Apple starts a new fiscal year at the end of September every year. Yesterday, Apple released the results for its 20114 fiscal fourth quarter (which ran from June 29, 2014 to September 27, 2014) and held a call with analysts to discuss the results. This is typically a transitional quarter for Apple considering that so many sales typically take place in Apple’s first fiscal quarter — the quarter that contains November and December holiday sales. But this year, the new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus went on sale on September 19, and even though that only accounts for eight days, there is always a surge in sales when a new iPhone first goes on sale. As a result, Apple had a record-breaking fiscal fourth quarter, with quarterly revenue of $42.1 billion (compared to $37.5 billion this time last year) and quarterly net profit of $8.5 billion (compared to $7.5 billion last year). 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. Here are the things said on the call yesterday that I think would be of interest to iPhone and iPad users:
iPhone
- During the past quarter, Apple sold 39.27 million iPhones, the most that Apple has ever sold in a fiscal fourth quarter. 10 million of those were iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus devices sold September 19-22, the first three days that they were on sale. By comparison, in the 2013 fiscal fourth quarter, Apple sold 33.8 million iPhones.
- Apple CEO Tim Cook said that demand for new iPhones has been “staggering” and “is far outstripping supply” and that Apple is seeing a “marked improvement” in iPhone sales in every country over the previous year. Cook added: “I’ve never felt so great after a launch before. Maybe that’s the best way to summarize it all.”
- By my count, as of September 27, 2014, Apple had sold over 590 million iPhones since they first went on sale in 2007.
- Apple CFO Luca Maestri said that “iPhone momentum in enterprise market remains very strong. The latest data published by IDC indicates that iPhone has 69% share of the U.S. commercial smartphone market.”
iPad
- Apple sold 12.316 million iPads. That’s a little less than Apple sold in the 2013 fiscal fourth quarter (14.1 million). Indeed, Apple sold 67.9 million iPads in fiscal 2014 versus 71.1 million in fiscal 2013. Cook noted that obviously he wished that Apple had sold more in 2014 versus 2013, but he sees this as just a “speed bump” because people don’t upgrade iPads as frequently as they upgrade iPhones. He doesn’t believe that the iPad market is saturated because there are still so many first-time buyers. Thus, Cook said that “over the long arc of time, my own judgment is that iPad has a great future. How the individual 90-day clicks work out, I don’t know. But I’m very bullish on where we can take iPad over time and so we’re continuing to invest in the product pipeline.”
- By my count, as of September 27, 2014, Apple had sold over 237 million iPads since they first went on sale in 2010.
The Future
- As for the products that Apple has planned for the future, Cook said: “I am incredibly optimistic about the future. We’ve already announced two new categories in the last 60 days or so, or less than 60 days, with Apple Pay and Apple Watch. We start shipping the watch early next year, and obviously we’re working on other things as well, and to the degree that I can keep that in the cone of silence, I am going to do it.”
- Cook also said that Apple is “the only company on the planet that has the ability to integrate hardware and software and services at a world-class level, and that in itself allows Apple to play in so many different areas. And so the challenge becomes one of deciding which ones to say ‘no’ to and which ones to say ‘yes’ to, and one of focus, not one of do we have any great ideas. We always have more ideas than we have resources to deal with.”