Steven Petrov
The Paw Print
34,000 iPhones/hour
Never before has a single company ever made that much profit for such a short period of time like Apple did in the last three months. On January 27th Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, announced that the company’s net income for the last quarter was $18 billion. This breaks the record that the oil giant Exxon Mobil set in 2012 and surpasses it with $2.1 billion. After Apple announced its’ newest iPhone on September 9th, 2014 all of the analysts and medias predicted that it would bring the company unseen success. In the beginning, however, Apple faced some minor obstacles that people thought could hurt the company’s future. Starting with the story that the new iPhones were bending under pressure and going through some software issues with the newest iOS 8 operating system, Apple critiques were predicting the “beginning of the end” for the world’s biggest and most successful company. However, here we are at the start of 2015 and Apple is unquestionably the king of all companies. Why is that you would ask? The company simply entered into the holiday shopping season with, as Mr. Cook said, “the strongest product cycle” Apple has ever had. The most recent earnings report showed that 2/3 of Apple’s revenue was generated by the record-breaking iPhone sales. Throughout the whole quarter Apple sold 34,000 iPhones every hour on average to reach the astonishing 74.5 million phones sold. The Cupertino based company continues to impress world’s most famous economists and analysts with its most basic and simple business model. Apple sells highly sought products with a large difference in manufacturing and retail price, which even reached 40% within the last quarter. Another major factor for Apple’s international success was their “conquest” of the Asian markets and more specifically, China. Judged by the number of delivered smartphones, Apple is currently holding the number one spot in China, and if we add Taiwan and Honk Kong, the company’s total revenue increased with 70% or $16 billion for the last fiscal year. On the other hand the Asian exposure could bring some more geo-political risk associated with the company’s business, so Apple should be ready to react and solve any potential problems that might arise within China or to at least have the idea how could such risks hurt the company’s future.
Apple’s innovation never stops, and now everyone is looking towards April when Tim Cook said the company’s newest product, the iWatch will be released for sale. The leading market experts and analysts have predicted that Apple will probably sell between 22-24 million watches within the first 12 months after the release, which will bring billions of dollars worth of profit for the tech giant. It is widely expected that the profit percentages will be higher with the watch than the iPhones, which will improve the company’s gross margins and will also increase Apple’s income from software due to the increase in the number of products that they offer. As of right now Apple “sits” on a pile of $178 billion on their balance sheet, and many experts are trying to guess where and how would the world’s largest company use this astonishing sum.
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