[quick notes on Apple’s quarterly results and conference call]
Apple Tuesday afternoon said it posted a net profit of $32 million for itsjust-completed third fiscal quarter, down from a net profit of $61 millionin the same fiscal period of a year ago.
Apple recorded revenues of $1.43 billion for the quarter, down just a bitfrom $1.47 billion from the year-ago quarter. Gross margins were 27.4percent, Apple said, down from the 29.4 percent it had in the year-agoquarter.
Apple said international sales accounted for 42 percent of its quarter?srevenues.
Apple shipped 808,000 Macs during the quarter, down 2 percent from theyear-ago quarter and down 1 percent from the second quarter.[[from a Bloomberg News article on Apple:
The PC business has never been tougher. Dell Computer Corp. and Apple areamong the few that are profitable. Hewlett-Packard’s PC unit lost $110million before tax the last two quarters. International Business MachinesCorp.’s PC division had a $153 million pre-tax loss last year. Gateway Inc.had $1.2 billion in losses over the past five quarters.
“Not losing a lot of money is, unfortunately, a shining achievement intoday’s PC market,” Jobs said in an e-mail. ]]
From Apple’s financial conference call:
Apple said units sales were down about 100,000 units from the company’sinitial expectations. Likewise, revenue was down about 11 percent fromoriginal expectations. Slowing sales of flat-panel iMacs, Power Macs, andPowerBooks accounted for 80 percent of the revenue shortfall. Apple said itwas particularly disappointed with sales of Power Macs and believesbusinesses are deferring purchases because of economic conditions. Customersare also deferring purchases until Jaguar (the code name for the nextversion of Mac OS X) and QuarkXPress for Mac OS X ship.
Apple said it sold 220,000 flat-panel iMacs in its second quarter. AlthoughApple expected strong sales to continue through the third quarter, demandslowed in May and June.
Xserve sales were also below expectations.
In part because of the uncertainty surrounding PC manufacturers Gateway,Compaq, and HP, Apple believes it Switchers campaign is resonating withWindows users, although it has no hard data yet, and is “putting all itswood behind that arrow,” it said.
Apple said tomorrow’s keynote address will include a 30-minute presentationon the Apple Stores.