Huge demand for its iPod portable digital-music players helped Apple Computer Inc triple its first-quarter earnings and easily beat Wall Street expectations.
The Cupertino-based computer maker said on Wednesday that its net income was US$46 mil-lion, or 12 a share, for the three months ended March 27. In the year-ago quarter, Apple reported net income of US$14 million, or US$0.04 a share.
Sales were US$1.91 billion, up 29 percent from US$1.48 billion reported in the year-ago period.
Excluding a one-time after-tax restructuring charge of US$7 million, the company's net profit for the quarter would have been US$53 million, or US$0.14 per share.
Analysts polled by Thomson First Call were expecting earnings of US$0.10 per share on revenue of US$1.8 billion.
``The iPod probably accounted for probably half of that [reve-nue] growth,'' Fred Anderson, Apple's chief financial officer, said in an interview.
The company reported record sales of 807,000 iPods for the quarter, up more than 900 percent from the prior year, bringing the total to about 2.8 million since the gadget was first introduced in 2001.
Extremely high demand for the iPod Mini, introduced in the US in January, led Apple to delay the smaller model's international release to the end of July.
Sales of iPods gained momentum after Apple introduced its pay-per-download iTunes online music store, first for Mac computers last April and then for Windows-based PCs in October.
Anderson said the company expects revenues for the third quarter to reach US$1.93 billion.
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