Apple Exceeds $100 Billion Annual Sales – And Disappoints

Apple reported yet another fantastic quarter that brought in more than $28 billion and wrapped about Apple’s first $100 billion fiscal year. Unfortunately, the iPhone did not meet analyst shipment expectations, which sent Apple’s stock below the $400 mark again.

It appears that Apple has landed in the general financial analyst territory, in which a miss of street expectations will translate in a nose diving share price. Apple’s fiscal Q4 (calendar Q3) revenue was $28.27 billion, up from $20.34 billion last year. The net profit jumped to $6.62 billion, up from $4.31 billion. Apple’s cash on hand as well as short-term investments remained flat at just under $26 billion, while the company’s total assets now stand at $116.3 billion, up from $75 billion last year. $30 billion alone went into long-term securities.

The revenue for the entire fiscal year was $108 billion.

To keep these numbers in perspective, Intel also reported quarterly revenues today – and came in at $14.3 billion with net income of $3.7 billion. Apple is already twice the size of Intel in revenue and remains ahead of IBM, which reported $26.2 billion of revenue and earnings of $3.8 billion. For the fourth calendar quarter, Apple expects revenue of about $37 billion, which will push it well ahead of HP, as well as record earnings of $9.30 per share, which will put Apple into the neighborhood of $10 billion of profit. The estimate is credible, especially since we know that more than 4 million iPhone 4S devices have been sold already.

Unfortunately, that has not been enough for analysts, who criticized that Apple sold only 17.07 million iPhone during the quarter, and missed the 20 million unit estimate. Apple couldn’t make up with the fact that 11.12 million iPads were sold, a 166% increase over last year. Apple also sold 4.89 million Macs (+26%), but is now seeing notably fewer iPods being shipped (-27%, 6.62 million).

After hour trading reflected the analyst sentiment and sent the stock down 6.6% or nearly $28 to $394. Nearly $26 billion of market cap being wiped out within a few hours.

It is unlikely that there will be any significant damage from this artificial miss at this time, but it is a sign that analysts may be much tougher with Apple in the future.

Kurt Bakke in Business on October 18