Apple was temporarily the most valuable company in the world again yesterday as the IT firm’s share price shot up following the announcement the company had revenues of $46.3 billion in its fourth quarter, a record for the firm, more than Wall Street expected, and seemingly proof the business can prosper without Steve Jobs leading the shop.
In the final three months of the last year the company sold over 37 million iPhones, nearly 15.5 million iPads, over five million Mac computers and 15.4 million iPods. Only the latter – surely soon to be a legacy device – saw year on year sales fall, iPhone sales were up 128% and iPad sales 111%.
Apple has been the biggest company based on market cap (share price multiplied by number of shares) before, but lost the crown to Exxon Mobil. For a few hours yesterday it reclaimed the title, only to see the oil giant take the accolade back by close of play. Though Apple also reclaimed the title of biggest smartphone provider in the US, and looks likely to hang on to that honour for a little longer.
Several people noted that Apple made substantially bigger revenues in one quarter than the whole digital music industry made in 2011 – $46.3 billion versus $5.2billion. Though the content industries do share in some of Apple’s good fortune, in that $1.7 billion of the IT giant’s revenues came from the iTunes store, making it the download platform’s highest earning quarter ever. Of course that includes film and TV content and app sales too, though music still makes up a healthy proportion of iTunes’ sales, while iTunes still makes up the majority of the music industry’s digital income in many territories.
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