Apple on Tuesday reported record sales and profits for the last three months of 2010 that far exceeded analysts’ bullish forecasts.
“Apple is already the envy of a lot of companies,” said Shaw Wu, an analyst with Kaufman Brothers. “Yet after they have reached such a high pinnacle, they seem to be able to distance themselves even further from the competition.”
Apple’s strong results are likely to go a long way toward easing investors’ worries — at least for now — over the health of Steven P. Jobs, the company’s co-founder and chief executive. Mr. Jobs, a survivor of pancreatic cancer who received a liver transplant in early 2009, said Monday that he would take an indefinite medical leave.
“We had a phenomenal holiday quarter with record Mac, iPhone and iPad sales,” Mr. Jobs said in a news release. “We are firing on all cylinders and we’ve got some exciting things in the pipeline for this year.”
In a conference call with top Apple executives, including Timothy D. Cook, the chief operating officer, who will be running the company during Mr. Jobs’s absence, analysts did not ask a single question about Mr. Jobs’s health.
Two analysts said they believed that Apple would not have answered them and that its executives would have been “irritated” by the questions. Apple said its net income in the last three months of 2010 rose 78 percent from a year earlier to a record $6 billion, or $6.43 a share, from $3.4 billion, or $3.67 a share, a year earlier. Revenue soared more than 70 percent to $26.74 billion, from $ 15.68 billion a year earlier.
On average, Wall Street analysts forecast that Apple would report revenue of $24.5 billion in the last three months of the year and have net income of about $5.38 a share.
Full story: Apple’s Holiday Sales Help It Exceed Expectations – NYTimes.com.