APPLE HAS reported a rare miss in quarterly results after sales of its flagship iPhone fell well short of Wall Street expectations, hammering its shares.
Shares of the world’s most valuable technology corporation fell more than 5 per cent to below $400 after it said it sold 17.07 million iPhones – well short of the 20 million expected by analysts.
The September quarterly report was Apple’s first under new chief executive Tim Cook, who took over in August after co-founder Steve Jobs resigned. Mr Jobs, the company’s leading visionary and co-founder, died on October 5th.
Apple said its revenue rose to $28.27 billion but that was also lower than the average analyst estimate of $29.69 billion. The company reported net profit of $6.62 billion, or $7.05 a share. That fell shy of expectations for earnings of $7.39 a share.
It sold 11.12 million iPad tablets and 4.89 million Macs in the September quarter.
Elsewhere in the tech sector, chipmaker Intel forecast quarterly revenue above Wall Street’s expectations, defying concerns that the growing popularity of tablets and a shaky economy are eating into demand for personal computers.
Intel, which has close to 4,000 staff in Ireland, said revenue in the current quarter would be $14.7 billion, plus or minus $500 million.
Intel’s processors are used in 80 per cent of the world’s PCs but the company has failed to gain traction in mobile devices like Apple iPad and Google’s Android smartphones. GAAP net income in the third quarter was $3.5 billion, up 17 percent.
Struggling web company Yahoo also reported third quarter results after US markets closed which showed revenue and profit slipping further as it struggled to revive its online advertising business.
Profit in Yahoo’s third-quarter, the last under chief executive Carol Bartz, who was fired in September, totalled $293 million, or 23 cents a share. A year ago Yahoo posted net income of $396 million.
EMC, the world’s biggest maker of storage computers which employs 2,500 people in Ireland, reported a 28 per cent gain in third-quarter earnings as corporate spending on internet-based computing drove sales of data products and software from majority-owned VMware.
Net income rose to $605.6 million, or 27 cents a share, from $472.5 million, or 22 cents, a year earlier, the company said yesterday.
In Ireland, EMC said revenue grew by 21 per cent over the same period last year driven by demand for private cloud solutions. Irish customers who deployed EMC technology included Ericsson, Vodafone, Concern, Bausch Lomb, Nexus, State Street and Icon. – (Reuters)
