Two Records--Apple Posted Best Ever Quarter & Fiscal Year, Beating Analysts Estimate by 35%!
For 2005 Q4, Apple reported earnings of $0.50 per share and a profit of $430 million. The earnings per share is over 35% above the consensus of analysts estimates of $0.37 published by Thomson First Call--Apple virtually always beats these guesses. The 2005 Q4 earnings of $0.50 per share were a whopping 285% above the 2004 Q4 earnings per share of $0.13, after being adjusted for Apple's stock split this year.
For the entire 2005 fiscal year, Apple reported revenues of over $13.9 billion and a profit of over $1.3 billion, nearly four times the profit of the 2004 fiscal year.
What fueled this outstanding financial performance were skyrocketing iPod sales and better than market growth sales of Mac. In fact, in the afternoon webcast conference call, Apple told listeners that the Mac sell-though exceeded expectations. This, of course, means the there is no discernible negative effect of Apple's June 2005 announcement of a move to Intel CPUs by around June of 2006. Apple also told listeners that it believes that booming iPod sales have had a "halo" effect on Mac sales but can not quantify it.
Apple shipped 1,236,000 Macs in Q4, up 5% from Q3 of 2005 during which 1,182,000 Macs were sold and up 48% from Q4 of 2004 in which 836,000 Macs were sold. Apple no longer reports on sales by individual computer lines, only as desktops (Power Macs, iMacs, eMacs, Mac minis and Xserves) and portables (PowerBooks, iBooks). As a whole, desktop sales were down 12% from last quarter and up 56% from last year to 602,000 units. Portable sales were up an excellent 28% from last quarter and up 41% over last year to 634,000 units. The higher portable vs desktop sales has been characteristic of Q4 recently, with back to school sales favoring portables according to Apple during in the conference call.
Shipments of iPods (Apple does not break down sales by model) in Q4 were a record 6.4+ million, 5% better than last quarter and more than double Q4 of last year. Calling iPod nano demand "staggering", Apple's Executive Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Operations Tim Cook said Apple shipped over 1 million of them in just 17 days that ended the quarter. He also said that there is a huge backlog of demand that carried into 2006 and did not know when it might be alleviated. The backlog is in part due to a constrained part or parts for the iPod nano but Apple refused to identify it/them. There was no issue with clearing remaining iPod minis, which were replaced by the iPod nano, from market channels.
Apple's Q4 retail store sales continued their growth with a 19% increase in revenue over the last quarter and a 76% increase over last year's Q4. Apple will open another 35-40 stores during 2006 with most being in the U.S.
Looking ahead to Q1 of the 2006 fiscal year, Apple provided a strong forecast, with revenue of $4.7 billion and earnings per share of $0.49. During the conference call, Apple also said that it has "exciting announcements to share with you tomorrow (today)!" [Bill Fox]
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