Apple announced its retail locations brought in $1.74 billion during the December quarter, selling more than a half billion Macs for the fiscal first quarter.
At a time when retailers search for ways to attract customers and announce the shuttering of poorly-performing shops, Apple said it raked in $7 million for each of its 251 stores.
Large discounts and bundling iPods with other Mac items accounted for much of the upturn in retail income.
Despite the tight economy, nearly 47 million people visited Apple retail locations during the quarter, company finance chief Peter Oppenheimer told investors Wednesday.
However, Apple stores are not immune from the U.S. economic recession. The margin for retail outlets shrank in the December quarter to $353 million from $405 million in 2007. Although Apple plans to cut ribbons for 25 new stores in 2009, half of those will be outside the U.S., Oppenheimer said.
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
4 responses to “Apple Stores Sell 500M Macs, Earn $1.74B In Q1”
Oh, Eddy, poor thingie, where is your brain? Maybe you better figure this out first before you figure out “trends and the finances of large (and small) technology companies”, huh?
How many billions again?