BANGALORE: Apple reported earnings of $90 million, or 51 cents a
share, for the three months ended September 25, excluding non-recurring items.
Including an after-tax gain of $37 m from the sales of three million shares of
ARM Holdings Plc and a net restructuring charge of $16 m for contract
cancellation charges, Apple reported a net profit of $111 million, or 63 cents a
diluted share, versus $106 million, or 68 cents a share. Revenues in the quarter
fell to $1.34 billion, down 14 per cent from a year earlier. Gross margins rose
to 28.7 per cent from 26.8 per cent.
Apple chief financial officer Fred Anderson outlined orders for the
company’s bevy of new products and said that he expects Apple to have a strong
first fiscal quarter, with revenues and units significantly higher than a year
ago and the fourth quarter.
Profit margins, however, are expected to decline from 28.7 per cent in the
quarter, due to higher prices of memory chips and a bigger portion of lower-cost
consumer products in its product sales in the December quarter. Apple received
300,000 orders for its new iBook, but only shipped 6,000 units. It also has over
250,000 orders for the new iMacs, which were just launched last week, and it had
150,000 orders for the new G4s.
Mr Anderson said that Apple should be able to meet all the orders for its
products, except that it expects to be supply constrained with the iBook. The
company said that IBM, its former partner in the development of the PowerPC
processor, would begin making the G4 processor chips in the first half of
calendar 2000.
For the year, Apple posted revenues of $6.1 billion and net earnings of $601
million, or $3.61 per diluted share. That compared with revenues of $5.9 billion
and net earnings of $309 million, or $2.10 per diluted share, in the prior year.