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Apple Announces Most Profitable Quarter in History
zacharye writes with an except from an article over at BGR about Apple's quarterly results: "'Disappointing' though it may have been to some, the iPhone 4S propelled what is now confirmed to have been the most profitable quarter any technology company has ever recorded. Apple on Wednesday reported record earnings for the December quarter, revealing a profit of $13.06 billion on revenue that surpassed $46 billion. Among technology companies, Apple's fiscal first quarter represents the most profitable quarter ever recorded. Only one U.S. company has ever posted a more profitable quarter — Exxon managed a profit of $14.8 billion in the third quarter of 2008 — and the driving force behind Apple's record-setting performance was quite clearly the iPhone."
abusus non tollit usum
: abuse does not take away use, i.e., is not an argument against proper use
That is, fanboyish reactions do not strip the relevance of one of the largest players in a tech industry making more money than ever before, or prevent sane discussion of the fact.
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
You should learn a few things about investing before making a fool out of yourself. The fact that AAPL shares are above 400$ bares no meaning at all on whether the price is "sky high" or not. Berkshire Hathaway class A shares are over 100,000$ each and their price is not "sky high" either. It's all about the actual valuation metrics of the company relative to the share price and according to them, AAPL was actually pretty fairly priced before the earnings release.
Or are you going to be making even more of a fool out of yourself by sticking to your guns and saying that a PE of 15 for a company with projected 30% revenue growth is "sky high"? Except that it was actually even cheaper then that, because the revenue growth ended up being twice higher.
There are only 3 models of iOS phones currently being sold. You can't expect one of the tens-hundreds of Android phones to outsell anything on a platform of only 3 models.
And the reason for this is that Android users have Choice - this is a Good Thing, not a Bad Thing.
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
[...] and had to be rescued by Microsoft.
I'm not sure that's entirely true.
One of Apple's biggest problems at the time was that they were going out of business. It was all over the news, in case you missed it. Apple was going out of business. Everybody knew Apple was going out of business.
Now, would you buy a product from a company that everybody knew was going out of business? Would you consider selling parts or components to a company that everybody knew was going out of business? If you would do so, would you offer them decent credit terms? Of course not--they're going out of business! Everybody knew that Apple was going out of business! You'd be crazy to offer them any kind of credit because they'd go out of business and you'd be left trying to collect pennies on the dollar in bankruptcy court.
It's tough to build iMacs when you have to pay cash up front for parts.
Microsoft's cash investment was $150 million in common stock--remember that, at the time, Apple had something like 4 billion dollars in the bank. So the dollar amount wasn't that much. It was more the press of Apple being aligned with Microsoft to basically shut up all the "Apple is going out of business" people. Once everybody decided that Microsoft wouldn't let Apple go out of business because then Microsoft would be a monopoly (of course,, Microsoft tried to play the Apple card during their monopoly trial and the judge decided that Apple was not a competitor of Microsoft), Apple was able to get better terms.
I will agree that Microsoft "rescued" Apple. But the rescue was more in the terms of reputation than in cash.
First of all, if Apple does any R&D, I'm fully unaware of it.
Apparently, such fullsome unawareness is a willful choice on your part, because R&D is a line item in public companies' income statements. Looks like Apple spent $758 million last quarter. If that's typical, then that's about $3 billion a year.
I guess you're fully aware now.
Advice: on VPS providers
Mmm... when Steve came back in 1996 and introduced the reworked Apple (with cleaning of the board and going back to the strongpoints) he also announced a deal with Microsoft where MS injected money for non-voting shares (that MSFT made use of 5 or so years later with hefty profit) and promised to bring office etc to Apple's platform for N years. THAT did save Apple to some extent as Steve's said that they were days away from bankruptcy.
But - How come we don't hear the politicians demanding a "windfall profits tax" like they did with Exxon two years ago? I guess it's only bad to make a profit if you're an evil oil company, but if your a tech company it's a good thing to rake-in equivalent amounts of money.
Um because Exxon was collecting subsidies from the US government at the same time they were making extreme amounts of profit. I am unaware that Congress enacted laws to give Apple subsidies. Also Exxon moved their headquarters to Switzerland to reduce taxes than Apple which is still an American company. Now if you go down to Houston, the buildings and workers are still there. They just moved to Switzerland on paper.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.