Apple may not be recession proof, but it's doing surprisingly well for all that investor hand-wringing and stock trashing nonsense that went on earlier this year. While the company wasn't able to repeat its record-breaking first quarter performance, it did set a March quarter record for revenue and earnings and once again beat Wall Street's estimates.
Indeed, it would appear the stagnant economy is having virtually no effect on Mac sales. Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer said the company sold 2,289,000 of the computers during the quarter, a 51 percent unit growth and 54 percent revenue growth over the year-ago quarter. That's more than two and a half times the overall market growth rate for PCs, too.
Interestingly, it appears that MacBooks, Macbook Pros (and yes, even MacBook Airs) are continuing to fly off the shelves. Apple said laptops saw unit and revenue growth of 61 and 58 percent over the same period last year. Even more surprising, unit and revenue were actually up, 7 and 5 percent, respectively, from Q1. Yes, that would be the record-breaking holiday quarter. While Apple didn't break sales down into precise categories, it's safe to assume a lot of that money came from new MacBook Pro and MacBook Air purchases.
In total, the company reported revenue of $7.51 billion, up 43 percent year-over-year, which was also more than $500,000 above Wall Street estimates.
For the quarter, Oppenheimer said the company moved:
- 10,644,000 million iPods, representing one percent unit growth and eight percent revenue growth over the year-ago quarter.
- 1,703,000 iPhones, which falls somewhere in the middle of analyst estimates which were 1.5 to 2 million. Total iPhone-related revenue recognized for the quarter was $378 million.
During the call, Oppenheimer also said Apple generated about $4 billion in cash flow from operations in the first half of fiscal 2008, which yields an ending cash balance of $19.4 billion. Not too shabby.
Regarding the ongoing iPhone shortage, COO Tim Cook would only say that Apple is still committed to hitting the 10 million mark by the end of the year. "At this point, both inventories in stores and the channel are low," he said. "We believe the reason for this is that there are more phones being bought with the intention of being locked, which is a significant number."
Unfortunately, Cook didn't offer any estimates this time about what that number is, but he did say the company continues to see this trend "as a proxy for the worldwide demand for the phone."
"We're on target to roll out into more countries in Europe and Asia later in the year," he said.
Figuring in those 1.7 million in iPhone sales for the quarter, that now means Apple has shipped about 5.7 million phones worldwide.
On a related note, Cook also told listeners that developer demand for the iPhone SDK continues to be strong. So far, 200,000 developers have downloaded kit, he said, and more are being added each week.
As for the dwindling iPod sales, there weren't too many surprises during the call. Oddly, it appears we're starting to see a reversal trend when it comes to iPod revenue and unit sale numbers from a couple years ago. Whereas during the second quarter of 2005 and 2006, iPod unit sales were up 24 precent and revenue was down one percent. This quarter, sales were barely up a measly one percent while revenue was up 8 percent from the year ago quarter. That seems to confirm that those buying the now ubiquitous devices are opting for the higher priced models like the Touch and Classic.
Apple stock was down a fraction of a percent in after hours trading at $162.80.
