Even without 3-Jesus Phone, Apple busts revenue records

And Wall Street is peeved

During its last fiscal quarter, Apple shipped a record 2.49 million Macs, and even if you ignore a decent chunk of its Jesus Phone sales, it nabbed a record $7.46bn in revenues. But in typically coy fashion, the company says it has low expectations for the quarter to come.

Naturally, those who play the Wall Street game sent Apple's stock price on a tumble. Last we checked, it was down 10 per cent in after hours trading.

For the quarter ending June 28, Apple revenues were up 38 per cent from the same quarter last year, and profits jumped 31 per cent, reaching $1.07bn. "We're very pleased to report the highest June quarter revenues and earnings in Apple's history," said automatonic CFO Peter Oppenheimer during a conference call with industry analysts and reporters. "We are very proud of these results."

In shipping nearly 2.5 million Macs - a 41 per cent leap from last year - the company beat its record not just for the June quarter, but for any quarter. Desktop sales were up 49 per cent, thanks mostly to the recently updated iMac, while notebooks sales grew 37 per cent.

"We've been thrilled with the momentum of our Mac business," Oppenheimer monotoned.

Meanwhile, iPod sales climbed an unexpected 12 per cent to over 11 million. Not bad considering the ever growing shadow from the Jesus Phone. That said, iPod revenues grew only 7 per cent, due in large part to a price drop that hit the iPod Shuffle in February.

Third quarter Jesus Phone sales topped 710,000. But the company's official Q3 numbers don't include revenue from most of those phones. "Because we announced the iPhone 2.0 software and its many new features on March 6 but did not make it available until this month, we did not begin recognizing handset revenue for any iPhone sold on or after March 6 until we made the iPhone 2.0 software available." iPhone 2.0 debuted on July 11, after the close of Q3.

July 11 was also the day that the 3G Jesus Phone made its debut. So although Apple sold over one million devices during the first three days of the second coming, Q3 numbers don't include these sales either.

Nonetheless, Apple anticipates fourth quarter revenues of only $7.8bn, well below what all those Wall Street guess men anticipated the company would anticipate. At the same time, Oppenheimer said, gross margins will drop to about 31 per cent.

According to the Apple CFO, margins will dip in part because of a "future product transition which I can't discuss today." Chances are, Apple will soon launch an update to the MacBook Pro.

Bootnote

This morning, The New York Post insisted that Apple investors are terribly worried about the health of Steve Jobs, who appeared unusually thin when turned up at the company's annual developers conference in June. During today's call, Oppenheimer and crew were questioned about Jobs' wellbeing. But as you might expect, they stayed mum.