In addition to being the best quarter in the company's history, Apple's Q1 results also blew away quarterly revenue and profit figures
for any company ever, according to credit rating analysts Standard & Poor's. Even more remarkably, CFO Luca Maestri noted repeatedly that
fluctuations in major currencies (such as the
Russian ruble and the unusually-strong US dollar) actually cost the company a potential five percent -- or $3.73 billion -- in additional revenue.
To put that in perspective: Apple lost more money in currency changes than Google made in profits last quarter ($2.6 billion) by over a billion dollars. Apple made more money from iPhone sales in fiscal Q1 than Google and Microsoft made from all their products and services combined in the same time frame, and Apple's iPhone revenue for the quarter alone -- over $51 billion -- was more that $6 billion above Yahoo's entire market cap,
noted Business Insider.
In addition to record revenues, Apple also attained -- by a comfortable margin -- the highest profit ever recorded in a single quarter. The previous record-holder had been Gazprom (Russia's natural gas extractor), which once recorded $16.2 billion in profit in a quarter. Apple's profit of $18 billion for its holiday quarter is $1.8 billion higher, and would have been as much as another three percent higher if not for the unsteady currency situation. Apple derives the majority of its sales (65 percent) from foreign markets in aggregate, though the US is still the largest single market region.
In the list of all-time top 10 most profitable quarters by any business, Apple is notable for holding five of the spots -- the most of any single company. The remaining five spots are all held by oil companies. Eight of the 10 places are held by US companies (Apple and ExxonMobil), with the other two belonging to Gazpom and RoyalDutchShell, co-owned in the Netherlands and the UK.
While analysts were completely off in their assessments Apple's fortunes for the quarter, they did correctly predict that even in a market dominated by ever-cheaper low-end smartphones, Apple would raise its average selling price on the iPhone through a combination of a premium for the largest screen size, the iPhone 6 Plus, and the incentive for budget buyers to pay $100 more than the base price to get the 64GB model rather than the 16GB. Unlike previous launches, Apple skipped a 32GB option, but priced the 64GB model at the same price tier, increasing the perception of better value.
Apple was able to increase the average selling price (ASP) of the iPhone by $50 from the year-ago quarter, which in turn helped the company bring gross margins up to just a hair shy of 40 percent. Sales were so insanely high that some sites noted that Apple was, on average, making $829 million in revenue
per day, and $8.3 million
in profit every hour of the quarter.
Unsurprisingly, the stock was richly rewarded on Wednesday by investors, moving up 5.65 percent to close on Wednesday at $115. The company is already the biggest firm on the planet as measured by market capitalization (now $676.27 billion). The company's growing but less-profit-oriented initiatives, such as Apple Pay or the forthcoming Apple Watch, are now being seen by pundits as supporting and refreshing the entire "Apple eco-system," making devices such as the iPhone continually more attractive.
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