Mac, iPhone sales drive Apple's $1.23-billion Q3 profits

Riding on strong Macintosh notebook computers and iPhone sales, Apple's Q3 sales and profit beat analysts' - and Wall Street's - expectations and continued to go against the tide of recession.

The Cupertino-based company posted revenues of $8.34 billion and a net quarterly profit of $1.23 billion against revenue of $7.46 billion and net quarterly profit of $1.07 billion in the same quarter last year.

International sales accounted for 44 per cent of the quarter's revenue.

The revenue was driven by increased sales of Macintosh notebook computers and iPhones. Apple sold 2.6 million Macintosh computers, representing a four per cent unit increase over the year-ago quarter and 5.2 million iPhones, representing a whopping 626 per cent unit growth over the year-ago quarter.

"We're making our most innovative products ever and our customers are responding,'' said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. ''We're thrilled to have sold over 5.2 million iPhones during the quarter and users have downloaded more than 1.5 billion applications from our App Store in its first year.''

''We're extremely pleased to report record non-holiday quarter revenue and earnings and quarterly cash flow from operations of $2.3 billion,'' said Peter Oppenheimer, Apple's CFO. ''Looking ahead to the fourth fiscal quarter of 2009, we expect revenue in the range of about $8.7 billion to $8.9 billion and we expect diluted earnings per share in the range of about $1.18 to $1.23.''