All I can say right now is – I wish I had purchased Apple stock last year.

Apple released their earnings announcement today after the close of the stock market and by all measures, they had an incredible fiscal third quarter. The company reported quarterly profits of $818 million on revenues of $5.41 billion dollars. This comes out to $0.92 cents per diluted share. Compare this to the year-ago quarter results of $4.37 billion dollars in revenue and a quarterly profit of $472 million or $0.54 cents per diluted share. What’s even more impressive – gross margins went up to 36.9 percent from 30.3 percent a year ago.

Here are the interesting numbers as reported on News.com:

• We’ll start with the iPhone because that’s what everyone cares about these days. Apple sold 270,000 iPhones during the first 30 hours before the quarter ended on June 30th. This is higher than the reported AT&T number of 146,000 iPhones. Why the difference? The 146,000 number is the number of activated iPhones – not the number of units actually sold. Remember a lot of users had trouble activating their phones? Well it turns out there was A LOT of trouble.
• The 270,000 iPhones includes phones sold to AT&T for distribution in its stores, units sold by Apple through their retail stores and some units in transit when the third quarter ended. These numbers do not include iPhones purchased over the Internet.
• Mac shipments accounted for 60 percent of the company’s revenue during the 3rd quarter and grew by 33 percent compared with a year-ago.
• Notebook shipments increased 79 percent compared with a year ago
• There were 9.8 million iPods shipped during the third quarter – up from 8.1 million last year.
• iPod revenue grew at a smaller clip to 1.57 billion – up from $1.5 billion last year this quarter
• Apple expects to ship their 1 millionth iPhone by the end of September
• It’s confirmed that Apple is receiving payments from AT&T related to the sale of iPhones though no details have been provided

Finally, Apple provided conservative guidance for the fourth quarter which ends at the end of September. The company expects to record $5.7 billion in revenue and earn $0.65 cents a share – a pretty big fall off from 0.92 cents a share.

[Check it out]

[Check out the Apple press release]

Technorati Tags: Apple, Earnings Announcement, 270, 000 iPhones