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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.
Those are amazing numbers. It shows that by making bug-free products, offering long term support, providing great value, acting fully ethically, and listening to your customers, can make you a fair amount of money. Their secret sauce? Bringing the real engineers to the spotlight.
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).
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
And they paid $12 in taxes.
All it means is that you pay WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYYYY too much for their products.......
Apple has invented a really fabulous business model, which was previously monopolized by the churches and governments. They take a bi-yearly Apple-tax from their believers by making devices which have planned obsolescence.
Who runs on 4% margins that has any choice at all in it? There's nothing more moral or good business about razor thin margins. If you run at single digit margins you have absolutely no ability to invest in development.
Yes, they could still make more profit then anyone else -- because everyone else is putting out crap that isn't profitable, sustainable or with the economics of scale factoring into production.
That last bit is important. Samsung can match it, but they do so by making many products and they're suffering a lot lately on making money via that strategy. They're keeping share, absolutely, but making money is waning.
Apple margins are high relative to its bottom-feeding competitors partly because they are leveraging scale. They make very big deals over long terms, invest in suppliers and buy out supplies for years (Yes, at a premium rate, someone's going to mention the sapphire plant that went bust: they signed onto a deal they couldn't execute and you blame Apple? Please.)
As to the comment on taxes, I don't know what it means but it makes me think you don't know how taxes work.
They are paying 26% tax. It's right there in the filing.
It just goes to prove no one is irreplaceable; not even Jobs.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
because it trades on the US market, mayhap?
Simple rule: if you trade on the floor, you pay the fucking rent.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
No, this is really an absurd profit, Standard Oil's net profit from 1882 to 1906 was $838,783,800 equal to roughly $22B today, so on an inflation adjusted basis Apple's quarterly profit was nearly equal to the majority of the lifetime profits of one of the classic robber baron trusts.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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?
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.
I am sure some people think software developers are overpriced, but I am not going to walk into my managers office and tell him to give me a pay cut.
If they were "overcharging", they wouldn't be selling as many. Amazing how the free market works isn't it?
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.
$18 billion profit, but they can't afford to make their phones in a country with decent labour laws. Nope, can't do it. The numbers just don't add up I tell you. Apple are the apotheosis of psychopathic corporate greed, at the expense of any human decency.
yeah, and i wonder just how much tax they will avoid paying
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Not necessarily. The market rewards companies that demonstrate an ability to outproduce or out-innovate their competitors. I'm not arguing that's necessarily the case with Apple, but a company that reaps large profits doesn't necessarily indicate a broken system.
In my opinion, the best indication of a broken market is a company whose customers hate their guts yet still manage to reap huge profits. That's an indication that legitimate competitors are somehow being kept out of the market, either because of leverage/buyouts, artificial monopolies, cartels, or whatever. Capitalism is a pretty decent economic system compared to the alternatives, but anyone who thinks it's infallible isn't paying attention.
The people that buy Apple products tend to like them, enjoy using them, and regularly upgrade their products with new purchases. Whatever faults Apple has, it's hard to argue that their success is completely illegitimate.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Company tax is not based on revenue, it is based on profits.
That's only income tax. There are sales taxes, VAT, tariffs, use taxes, port fees, gas taxes, etc.
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I thought I'd check, and in their 2014 annual accounts, Apple showed tax payable of $14 billion on a net profit of $40 billion. Unless this is just some totally fictitious accounting entry, I'm not sure where you get the idea that they don't pay any tax.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Amazon: .1% operating margin.
Apple: 29.3% operating margin.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
I've never understood the true-Apple-fanboi approach to these figures, which is always joy and pride, like they've somehow "won"? The amount of times I've heard people proudly tell me how Apple has the highest profit margin on their phones - a phone which the person who is telling me this is holding - truly makes me shake my head. I can't think of many other scenarios where people are proud that they paid more for their device and the people who sold it to them paid less to make it.
When did "I win because I got ripped off the most!" become a sane argument?? By all means, be happy the company is stable and will stick around to make more devices for you or will money to invest in future devices but for goodness sakes, people, stop being proud that you're being ripped off!?
It looks to me like you've got this wrong.
According to this Forbes article from 2013, Apple routes all non-US sales revenue through Ireland. That's sketchy on the part of both Ireland and Apple, and offensive to all the other countries that get no cut from Apple's sales within their borders.
According to this financial statement, Apple paid $9.48b in current US income tax in 2014, $2.15b in current foreign income tax.
Pooling everything, in 2014 Apple had pre-tax income of $53.48b, $13.97b total income tax, for a net income of $39.51b.
I don't know how those numbers compare to other large corporations, or "socially responsible corporations", or whatever you want to compare to. But claiming that Apple routes US sales revenues through Ireland, or that Apple doesn't pay tax on its profits, appears to be completely false.
If I'm misinterpreting these numbers, please post corrections.
We don't even have to debate the evilness of walled gardens
Evilness? The walled garden is the *reason* I buy Apple products. The only annoying thing is that they don't set the walls highs enough. If they would charge a few hundred dollars per app submitted, they could (1) examine apps more closely, (2) do it faster, and (3) eliminate the millions upon millions of garbage apps that clutter the app store with the expectation it might make a few bucks.
Sure, there exists the theoretical possibility that a good app might not get submitted, but the reality is that if you don't believe in your app enough to put a few hundred dollars behind it (or find anyone else to), it's unlikely to be a very good app. Almost all successful apps have a minimum of $50-100K behind them already.
Some modest barriers to entry are a *good* thing for the vast majority of consumers. And for those who really, really want the choice? They've got a jillion Android phones to choose from. No one is forced into the walled garden.
I just wish Apple would use a small fraction of that profit to rewrite itunes, from scratch.