Apple announced its latest quarterly earnings last night, and they were obscene. The company made an absurd $46.33bn (£29.7bn) in revenue, and $13.06bn (£8.4bn) in profit.
But just how much is that, really? Allow the blogosphere to all of Apple’s latest astronomical figures into perspective for you.
1. Apple sold 37.04 million iPhones in the last quarter. By contrast, Samsung shipped – not sold – two million fewer devices across all its smartphone platforms. (The Verge)
2. That figure averages out to 377,900 iPhones sold per day, a higher number than the average number of children born per day (371,000). In the world. Nuts. (The Next Web)
3. Apple now has $97bn (£62.3bn) in pure cash reserves. If you were to pile up that amount in dollar bills, the tower would reach 6,538 miles into space, or 32 times higher than the International Space Station (Gizmodo).
4. Apple doubled its quarterly profits year on year, up from $6bn (£3.9bn) this time twelve months ago. For the second most valuable company in the world to still be enjoying this kind of growth is unprecedented. (The Guardian)
5. With a market capitalisation of $400bn (£256.7bn), Apple as a company is worth more than Greece as a country. (CNN)
6. The iTunes Store generated more revenue in the last quarter than Yahoo! did. Yeah, the whole of Yahoo! By fifty percent. (Jordan Golson)
7. Apple’s $13.06bn profits outstripped Google’s entire revenue for its last quarter, at $10.6bn. (Farhad Manjoo)
8. Apple’s revenues don’t come close to a retail giant like Walmart’s ($109.5bn or £70.3bn), but Walmart’s “mere” $3,3bn (£2.1bn) profit means that Apple is still four times as profitable. (TechCrunch)
9. Apple is the most profitable non-energy company of all time by a country mile. In fact, only Gazprom, Shell and ExxonMobil have ever posted quarters with higher profits, and only once each. (Wikipedia)
10. Microsoft took just under six years to sell 55 million Xbox 360s. Apple took less than two years to sell 55 million iPads. (That’s us – data from Apple’s conference call yesterday and Microsoft quarterly earnings)
