Apple Posts $18B Quarterly Profit, the Highest By Any Company, Ever

jmcbain writes: Yesterday, Apple reported its financial results for the quarter ending December 27, 2014. The company posted $18 billion in profit (on $74 billion in revenue), the largest quarterly profit by any company, ever. The previous record was $16 billion by Russia's Gazprom (the largest natural gas extractor in the world) in 2011. Apple sold 74.5 million iPhones last quarter, along with 5.5 million Macs and 21.4 million iPads.

Comments

It is hard to know what to think

[TrollstonButterbeans]

Apple arguably makes the best phones and when using Android phones you notice little things here and there that aren't quite a nice, but these are rather rare and mostly insignificant.

It feels strange that Apple is making such a profit with a rather smallish that may be 12% of the market and no particularly eye-popping new products since the Steve Jobs era, just a series of well-engineered refinements.

Then again, certain shoe and apparel companies do this and have done this for decades. Seems odd to see this in technology sector that historically has been very market-share, volume and dominance oriented. However historically, this was the method employed since the early days of Apple (premium pricing).

Re:It is hard to know what to think

[swb]

It feels strange that Apple is making such a profit with a rather smallish that may be 12% of the market and no particularly eye-popping new products since the Steve Jobs era, just a series of well-engineered refinements.

I think you underestimate the "eye-popping" value of the 6 Plus screen size among consumers. I've owned every new iPhone since the 3GS and despite waiting a couple of months after the release date, still had a backorder time of 6 weeks when I ordered a 6 Plus. That hasn't happened for any other model.

It may not have been an eye-popping change in absolute technology terms or geek credibility, but what would be and would consumers care? There's too many constraints on size and battery life for more much more than incrementalism.

Plus I think all smartphone vendors want to maintain the current niche paradigm for these devices -- the consumer understands the "role" of the smartphone in their larger electronics ecosystem.

I think it will take someone willing to gamble on the idea of a dockable phone that can be used with KVM as a PC and/or tetherable to a "screen only" tablet to really shift the paradigm a lot. Apple could do it since they control the whole ecosystem but likely want to protect their product segments from sales loss, x86 is too power hungry and Windows failed on RISC and with Metro.

Google seems likely since they aren't specifically tied to given CPU and so much of Chrome is web-focused. Maybe Project Ara is sort of the start of this to sort out the modularity aspect so that you can assemble an Android/Chome system from parts or dock components with other components.

18B on 75B

[houghi]

That is 24%. That means your device could be 20% cheaper and they would STILL make more money then anybody else in percentage per product in the electronics world.
So instead of 500USD for the Ipad2, you could be paying 400USD and they would still make money.

And some people don't think Apple is overpriced.

I bet the before and after tax is the same. Legal? Yes. Moral? Nope.

Re:18B on 75B

[Ixokai]

Look, someone compares market wants to religion. Again. Because they can't fathom that people decide to buy things with reason and knowledge behind their choices.

No. It *has* to be the Cult of Apple, nothing else explains why someone makes a different choice from you.

The funny thing is, you say we're the religious ones. Your faith fails to work as you want and predict the reality you experience, so we're the cultists. Its us who are irrational, not you who say things should be different from how things are.

Good luck with that.

Headline is flat out wrong

[WWJohnBrowningDo]

The highest by any publicly traded company, you mean. I'm pretty sure Saudi Aramco is at the top with annual profits estimated at a whooping $182 billion. Where else do you think the terrorists and the Bush family keep getting all that money from?

Asian success was not unexpected

[Camembert]

I live since a few years in Asia (first Singapore, now Hong Kong). 3 years ago I saw lots of people with iphones in de metro, gradually this shifted to mainly big Samsung phablets which are really popular here. Switcher friends told me that they liked their iphone 4/4S but they simply like a bigger screen more.
Now, the iPhone 6 Plus is (very visibly in the metro) stealing customers back from the Android camp, often these are switching back buyers.
I did ask a few colleagues about their switch back, the general opinion is that while they needed to unlearn a few Android habits, they thought that the Apple gear worked very well, and (ALWAYS a factor mentioned by the lady colleagues) they thought that the iphone was simply a beautiful, elegant device.

I upgraded 2 months ago from a 4S to the 6 Plus myself. I am not so impressed by hateful online arguments (nor do I have a problem with Android phones), and it must be said that it works indeed very smoothly. It is still just about portable and the comfort has made me almost abandon my old ipad (between the 6Plus, and the small MAcbook Air the ipad sits now a bit uncomfortably). Also, the camera is remarakable. Without doing scientific tests, I have the impression that the general image quality is akin to my old Nikon D200 (without the nice bokeh of course), the pictures are more than good enough for most casual uses.

Re:= 5-digit figure tax payed

[smash]

No. They sell a solution to a problem. You buy an iOS device, and a Mac, and you get the benefits of tight integration between the products to get things done with a minimum of fucking around. Transparent sync between them. Transparent phone backups to either the cloud or your machine. Transparent voice calls from your laptop via your phone. Application state shared between devices. Transparent, out of the box encryption. No one else in the market place offers such things without manual fucking about to get it to work.

That is what Apple sells. And a lot of techies will argue "blah i can do that with my Android + Chrome + Linux box just fine!". Good for you. How many hours did you spend setting it up?

Setting all of that up in the Apple ecosystem is merely logging into your AppleID on all your devices. Job done. Move onto something more important.

Re:Tax

[MachineShedFred]

So when Tim Cook sat in front of a Senate Finance committee, sworn in and under subpoena, and said that they paid almost $6B in taxes in 2013 he was lying?

Why isn't he in jail if he lied to all those Senators under oath, on something so easily disproven?

Or are you just misinformed and wrong? I think we know which is more likely.