Oh, boy, is this a good time to be an Apple shareholder or what! The company has just published its financial report for the quarter ending in September and things just couldn’t be better. The company posted revenue of 20.34 billion US dollars, of which 4.31 billion were net profit.

Not only are those the best results ever achieved by Apple, they are also immensely better than the one for the same period last year. In Q3 of 2009 the numbers stood at 12.21 billion and 2.53 billion dollars respectively.

 

The main driving force behind this spectacular success is the iPhone 4, which generated more than 14.1 million sales (a 91 percent year-on-year growth). In other words, they’ve almost doubled their iPhone sales. Now Apple has a worldwide market share of over 5.5 percent, which is really something considering the average selling price of 629 dollars. Plus, shortages have been plaguing the iPhone 4 ever since it was launched.

 

In fact Apple has just surpassed Sony Ericsson figures in terms of sheer number of units sold and depending on the LG, Motorola and RIM results, Apple might has just secured itself a place in the world’s Top 5 mobile phone manufacturers.

 

The other Apple products did impressively over the past three months too (save for the iPods that recorded an 11 percent decline in sales). A total of 3.89 million Macs were shipped, a 27 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter, but the real success story is the iPad, which sold in 4.19 million units. Yep, Apple has sold more iPads than Macs.

 

In his speech at the Apple’s earning’s call, Steve Jobs confirmed that a 7-inch iPad isn’t in the works as the company doesn’t believe that a screen that small would be enough for high-quality apps to be created. So a direct battle between Samsung and Apple won’t happen until early next year, when the Koreans will, presumably, launch their 10-inch slate.

 

In the Q&A session following the official presentation, Peter Oppenheimer, the Apple’s CFO, shared that the free-bumper program has so far cost them “just over 100 million [USD]“.

 

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