Showing continued strong growth of its popular iPod digital music player and impressive personal computer sales in the US, Apple Computer reported quarterly earnings on Wednesday that far outpaced the expectations of financial analysts.
Apple said net income for its third quarter, ended June 30, rose to US$320 million, or US$0.37 a share, from US$61 million a year ago, or US$0.08 a share, on a split-adjusted basis.
The results surpassed the consensus forecast of analysts, which was US$0.31 a share. Moreover, revenue increased 75 percent to US$3.5 billion, from US$2.01 billion during the same quarter last year.
"Over all it's great news," said Barry Jaruzelski, vice president for communications and technology at Booz Allen Hamilton, a technology strategy and consulting firm.
"All of the speculation over whether the iPod has peaked has been put to bed for at least a quarter," Jaruzelski said.
Apple reported sales of 6.1 million iPod music players. IPod revenue was US$1.1 billion for the quarter, an increase of 16 percent quarter to quarter and of 343 percent from year to year. The company also pointed to a strong start for the latest version of its Macintosh OS X operating system, named Tiger, which sold more than 2 million copies during its first quarter of availability, with revenue of more than US$100 million.
The chief financial officer, Peter Oppenheimer, also said that quarterly sales of Macintosh computers had reached a four-year high, with 1.18 million systems shipped, and that the company had sold 495,000 notebook computers, a record.
The company's obvious enthusiasm for the quarter was tempered during a conference call with analysts by what Oppenheimer referred to as a "prudent" forecast of flat to slightly declining revenue for its fourth quarter.
"We are being prudent in our first quarter after our Intel transition and expect to learn more during the quarter," he said.
The cautious forecast caused a number of financial analysts to question whether the company had experienced a decline in sales during the quarter after announcing in June that it planned to switch from IBM to Intel for its processors.
"We saw no obvious reduction in sell-through after the announcement," said Timothy Cook, Apple's executive vice president for worldwide sales and operations.
But he stressed that the company had only several weeks of sales data and expected to learn more about whether consumers would defer purchases in the current quarter, which ends in September.
"The question for the investor is, Do you want to worry about something that is more than a year away?"' said Richard Chu, a financial analyst at the SG Cowen Securities Corp.
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