World of Apple

Todays conference call has finished, announcing Apples Q1 Financial results, the last 14 weeks have been the best in Apples history.

• 14,043,000 iPods sold, 207% growth over the year ago quarter.
• 1,254,000 Macintosh computers sold, 20% growth over the year ago quarter.
• Revenue of $5.75 million, 40% of that from International sales (outside of US).
• Net Quarterly profit of $565 million.
• Gross margins of 27.2% compared to 28.5% Q1 2005.

  “We did see what we think was a bit of a pause from some customers associated with the Intel transition,” said Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s CFO, in a telephone interview.

  Steve Jobs had the following to say about the record quarter and the year ahead, We are thrilled to report the best quarter in Apple’s history. Two highlights of an incredible quarter were selling 14 million iPods and getting ready to launch our new Macs with Intel processors five to six months ahead of expectations. We are working on more wonderful products for 2006, and I can’t wait to see what our customers think of them.”

  After the conference call Apple’s stock has taken a bit of a rocky road eventually settling at $82.49.

What appears to be an exploit in the tax loophole could allow Apple to sell songs through the iTunes Music Store without VAT tagged on. This could bring the price of songs down to 67p.

All Apple has to do is move some operations to Guernsey where a law allows retailers outside of the EU to sell goods worth less than £17 to UK customers free of VAT.

Last Friday Steve Jobs sent a friendly email to his employees saying “Team, it turned out that Michael Dell wasn’t perfect at predicting the future. Based on today’s stock market close, Apple is worth more than Dell. Stocks go up and down, and things may be different tomorrow, but I thought it was worth a moment of reflection today. Steve.”

This all relates back to 1997 when SJ rejoined Apple and Michael Dell made an interesting yet foolish comment towards Apple “What would I do?” Mikey said to an audience of several thousand information technology managers. “I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.”

Just a reminder to all whom are interested, Apples first conference call of 2006 will take place this Wednesday at 14:00PT which is 22:00GMT.

The call should bring some more details into the figures that Jobs presented last week in his Keynote.

The webcast can be listened to here.

Already a billionaire from owning stock in Pixar, Steve is set to receive another set of stocks from Apple.

“Jobs exchanged worthless options on a split-adjusted 55 million shares for 10 million shares of restricted stock three years ago. The shares, Jobs’s entire stake in Apple, vest in March. Right now, they are valued at $808.6 million,” Bloomberg News reports. ‘It’s a bargain,’ said Chuck Jones, a fund manager at Atlantic Trust Stein Roe in San Francisco. ‘I’d gladly pay him another $808.6 million to have him create another $65 billion in market cap.”

The FT is reporting today that “music downloading websites” saw a 50% rise on Christmas Day, supposedly down to hundreds of thousands of people unwrapping iPods and loading them with tunes. In particular Hitwise reckons that the iTunes Music Store saw a 50 percent rise between the 24th and the 25th.

Apple has been ranked among the winners in Forbes’ Platinum 400 list of Americas best big corporations, in particular these companies must have outperformed the S&P 500 over the previous 12 months. Apple was ranked 4th behind SanDisk, Holly, and Valero.

Apple will announce its financial results after market close on January 18 2006. The call will begin at 2PM PT and a audio webcast will be provided.

As of publishing this Apple’s share prices resides around $71.50, a drop of 4.64%. It looks like this sudden drop has occurred after an analyst said that Apple’s share valuation was above fair value.

The analysts downgraded Apple from “outperform” to “peer perform” and said, “reflects much of the near-term optimism and is 7% over our calendar 2006 year-end fair value.”

But the analyst is still encouraged by “emerging opportunities” for Apple.

Apple today named Tim Cook to be Chief Operating Officer. Tim was previosuly Worldwide Sales and Operations Vice President but will continue to work very closely with CEO Steve Jobs.

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