Apple Conference Call with Investors

Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer and COO Tim Cook reported positive ‘09 First Quarter Results via their live broadcast today. Apple reported all time high quarterly earnings and entered the 2008 holiday season with its best holiday line up yet. Apple COO Tim Cook also spoke about the emerging Netbook market, Apple iPhone sales and much more in this great breakdown from AtomicSub!

Apple reported 6% growth with a better than expected operating margin. Fiscal quarter profit was $1.61 billion, or $1.78 per share, on revenue of $10.17 billion.

Details of the Results

In the December quarter, Apple sold 2.5 million Macs, a 9% growth over the prior quarter. Desktop units declined by 25% year over year as Apple believes this to be due to a shift towards portables. IDC estimates overall markets for personal computers contracted in the quarter.

Music - Apple sold over 22.7 million iPods in the quarter - a 3% growth from the year ago quarter. Apple’s iPod continues to gain grown with a solid 70% market share in the MP3 players market and continued to gain market share year over year in international markets. The iPhone continues to gain strong traction with Apple selling 4.4 million iPhones handsets in the December quarter and 13.7 million iPhones overall in 2008.

The Apple Retail Store had 46.7 million visitors and a new record revenue of $1.74 billion, a 2% growth year over year. 515,000 Macs were sold during the quarter.

Apple’s Cash + short term + long term = $28.1 billion.

Peter Oppenheimer spoke about Apple’s Outlook: “We are shipping the best products in our history and remain very confident in our business. We expect revenue of $7.6 - $8 billion, gross margins to be about 32.5% reflecting $28 million in stock based compensation expense, this reflects the impact of a stronger US dollar.

“We are extremely proud of our performance and record December quarter” - Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer.

Questions:

“How’s Steve?” from Barclays:  ”there is an extraordinary breadth and depth of tenure in the Apple executive team. Our values are extremely well entrenched. We’re constantly focused on innovating. We believe in saying no to thousands of projects so that we can really focus on the few that are important and really meaningful to us. Frankly, we don’t settle for anything less than excellence. I think regardless of who is in what job, those values are so embedded in this company that apple will do extremely well.” Apple COO Tim Cook.

When asked about Apple’s thoughts on entering the Netbook market, Apple COO Tim Cook stated: ”We’re watching…but right now from our point of view the products in there are principally based on hardware that’s much less powerful than we think the customer wants, software thats not good, a cramped keyboard, small displays, and so forth. We don’t think people will be pleased with those types of products - but we’ll see”

Product Update - Snow Leopard: “No comments and we don’t have a specific launch date”