Apple's quarterly profit, sales beat estimates
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Apple Inc. on Monday posted quarterly profit and sales that both beat analysts' estimates, driven by strong sales of its iPhone, iPad and other products.
Apple earned 4.31 billion U.S. dollars or 4.64 dollars per share in its fiscal fourth quarter, compared with 2.53 billion dollars or 2.77 dollars per share in the year-ago period.
Revenue for the quarter was 20.34 billion dollars, an increase of nearly 67 percent compared with a year earlier.
Wall Street analysts had expected earnings of 4.08 dollars per share on a revenue of 18.9 billion dollars.
"We are blown away to report over 20 billion dollars in revenue and over 4 billion dollars in after-tax earnings -- both all-time records for Apple," Steve Jobs, Apple's chief executive officer ( CEO), said in a statement.
In the most recent quarter, Apple sold 4.19 million units of iPad, the tablet computer that was launched in April. The company sold 3.27 million iPads in its fiscal third quarter, the first quarter when the device hit stores.
Sales of iPhone continued to be the main driver for Apple's revenue growth. The company sold 14.1 million units of iPhone in the quarter that ended on Sept. 25, following the introduction of its latest model of iPhone 4 on June 24, which represented an increase of 91 percent over the same quarter last year and also a jump of nearly 68 percent over the previous quarter.
The numbers showed the popularity of Apple's handset despite increasing competitions from Blackberry made by Research in Motion (RIM) as well as smartphones using Google Inc.'s Android operating system.
"iPhone sales of 14.1 million were up 91 percent year-over-year, handily beating the 12.1 million phones RIM sold in their most recent quarter. We still have a few surprises left for the remainder of this calendar year," Apple CEO Jobs noted.
Apple is expected to make new announcement this Wednesday on the next major version of the operating system that runs on the company's Macintosh desktop and laptop computers.
Apple's Mac performed relatively well on the computer market. The company sold 3.89 million Macs during the latest quarter, up 27 percent year-on-year.
Sales of Apple's media player iPod dropped 11 percent from last year to 9.05 million units in the most recent three months, the company said.
