Apple's profit soared 90% last quarter in its best non-holiday financial period ever, driven once again by surging iPhone sales.
The company posted March quarter income of a record $3.07 billion. Revenue grew 50% to 13.50 billion, and gross margin also improved slightly.
Apple sold 8.75 million iPhones during the quarter – a massive 131% increase from the year before. By comparison, Apple sold just 2.94 million Macintosh computers – a 33% increase – and iPod sales declined 1% to 10.89 million.
Apple said it was too early in the iPad's life to count device sales from last quarter.
More than half of total revenue was generated through international sales - in Greater China alone, iPhone sales grew ninefold to $9.3 billion, PC Mag said. Sales from Apple's retail stores grew to $1.97 billion from $1.38 billion.
Apple stock on the Nasdaq jumped 5.3%, or $12.88, to $257.47 in after-hours trading yesterday on the strength of the results and Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer's rosy outlook for the current quarter.
“Looking ahead to (this quarter), we expect revenue in the range of about $13.0 billion to $13.4 billion and we expect diluted earnings per share in the range of about $2.28 to $2.39,” he predicted.
CEO Steve Jobs added that the company has ambitious plans for the rest of 2010. “We’ve launched [the] iPad and users are loving it, and we have several more extraordinary products in the pipeline for this year,” he said.
One of these products is widely expected to be the iPhone 4, which Apple is rumored to be planning to launch in June.