appreciate that. Its OK to recognize when a company has done well with something. It doesn't mean you like OSX, or macs. It means you're a big enough person to step back and acknowledge a job well done both in marketing and design. It can be argued that they could have done x or y thing better, but that's true of pretty much anything.
After wards we can all go back and shake our heads at the idiocy of the the one button ipod...which still blows my mind that it made it past any semblance of an internal review.
Still I don't mind the overpriced apple products, they are just not for me. their target market is : Snobs and Know it alls with too much money and time on their hands. (except my girlfriend, who is educated, smart, cool and beautiful and none of the above... I'm sooo dead now)
What this news tell me is what I thought for almost two years now has come true: Apple is a (1) Cellphone company that produces other (2) handheld devices and (3) personnal computers and (4) software for all previously named product lines.
Great for them if it turns good proffits, the economy needs companys that do well. I just hope they stop posing as a computer OEM when it is only a tertiary product line for them.