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Apple Posts 4th Quarter Financial Results
theanonymousbrit writes "From the AppleInsider article: 'Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2004 fourth quarter ended September 25, 2004. For the quarter, the Company posted a net profit of $106 million, or $.26 per diluted share.' This profit (on a revenue of $2.35 billion) apparently constitutes Apple's highest fourth quarter in nine years. In terms of actual units shipped, over 830,000 Macs and 2 million iPods were sold over the quarter. The strength of the new iMac G5 is also credited. Pretty impressive figures."
that apple is dying now?
Don't save Windows XP! http://www.petitiononline.com/jjw1xp/petition.html
... about Apple's continued success is that there is no apparent successor to Steve Jobs. Back in the beige days before Jobs returned ... I seriously thought Apple was going to disappear.
What Jobs has done to re-invigorate the company has been amazing, but what happens if something happens to Steve? Is there anyone else who can whip up the "reality distortion field" with the same frenzy to make Apple stay the trendy, innovative company that they are now.
I know the talent will be there, but without the leadership, will Apple again drift like back in the Gil A. days and fade into obscurity?
It just makes me nervous to think that the sole success of this company might hinge on the availability of Steve Jobs. (It's not like people live forever, you know)
That's great, but what are they going to do with all their spare cash? They are already building a much better operating system than Microsoft's offerings with their existing budget. It doesn't matter how kick-ass their operating system is any more - it's ahead of the competition, and the only thing stopping them from taking a larger market share is the fact that they don't have the critical mass of market share there already.
What I would like to see Apple do is be more agressive in getting people to switch. Advertising is nice, but people who just use computers rather than having them as a hobby aren't going to pay much attention. They have a computer already, and they are comfortable with what they know.
How about a trade-in? People bring their old PCs to their local Apple store, and they get a big discount off a new Apple. Or perhaps a free training course (with certificate) when buying an Apple computer. The training course alone will ease newbies in and show them how easy it is, and the certificate will attract the people looking to improve their resume.
Apple don't have a problem building a better system than Microsoft's. They do have a problem with the network effect. When you ask your neighbour for help to fix your computer, chances are, he's only going to know Windows. When you walk into a newsagents, 99% of the magazines are focussed on Windows. When you copy a game from a friend, it'll be a Windows game. This is Apple's bottleneck; it doesn't matter how kick-ass their product is, they are only going to have marginal increases in market share as long as they think outperforming the competition is enough.
From what I've heard Microsoft sold that stock off a long time ago.
Of course, they do make a nice hefty sum off of Office for Mac...
Listening to the analyst conference call, which is a pretty interesting thing to do, regardless of the company, Apple disclosed, and did not disclose, some interesting items:
(1) They have reached supply/demand balance with the G5 processors with the potential exception of the top market 2.5 Ghz which may have slightly more demand over the next three months than IBM can supply for.
(2) They would not discuss the possibility of FLASH based iPods and/or lower cost units to penetrate the low end market
(3) Apple reitterated thier interest in the $800+ desktop market and not the sub $800 market
(4) About 30% of Apple store sales are to people who have previously owned Windows boxes and their sales to people who have never owned a PC are down from the pervious year, which Apple attributed to there being fewer and fewer people who have never owned a PC before.
(5) The new iMac G5 is off to an impressive start and they wish they could have had it for back to school buying season.
(6) Their current iPod promption is an exclusive pre-release with U2. Apple feels very good about their strategy that is holding 70% of the on-line legal download market with Wal-mart and Real at 6%, Napster with 10%.
(7) iPod is in lots of channels including BestBuy (ed note, I have also seen for sale at Foly's department store in Texas and the HP iPod is for sale at Radio Shack). This is iPod only but Apple continues to look for strong retail partners for CPUs as well.
(8) An analyst said 'hPod' and the Apple person corrected him to the tune of the HP branded iPod or something of that nature.
(9) Apple's board from time to time considers stock buy back programs but is not interested in one at this time. This is noteworthy because many top level Apple execs (Jobs being most notable) have very large stock option packages but low salary (Jobs' being $1). Since a share of stock is a percentage of ownership in the company, when the company issues more shares, this dilutes the value of a single share already outstanding. By buying back stock in the open market, a company would increase stock value, because exisitng stock would have the reverse effect, it would become a larger percentage of the company than it was previously. Since Apple is trading at over $40 per share now, not buying back the stock could signal that Apple Corp thinks it over valued at $40, does not want to drive the stock price higher, or simply is interested in investing the cash into R&D, merchandising, etc.
(10) Apple did have a truly wonderful quarter and it is a shame we will never know how it would have faired with a larger suply of iMac G4 or quicker availability of the iMac G5.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
*rolleyes*
/seriously/ claiming that, at a time when Apple had about 3 billion in cash, a 200 million "injection" "saved" them?
Are you
Apple wasn't bankrupt in '97, nor anywhere near it. They simply lacked focus.
However, the investment was a very big deal, and did help stabilize Apple's position. The reasons are far less simple than you are suggesting, though.
It showed that a big player thought Apple was worth investing it. It promised five years of Office updates. It stopped multiple lawsuits between the two companies. This helped reassure people that Apple wasn't going anywhere, but it was about much more than the money.
Also, as I understand it, Microsoft sold off that non-voting stock years ago, and is no longer making any money off of the deal.
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Those who have built great companies have done so knowing that their time will come - either in death or retirement. Smart management requires the organization to not depend on a single point of failure.
True, Jobs is the living incarnatiuon of Apple, but Jobs did not deisgn the iPod. Jobs didn't design the iMac G4. Jobs didn't code OS X. In all these things, Jobs was part of the vision, in many cases at Apple, he seems to be the prime visionary, but this 'rubs off' and inspires others and will continue to.
Apple has a strong culture. Cultures don't change overnight and any Jobs replacement would have to fit the culture the Board wants to perpetuate.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
My order for my iMac G5 is in, ships next month. I think your fears about getting help are unfounded. As an experiment we got my wife an iBook... we'd never used a mac before (I admit I do know Unix quite well)... We were able to do most anything with no assistance (or even reading a manual) at all. Even setting up Xcode for Java for my wife's programming class at college. You try something, it just works. Don't have to worry about viruses, don't have to worry about active x controls installing spyware or taking over the browser - that is why people usually need "help" with their computer. So, now we are switching our main box to an apple... still have to keep a pc on hand for games, but for the most part, your fears are unfounded thanks to a very easy to use and elegant interface. It really does just work.
There are literally hundreds of places in the US looking for older computers and spare parts. They could easily donate to them and BAM...write-off.
"It'll destroy you if you try to make it mean anything to anyone but yourself." - Henry Rollins
Debeleaguered? Unbeleaguerble?
10. Can't survive without Microsoft's Cash Infusion
9. Have no hope of selling into "the Enterprise"
8. Sell hardware for too much
7. Are really a Software Company
6. Are really a Hardware Company
5. Can never equal the market share of Microsoft
4. can never equal the market share of Dell or (heh) Gateway
3. Their retail strategy will sink them (see reference in #4)
2. They don't give it away like Linux
and the Number one
1. One Button Mouse.
(Did I miss any?)
Thanks, I'll be here all week, try the veal.
What saved them was not the $200m, but Microsoft's continued commitment to ship MS Office and other MS products for Mac.
I rather care about Apple giving the best computer-experience available right now. But if they have a healthy business strategy, great for competition and the consumers. Great news then !
Animoog.org
I'm an Apple fan but this arguement is just plain stupid. The developer problem facing Apple is not the lack of big names like Adobe and Microsoft but the lack of small names you're probably never heard.
Seriously! There's no Spybot or Ad-Aware on Mac OS X! WTF am I supposed to do when I run IE and get 0wnz0red by spyware?!?
Seriously guys, I have a windows 2 button usb mouse, and it works fine with my mac. So shut up about the mouse. It's just like complaining that you hate windows because it doesen't come with mozilla. -_-
Total shipments were 48.4 million for 2004q4. So, Apple's share of that is 1.7%. HP, in contrast, shipped 7.5 million PCs in the same time frame, a 15.5% share.
Why is it that there's constant hand wringing over apple's market share, and there's NOT constant hand wringing over BMW's (who holds less a share of the automobile market than Apple does of the personal computer market) market share? I didn't buy I mac because I wanted a Ford Torus. I bought a mac because I wanted luxury.
With that said, Apple's 90% share of the HDD based music player, and 70% share of the (DRMed) online music market is pretty impressive. I don't think either holds, but it will certainly be quite hard to unseat Apple from the top of either pile (with no real challenger in sight).
Apple has been producing better quality that is not really expensive. The G5 has impove the power of thier desktop systems over the G4. The PowerMac and Xserve are price comprabale to Xeon/Opteron workstations and servers offering sometimes with better performance. The Imac is more expandable than before with faster componments(g5,hypertransport bus,SATA). Moreover, it is priced less than or equal to similarly equipped Dell (4700), Gateway (Profile 5), and HP (Pavillion) systems. The operating system is a better consumer OS than Windows XP or Linux. Then there is the iPod which has taken the music player market. I expect Apple to ride this wave for quite sometime.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
The influx of NeXT computing programming houses actually makes this argument weaker, not stronger. As GNUStep progresses in its goal to resync with Mac OS X, another crop of small developers you never heard of will be writing using Cocoa on Mac OS X and GNUStep on Linux.
The developer problem is a lot better now that first class tools ship with every Mac. I expect the problem to get better, not worse over time.
How about Apple's wikipedia entry?
Not true! Scotty has had an iBook for some time now, and apparently Captain Kirk is saving up for a G5 tower. Mr. Spock, of course, is sticking with his ancient Pentium II running NetBSD....
Yeah, but who's gonna fix it when it breaks?
Man, analogies are fun.
Four weeks, Twenty papers, that's two dollars
Honestly, what is so important about market share? Apple is making a tidy profit, has a nice wad of money in the bank, is hiring new people, makes a great product, and has happy customers. If their market share is only 1.7%, well that means they have tons of growing room. Sounds like a good company in good shape to me, and they also sound like a lot nicer a company than most.
Technology: after the PC crash in fall 2000, Apple's competitors hunkered down and shed workers by the thousands. Apple invested in R&D, and came out with OSX, G5, and new iMac designs. I see no reason for that successful strategy to not continue in better times.
Development: The Macintosh has tons of good software. There are the big names already mentioned. There are all the shareware and freeware programs (just take a gander at VersionTracker). Thanks to Apple being savvy about Unix and Open Source, there is also a ton of software being ported over from Linux.
If you are all that amped by market share, Apple does have 82% of the mp3 player market.
"No one's going to die, mister. Mothra's going to come and save us."
Taiki Goto, "Mothra", December 14, 1996
(Released in Japan six days before Apple's surprise announcement of the return of Steve Jobs.)
Why is it that there's constant hand wringing over apple's market share, and there's NOT constant hand wringing over BMW's (who holds less a share of the automobile market than Apple does of the personal computer market) market share? I didn't buy I mac because I wanted a Ford Torus. I bought a mac because I wanted luxury.
Whether or not it's a Luxury machine, it's what you wanted. A BMW might have a low market share, but also the top selling sedan in the USA might also have a low market share when compared to the set of "All Vehicles". When it comes to the market share of cars, what matters isn't that comparison, but comparison to their direct competition. Whatever top selling passenger car there is, is competing against Other passenger cars, HP Servers compete against All Servers. HP Desktops compete against Desktops, Cheap & Cheerful PCs compete against other Cheap & Cheerful PCs, and so on.
Saying that Mack Trucks make only 0.3% of the total vehicle market sounds pretty fucked up, because it's a useless statistic.
I don't think it's fair that you got modded down, unless you really meant to troll of course, which, in a Mac section of any forum will get you flamed quite quickly.
Let's look at it from the perspective of a few potential software developers, one small, i.e. shareware, one big, i.e. enterprise ERP and one in a specialised field, i.e graphics.
The case of the small developer: You only need to spend a small amount of time with the generally extremely low quality level and huge mass of sharware software available on download.com to notice that you are both right and wrong here. The huge marketshare of pc's means that the majority of shareware gets developed for Windows PC, BUT also the large majority of junk made by semi-incompetent developers. The market is so large and the competition so high, that as a sshareware devloper for Windows, your chances of making a buck and getting recognition are tiny.
The situation is very different for Mac OSX and Macs. Here, the avergae quality level is quite a bit higher, perhaps because the community being smaller, the word gets around quicker if something is a dud. The Mac shareware developer has a good chance of getting recognition and even money for his work, because the market is smaller.
Let's look at the enterprise market: Apple now makes both servers and raid storage solutions, both of which offer excellent value and performance and very good management tools. These products are obviously selling, both in Apple's traditional media market, where video and sound demand these products as they fit in with Apple's other strengths in this area, and in other enterprises where they fit in perfectly with Linux and Unix servers. The fact that Oracle, Sybase and SAP offer their products for the Mac now shows that the interest is there.
There are indeed corporations using OSX, often because the TCO is very low, the quality high, and because OSX is so extremely flexible to fit in in mixed environments, and because it supports traditional Unix enterprise systems very well (The Java integration is the best available)
Last, let's look at traditional niche markets, such as designers and media industries. This is one area where Apple lost a lot of marketshare in the late 90's and early 2000's because OS9 was unstable and OSX 10.0/10.1 so slow and had so little software available. Many designers moved to Windows and the PC marketshare of Adobe and Macromedia etc, shot up.
That situation has now stopped and people are moving back to the Mac because of its superior colour management and stability and flexibility and simplicity. In video and sound, Apple competes extremely well with its own applications and Adobe, Macromedia, Alias, Quark etc have all now overcome the initial problems and their apps are again second to none on the Mac. I am willing to wager money that media types are simply more productive in a Mac environment, than in a PC environment. I used to be a Windows sysadmin, so I know what I'm talking about.
And then there's the new market of people switching to Macs from PC's. The iMac and iBook are made for these people. A simple, well performing, rugged, stable, virus and problem free, stable computer and OS makes friends on its own.
In fact, about the only market where Apple does have difficulties is in the traditional medium business where there is basically only MSOffice and a few servers, or where there are applications which have never had Mac equivalents, such as AutoCAD and engineering applications.
What would you say, perhaps, if in 5 to 10 years, Linux had captured 50% marketshare in the PC market? Would you also ask where the applications were now today? Or would you look at the growth in Linux in general.
As long as Apple keeps on growing, developers will keep on making apps for the platform, even, with time, specialised ones.
I'm certainly not worried.
One guy further down asked what Apple would do since its marketshare is so small, even though its total userbase is constantly growing.
Most of us who use Macs and PCs know how good the Mac and Mac OSX is. For us, the people who know both sides (and who really doesn't these days?) there is no question.
But the guy raised my interest because I wondered what kind of strategy Apple keeps up its sleeve in case a crisis hits such as the one in the mid 90's. What products and goals would Apple have if large Mac software developers started deserting the platform for Windows or perhaps even Linux in the future? (For instance a lot of Games studios now produce Linux versions, which they didn't before and even Macromedia is considering developing for Linux). What would Apple do if MS stopped producing Office for Mac OSX and Adobe decided that it isn't worth the money develpoing for Mac?
I think Apple under Jobs considers this scenario very often in designing products.
In order to ease the dependance on pure Mac sales, not that Macs will die anytime in the next decade or so, if ever (Dvorak, you clown, where are you?), I think Apple started the semi-independant iPod and iTMS products that, although loosely coupled with Macs in marketing and software, appeal to a far broader base of customers than Macs do. This division is so successful that it even allows Apple to use it as a marketing device for the new iMac.
I think Apple spends more time than possibly any other company in both product R&D and market segment R&D. I don't know any other company that makes as much effort to cater for its various market segments, with the iMacs and iBooks for consumers and education, PowerMacs and PowerBooks for professionals and XServes and XRaid for enterprise, with especially ahuge amount of effort being put into the i- range to make them more appealing than your run of the mill PC or laptop. Added to this the huge amount of research that they must put into OSX R&D in order to keep it as simple, stable and powerful AND goodlooking as it is.
Then there's Apple's software line, ranging from the extremely well thought out and simple but powerful iLife apps, to the professional video and audio applications in whose markets Apple almost dominates. And even the very nice small business database Filemaker belongs to Apple, to round things off.
But back to the main subject. What does Apple do to stave off Microsoft and Adobe desasters? In the first case, Apple has a not very well kept secret that it keeps OSX compiled and up to date for x86. This mere fact is probably enough to keep Microsoft on its toes and keep the Office version for PPC rolling. The strange CherryOS post of yesterday showed just how much interest there would be for OSX on x86. If I put on my tin-foil hat I would be nice a conspiracy minded and say that the CherryOS debacle would be in Apple's inerests in order to simply show MS how muuch damage Apple could do to MS' marketshare.
Then, anyone who's been watching the development of OSX 10.4 Tiger knows about the CoreImage and CoreVideo technolgies. Those two technologies allow developers to slowly start gnawing away at Adobe's domination in that market, by making it easy for graphics developers to make applications that now only Photoshop and Illustrator can do. Apple is extremely clever in doing this because it will be a slow process, one that Adobe won't notice and suddenly kill InDesign and PS and AI, until the competition slowly makes itself known, when it will be too late for Adobe to blackmail Apple the way Gates did in the 80's with Excell and Word forcing MacBasic out.
In doing this Apple is taking a page from Microsoft who orginally got its strong position by using developer power. (Ballmer didn't dance on stage for fun, you know. He really meant that)
I think Apple has an even rosier future than imagined.
But then again, maybe the new iPod with image capability will be an absolute dud, so you never know.
If you really want it, you can have it: Macmice.com makes a two-button mouse that looks like Apple's, but with a 'split' near the front and a scrollwheel.... Haven't tried them but they do look nice. Bluetooth versions too.
Software developers look at more than hardware marketshare.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.