Earnings: Apple Posts Q2 Profit Gains Of 73 Percent; Says 270,000 iPhones Sold In First Two Days

Sales of iPods and computers helped boost Q2 profits 73.3 percent for Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) to $818 million from $472 million, as revenues came in at $5.41 billion, a 23.8 percent rise over last year. No word in the press release on how many iPhones it shipped in the last two days of the quarter (exclusive carrier AT&T said Tuesday it activated 146,000 iPhones in Q2), but during the call CFO Peter Oppenheimer said Apple sold 270,000 iPhones in the last two days of Q2 ; the company estimates it will sell 1 million by September and 10 million by the end of 2008 including global sales. Apple did not recognize payments related to the iPhone from AT&T in Q2; it will begin recording those payments in the next quarter.
Earnings release | Webcast

Update: More from the call (via SeekingAlpha transcript):
Oppenheimer: “While we are off to a great start with iPhone and sold 270,000 in the last 30 hours, the revenue contribution in the quarter was $5 million and the vast majority of that was accessories. So the impact to the quarter was very small.” Sales skewed toward the 8G model in early June.

Global iPhone plans: Oppenheimer: “We plan to go into a few major countries in Europe next quarter; to move across other countries in Europe across 2008 and to enter Asia in 2008 as well.” He said European plans will be announced this quarter.

Activation issues: Oppenheimer acknowledged activation issues but seemed to attribute them to AT&T. Since the first week, “AT&T has corrected the most common cause of these difficulties and we are now experiencing a very high percentage of problem-free activations.”
No explanation for the 124,000 discrepency between activations and sales.

James: CNet has a long piece trying to reconcile the discrepency between Apple’s figures and AT&T’s figures. Here’s my two cents: There’s no discrepency, there’s no problem. These figures are for the first few hours (just over a day) of the iPhone going on sale. As such, a significant number of people who make up these figures got the iPhone just to be the first to say “I have an iPhone” and later be able to say “I was one of the first to get an iPhone…the first day!” There’re not necessarily that keen to activate the iPhone and start paying AT&T. Look at it this way, having an iPhone is a status symbol, having an AT&T account isn’t. The phones will get activated eventually, maybe at a better time in terms of contracts running out.

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