Apple’s report for the December quarter beat Wall Street expectations, Wednesday. Bucking others in the technology sector hurt by the ailing economy, the Cupertino, Calif.-based company announced quarterly sales of $10.17 billion, surpassing investor predictions of $9.74 billion.
“Even as the consumer disappeared, Apple managed to report record quarterly revenues,” ThinkEquity analyst Vijay Rakesh told clients Thursday morning.
Apple reported selling 2.5 million Macs for December, a nine percent increase over the same period in 2007. Much of that came from new MacBooks launched in October. Although 2007 saw desktop sales climb with the introduction of refreshed iMacs, in 2008 Apple unveiled new unibody aluminum MacBooks, as well as a price reduction for its entry-level white plastic MacBook.
As a result of the new portables, notebook sales grew 34 percent while desktop demand slumped by 25 percent, compared to 2007, Apple said. The company earned $2.51 billion for MacBook sales while bringing in $1.04 billion from desktops.
The gains in Macs sales come amid a backdrop of a 20 percent to 25 percent drop in December PC sales, Rakesh noted.
Although onlookers expected new MacBooks would create a spike in Mac sales, Apple reported a sharp rise in sales of portable media players, a sector many believed to have leveled-off.
Apple said it sold 22.7 million iPods, a 100 percent jump from September. The consensus was for between 18 million and 22 million.
Sales of iPhones reached only 4.6 million, below the Street consensus of 5 million and a far cry from September’s 6.9 million handsets sold.
Looking forward, Apple could earn between $7.6 billion and $8 billion with the company reporting around $35 billion for the full fiscal 2009, the analyst wrote.
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.
