Dale Fontenot: Apple Crushes Earnings, Ships 7.3 Million iPads (AAPL)

steve jobs apple

Apple just put up a monster quarter, and investors should send the stock upwards Wednesday, erasing today's doubts about Steve Jobs' health.

Apple's Q1 EPS was $6.43, beating by a mile, and representing $6 billion in profit. Revenue was massive too, at $26.7 billion, beating consensus by more than $2 billion.

iPad shipments came in at 7.33 million, way above expectations. Meanwhile, Mac unit sales came in at 4.1 million, slightly below the Street's 4.3 million consensus. Perhaps the iPad is starting to cannibalize the Mac?

iPhone shipments of 16.2 million beat the Street, and should be strong again next quarter as the Verizon iPhone ships.

Even Apple's guidance is strong: $22 billion in sales is ahead of the Street's $20.6 billion consensus, and EPS of $4.90 is way ahead of expectations.

Apple did NOT disclose Apple TV unit sales or iAd revenue.

Key Stats: (Consensus via Yahoo Finance and Piper Jaffray)

Revenue: $26.74 vs. $24.4 billion consensus, $25.5 billion "high" Street estimate

EPS: $6.43 vs. $5.38 consensus, $6.02 "high" Street estimate

iPhone shipments: 16.24 million vs. 15.5 million consensus

iPad shipments: 7.33 million vs. 6.2 million consensus

Mac shipments: 4.1 million vs. 4.3 million consensus

iPod shipments: 19.45 million vs. 20.3 million consensus

March revenue guidance: $22 billion vs. $20.6 billion Street consensus, anything over $20 billion solid

March EPS guidance: $4.90 vs. $4.43 Street consensus, anything over $3.92 solid

LIVE Earnings Call coverage: (not a direct transcript unless in quotation marks)

5:00 Waiting for call to begin. Share are up in after-hours trading, and have made up for the dip earlier today on the Steve Jobs health news.

5:02 Call begins. Opening remarks from IR head. Standard disclosures, etc.

5:03 CFO Peter Oppenheimer takes over. "We are very pleased." Performance of business "extremely strong." More Macs, iPhones sold than ever before. All-time record quarterly revenue and earnings. Revenue up $11 billion over last year, up 71%. (Holy crap!)

5:04 EPS of $6.43. Mac: New quarterly record, representing 23% growth. Almost 8X the 3% growth of the PC market. Strong sales growth in each of geographic segments, over 50% growth in Asia Pacific and Japan. Fueled by MacBook Air, MacBook Pro.

5:05 Opened Mac App Store on Jan 6. Available in more than 90 countries, features over 1,000 free and paid apps. "Very pleased" with response, 1 million downloads on first day. No new stats here, why not?

5:06 iPod touch grew 27% year-over-year, and was more than 50% of iPods sold.

5:06 iTunes revenue exceeded $1.1 billion. Extremely pleased to bring Beatles and introduce movies to iTunes store in Japan. iTunes users now renting and purchasing over 400,000 TV episodes and 150,000 movies per day.

5:07 Thrilled to have sold 16.2 million iPhones, up 86% year-over-year, grew faster than smartphone market (so should capture some market share). $625 ASP.

5:08 88 of Fortune 100 and almost 60% of FT Europe 100 now testing or deploying iPhone. Custom app development fueling deployment. Fortune 500s like Wells Fargo, ADM, DuPont, Staples, and Starbucks have made iPhone available. Thrilled to be working with Verizon.

5:09 7.3 million iPads. Continue to see great enthusiasm from consumer, business, edu. Employee demand in corporate strong. Enterprise CIOs are adding iPads to approved device list. Over 80% of Fortune 100 already deploying or testing iPad, up from 65% in prior quarter. Channel inventory increased by about 525k units to support increased sales and channel expansion.

5:10 Combining iPhone, iPad and iPod touch, over 160 million cumulative.

5:11 Talking about iAd, expanded beyond US to Europe and Japan and provided iAd producer to marketers. No update on progress.

5:11 851,000 Macs sold in retail channel, up 24%. About half of Macs sold were to customers who had never owned a Mac before. Average intl store volume exceeded US. 4 stores in China highest traffic and highest revenue stores in the world.

5:13 Margins ahead of guidance because of: Better commodity costs than planned, leverage on higher revenue, lower other product costs including freight, phone support, etc.

5:14 Cash plus short term/long term $59.7 billion at end of quarter, up $8.7 billion.

5:15 Extremely pleased. Look forward to expanding reach of iPhone with Verizon. Opening the call to questions, with COO Tim Cook.

5:16 Q&A begins.

5:16 Availability of iPhones? Backlog? TIM: As I mentioned on last quarter's call, made a bet on iPhone, stepped up to over 16 million, able to increase over 2 million. Obviously have continued to work on increasing this further. Takes some time to do that. Relative to Verizon, we are thrilled to offer the iPhone 4 to Verizon's 93 million customers. We're going to do everything possible to get the iPhone into as many hands of those customers as possible.

5:18 Mac app store: Apple software tends to do best. How should we think? TIM: Just getting going, but thrilled to have reported over 1 million in a short amount of time. Nothing new here.

5:19 Tim, how comfortable are you with availability of iPhones and iPads? How quickly shortages addressed? TIM: On iPad, we increased dramatically last quarter. Got into supply-demand balance, expand to 46 countries, adding 20 during the quarter. Confident enough to add another 15 countries during the month of January. Feel very good about progress. Relative to iPhone 4, feel very good about what able to do, but it's not enough. We do still have significant backlog, working around the clock to build more. Not going to predict when supply and demand will meet.

5:20 What's driving growth in Asia Pacific? Of the BRIC countries, we several years ago identified China as top priority, put enormous energy into China. Results absolutely staggering. Greater China is region, includes Hong Kong and Taiwan. Revenue from greater China was $2.6 billion, which was up 4X from the prior year quarter. To further explain, a little over $3 billion for fiscal '10. Proud of team. Korea has also been a very, very good market for us. Outstanding Q1 there, primarily driven by iPhone and iPad. Several other Asian countries doing extremely well. Japan by itself revenue was up 83% year-over-year.

5:23 Insight on plans? TIM: Part of the magic of Apple, I don't want to let anybody know our magic because I don't want anyone to copy it. Apple doing best work ever, very happy with product pipeline. Team here has unparalleled breadth and depth of talent, culture of innovation that Steve has driven in the company, and excellence has become a habit. Very confident about the future of the company. We've done outstanding in our Mac business, 19 quarters straight of growing more than the market, but still very low share. Would seem that enormous opportunity still there. Relatively low share of handset market, smartphone market growing faster than a weed, enormous opportunity here. Incredible momentum in that space. iPad just got started, it's a new category, sold almost 15 million through first 3 quarters. Believe the market will be huge, IDC says it could quadruple in 2 years. We're in some great markets, some fast moving markets, we have the best products we've ever done, and an incredible product pipeline. We feel very confident.

5:26 How many more iPhones could you have sold if you didn't have supply constraints? Won't say.

5:26 What components were better priced than you thought? Component going into March quarter? We expect favorable pricing environment for DRAM, key metals are increasing. Don't want to give out too much, view it as competitive. In general, from our point of view, we design components where we believe we can innovate. A4 chip was a design issue. Other components different. Constantly looking for more of these. Identified another area to innovate, pre-payments and capital for tooling. Similar to flash agreements, in very strategic area. Not going into more detail, but same kind of thinking.

5:31 Always aggressively worked to lower costs. (Re: iPad.) Quite happy with progress.

5:32 On iPad side, can you comment on how currently viewing competitive landscape? How changed? TIM: If you look at what's shipping today, there's not much out there. Generally speaking, two kinds of groups today. The ones that are using Windows based OS are generally fairly big and heavy and expensive, have very weak battery life, require keyboard or stylus, and from our POV, customers not interested in them. Then you have Android tablets, and variety out shipping today, OS wasn't really designed for a tablet. Google has said this, not just an Apple thing. Wind up having a size of a tablet that is less than what we believe is reasonable, or even one that will provide what we feel is a real tablet experience. Kind of a scaled up smartphone, which is a bizarre product in our view. Frankly speaking, hard for me to understand if somebody does side by side with iPad, I think enormous percentage of people are going to select an iPad there. Not tablets that we have any concern on. Next-gen Android tablets, nothing shipping yet, and so, I don't know. Generally they lack performance specs, prices, timing, and so today they're vapor. We'll assess them as they come out, however we're not sitting still, and we have a huge first-mover advantage and an incredible user experience from iTunes to the App Store and an enormous number of apps and a huge ecosystem. So we're very very confident with entering into a fight with anyone.

5:36 You've said move to iPhone non-exclusivity has had no impact on ASPs. Still the case today? What's going to happen? Also iPhone still not available on many big operators, why not? TIM: Relative to ASP, want to say specific not to US for any specific carrier, don't envision overall iPhone ASP decreasing from December quarter to March quarter. Other carriers? Always looking and assessing who we should be doing business with and exploring different deals and arrangements, etc. We'll continue to do that.

5:38 Good point by Ina Fried on Twitter: No one's asking about Steve Jobs, only one question on Apple's long-term future.

5:40 TIM: People want to do business with us. No comment about future carriers. No more exclusive contracts, US was last one. Can guarantee we are always looking at opportunities to grow. In short term, will remind you we are constrained on iPhone 4, working around the clock to get out to existing partners.

5:41 Updated thoughts on Mac side? Cannibalization? What we saw in Mac, grew 23% at worldwide level, compared to market growth of 3%, grew 8X market rate. Every region outgrew the market. Asia-Pac led the growth with 67% y/y increase, almost 10X what market did there. Japan grew 56%, 6X market. Europe and US both grew in double digits despite both markets contracting overall. Any cannibalization by iPad? Don't know for sure, but yes, I think there is some. But I also think there is a halo effect. Think there is a halo effect from Apple product to Apple product. Introduced millions of people in Asia to Apple through iPhone, now many more through iPad, and I think some of those decide to buy a Mac. If iPads and tablets do cannibalize PC market, keep in mind we have low share of PC market, the other guys lose a lot more. We have a lot more to win. Cannibalization is not something we are spending one minute on here.

5:45 One of key learnings from iPad is that people love instant on. They really loved it. So MacBook Air incorporated it. I think Steve said it great when the Mac company and the iPad were separate companies, what would the Mac company build to compete with the iPad? I think the MacBook Air. It's not that the groups are competing, they're sharing, and coming up with products people really want.

5:50 Tablet market opportunity is so large it's large everywhere.

5:50 What components other than iPod contribute the big decline? We're working hard to increase supply of iPhones. Tim's talked about that but will come over a period of time, not overnight. In terms of sequential guidance this year, we are thrilled to be giving you guidance for 63% revenue growth, which will translate to 50% earnings growth. Shipping best products in Apple's history. As said in prepared remarks, increased channel inventory, which will have a bit of impact on sequential compare. For Mac, reported highest Mac sales ever, outgrown market for 19 consecutive quarters. Would expect seq. decline for Mac, large seq. decline for iPod. For iPhone, significant y/y increase. For iPad, first experience going from December to March quarter, so we'll see. Would expect sequential decline in March quarter.

5:52 Steve had a lot of comments about Android and some disadvantages. Few more months to see it develop, anything else you'd like to add on battle with Android? TIM: If you look at iPhone portion, we had record sales on iPhone. From market estimates we've seen, suggests we grew faster than the market. (He's not answering the question yet.) Believe integrated approach beats fragmented approach. Variety of app stores will lead people to pull their hair out, different updating methodologies. The net-net is that we think our integrated approach is much better for the end user because it takes out complexity instead of making them the system integrators themselves. I think the more iPhones that we can get out there into peoples' hands, the more people love them. I think the same thing about iPads. Customer sat ratings on iPad are off the charts.

5:58 MacBook Air? Phenomenal part of growth on the Mac, has gotten off to an unbelievable start, customers love it. Really happy with how it's doing. Just getting going.

5:59 Lots of talk about consumerization of enterprise tech. Still any barriers at corporate level that need to get worked through before penetration increases further? One of the mega trends that are occurring. The most forward-looking CIOs that productivity/creativity of employee is materially more important than everyone using the same thing. Ability to write apps through SDK is incredible thing and you can wind up literally running your whole business off an iPad or iPhone. List of ideas and places people can go there were unimaginable just a few months ago. Enormous potential there. Already up to 80% of largest companies deploying or piloting the iPad; this is unheard-of. Just scratching the surface right now. iPad has huge advantage, as went through various iOS releases, always put out enterprise features.

6:02 Call over.

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