Yesterday, Apple released the results for its 2014 fiscal first quarter (which ran from September 29, 2013 to December 28, 2013, and did not actually include any days from calendar year 2014) and held a call with analysts to discuss the results. This is typically Apple's best quarter of the year because of holiday sales. It turned out to be Apple's best fiscal quarter ever, with revenue of $57.6 billion and profit of $13.1 billion. Indeed, Apple set new records for iPhone and iPad sales.
If you want to get all of the nitty gritty details, you can download the audio from the announcement conference call from iTunes, or you can read a rough transcript of the call prepared by Seeking Alpha. Apple's official press release is here. As always, however, I'm not as concerned about the financial details as I am the statements of Apple executives during the call that are of interest to iPhone and iPad users. Here are the items that stood out to me:
- Apple sold a record 51 million iPhones last quarter. By my count, as of December 28, 2013, Apple had sold over 472 million iPhones.
- There were two new iPhones for sale last quarter. The good news is that Apple couldn't make enough of the iPhone 5s. If you want to be a pessimist, reading between the lines, it does seem based on yesterday's conference call that Apple had expected to sell more iPhone 5c devices then they actually did last quarter. Indeed, outside of the Apple Store, I've only seen a single person using an iPhone 5c — albeit a very important person. (Hi, Mom!)
- Apple executives indicated that they are excited about future iPhone sales. One reason for excitement: just last week, the iPhone became available on China Mobile, the largest cellphone network in the world with around 750 million subscribers.
- Apple sold a record 26 million iPads last quarter. Apple did not disclose how many of those were iPad minis, but it did say that throughout the quarter it could not make enough iPad minis to keep up with demand. By my count, as of December 28, 2013, Apple had sold over 195 million iPads.
- Apple says that 7 million iPads to date have been sold to U.S. educational institutions. And this football season, Apple says that nearly every NFL team is using iPads as playbooks instead of three-ring binders.
- That means that Apple has now sold over 667 million iOS devices to date. Apple is now two-thirds of the way towards being able to say that it has sold a billion iOS devices.
- The App Store now offers over 1 million apps. Based on data previously released, over 30% of those are native iPad apps.
- Apple CEO Tim Cook emphasized that Apple wants to sell a lot of iPhones and iPads to companies: "It’s clear that the enterprise area has huge potential, and we’re doing well from a percentage of companies that are using iPhone and iPad. It’s up to unbelievable numbers. The iPhone is used in 97% of the Fortune 500 and 91% of the Global 500, and iPad is used in 98% of the Fortune 500 and 93% of the Global 500. And we have a number of accounts ... that have tens of thousands of iOS devices working. And also, as I think was mentioned earlier, 90% of tablet activations in corporations are iPads. And 95% of total app activations were on iOS. And I think that’s an incredible measure of ultimately how sticky the products are because you can get so much productivity out of an iPad and an iPhone. And so I think the road in enterprise is a longer one. The arc is longer than in consumer, which can immediately go out and buy things, etc. And I think we’ve done a lot of the groundwork as you can tell from these numbers that I’ve given you, and I would expect that it would have more and more payback in the future."
- In prior calls, Apple CEO Tim Cook has indicated that Apple has a new type of product that it is working on. In April of 2013, Cook indicated that it would likely come out in late 2014. When asked yesterday whether the plan was still to come out with something new by the end of 2014, Cook said simply: "Yes. Absolutely. No change." Who knows what that new product will be, but now that 2014 has started, the countdown clock (perhaps an iWatch countdown clock?) has started.
