Yesterday, Apple announced its 2009 Fiscal Third Quarter results. As in the past, I have reviewed the transcript of this earnings call (provided by Seeking Alpha and available here) to report on the significant news from an iPhone perspective. Here is the significant iPhone news from Apple's Chief Operating Officer, Tim Cook:
Revenue for the quarter was $8.34 billion, 12% growth over this same quarter in 2008. While sales of Macs increased 4% year over year, and sales of iPods declined 4% year over year, iPhone sales were huge for Apple. Apple sold over 5.2 million iPhones in the quarter, thanks to the new iPhone 3GS and the discounted iPhone 3G. It only took three days of the iPhone 3GS being on the market for the company to sell over 1 million of them.
- Apple said that the App Store has over 65,000 apps. To put this in context, Cook pointed out that RIM's Blackberry app store and Nokia's app store are between 1,000 to 2,000 apps, and there are around 5,000 apps for Android.
- When Tim Cook was asked whether Apple had anything to announce on U.S. carriers besides AT&T, Cook simply said that Apple and AT&T have an "excellent relationship and we are very happy with it" and that he had "nothing to announce today in terms of other things with the carriers."
- Two different analysts asked Cook to provide details on how the iPhone 3G was selling at its newly reduced price of $99 compared to the iPhone 3GS. Both times, Cook avoided answering the question, just saying that when looking at both the 3G and the 3GS there was a "significant acceleration in total unit sales."
- Cook was asked about the use of iPhones by enterprise customers. (I consider law firms to be enterprise customers.) Cook responded:
Well, I think it’s a great opportunity for us and as you might
guess, we are seeing growing interest with the release of the 3GS and
iPhone OS 3.0, due in part to the new hardware encryption and the
improved security policies. The phone is particularly doing
well with small business and with large organizations that allow people
to purchase the phones for individual use, and this is both in
corporate and government settings. Specifically, to give you
some numbers, almost 20% of the Fortune 100 have purchased at least
10,000 units or more and there’s now multiple corporations and
government agencies who have purchased in excess of 25,000 each. We also had the iPhone approved in over 300 higher education
institutions and so we feel really good about how we are doing and you
may have noticed also that the most recent study by J.D. Powers has
ranked the iPhone the highest in overall satisfaction with business
customers, and so we think that we are just at the tip of the iceberg
in terms of what the iPhone can do with the business customer.
- When asked about Apple's iPhone inventory, Cook said that the company is essentially selling them as fast as they are making them, and there have been some stock outages with the iPhone 3GS, so the demand has been exceeding the supply.
- Cook refused to answer a question on the percentage of iPhone sales that were in the U.S. versus international, saying that this is competitive information. However, in answering a different question, Cook did say that most countries now selling the 3G would have the 3GS in a few months.
I'm glad to see that Apple had another great quarter and that the iPhone was a big reason for that.
