Google Finance: Apple Inc.

Re: Earnings math (and more)

merkhet <merk...@gmail.com>

Becca, it's not a sales growth of 50%. Think of the extremes. If they
only sold two macs last quarter, and one was to a previous Mac owner
while the other was to a new convertee -- they could still say that
half of our sales last quarter were to people who never owned macs.
However, two macs last year would certainly not be an increase in sales
growth. Of course, on the other extreme, they could have sold a
billion computers last quarter and that would equate to more than 50%
sales growth. So his comment that half of their sales last quarter
were to people who had never owned Macs has little predictive value.

Becca wrote:
> 20 Mil ipods in Q1 would not be unreasonable (since it is holiday
> period and look at sales for other quarters), and would still represent
> incredible earnings on iPods alone. If this statistic is correct, I
> don't see how Apple could manage to have earnings under $1 this
> quarter, what with PC growth and all.

> Has anyone tried to work with the statistic, 'Half our sales last
> quarter were to people who had never owned Macs?'

> Sounds like sales growth of about 50% to me - unless Mac owners have
> stopped buying. Am I missing something here?

> anblick wrote:

> > If Apple sold 80 million iPods before the Christmas quarter, then the
> > Christmas quarter sales were less than 20 million. In the keynote
> > address, he said that they would ship the 100 millionth iPod this year.