Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2013 fourth quarter ended September 28, 2013. The Company posted quarterly revenue of $37.5 billion and quarterly net profit of $7.5 billion, or $8.26 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $36 billion and net profit of $8.2 billion, or $8.67 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 37% compared to 40 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 60% of the quarter’s revenue.
Apple sold 33.8 million iPhones, a record for the September quarter, compared to 26.9 million in the year-ago quarter. Apple also sold 14.1 million iPads during the quarter, compared to 14 million in the year-ago quarter. The company sold 4.6 million Macs, compared to 4.9 million in the year-ago quarter.
Apple’s Board of Directors has declared a cash dividend of $3.05 per share of the Company’s common stock. The dividend is payable on November 14, 2013, to shareholders of record as of the close of business on November 11, 2013.
“We’re pleased to report a strong finish to an amazing year with record fourth quarter revenue, including sales of almost 34 million iPhones,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, in the release. “We’re excited to go into the holidays with our new iPhone 5c and iPhone 5s, iOS 7, the new iPad mini with Retina Display and the incredibly thin and light iPad Air, new MacBook Pros, the radical new Mac Pro, OS X Mavericks and the next generation iWork and iLife apps for OS X and iOS.”
“We generated $9.9 billion in cash flow from operations and returned an additional $7.8 billion in cash to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases during the September quarter, bringing cumulative payments under our capital return program to $36 billion,” said Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s CFO, in the release.
Apple is providing the following guidance for its fiscal 2014 first quarter:
• revenue between $55 billion and $58 billion
• gross margin between 36.5 percent and 37.5 percent
• operating expenses between $4.4 billion and $4.5 billion
• other income/(expense) of $200 million
• tax rate of 26.25%
Prior to Apple’s earnings release, Wall Street analysts’ consensus for Apple’s fiscal Q114 was $55.59 billion, according to FactSet.
On September 23, 2013, Apple stated their expectation for total company revenue for Q413 to be near the high end of their previously provided guidance range of $34 billion to $37 billion, and expected gross margin to be near the high end of the previously provided range of 36% to 37%.
Wall Street was expecting revenue of $36.8 billion, up from $36 billion a year ago, and earnings per share of $7.93, down from $8.67 a year ago.
Apple will provide live streaming of its Q4 2013 financial results conference call beginning at 2:00 p.m. PDT on October 28, 2013 at www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/earningsq413.
As usual, MacDailyNews will cover the conference call with live notes here.
Stoooooopid analists can’t get the time of day right.
Okay release the negative Korean financed opinion piece on Tim Cook.
And yet the stock is down $17 in after hours trading. F U Wall Street!
Ignore the haters on Wall Street; they will continue to trade Apple stock as if it’s casino chips. Wonder when the SEC will come to life and do its job. Great job Tim Cook. Go Apple!!
I’m far more concerned with the dividend. The stock price will be whatever it is when I sell. The dividend will provide my retirement nest egg.
I agree with that point. However, Apple could easily afford a higher dividend if they’re not going to make any large acquisitions. A higher dividend just might attract the mutual fund investors if Apple makes it sweet enough. Apple needs to do something to make the stock attractive to large investors. Apple having only 62% institutional ownership is just plain wicked for a tech company.
Amazon 68%
Google 71%
Microsoft 70%
Hewlett Packard 77%
Apple is not attracting the right type of investors.
If investors don’t like Apple, then don’t buy it. That just means there won’t be more big power players trying to tell Apple what to do.
Those MS investments will need a new home, are the people holding them smart enough to find their way over to Apple?
Almost always drops on good news. These are gamblers, not rational people, in control of our retirement.
You’re in control of your retirement you fool. If you don’t want to gamble in the Wall Street casino then pull your money out and put it in a savings account that yields less than 1%.
Stop texting in class, kid.
You people are just as greedy and selfish as Ichahn. Gamblers!
Probably because profits down.
That would be ironic, considering it’s those people pushing Apple to make lower-priced devices…
Not to mention Apple spending profits to buy back shares.
Not anymore sucker…up 6 now
Why do you care unless you are an Apple stockholder? Prices go up and prices go down on the share market – it’s a fact. Often, rumours, herd behaviour or analyst reports (accurate or not) affect the share price. It’s as if a lot of people around here have never seen the share market in action before! Apple isn’t going broke any time soon and they continue to churn out great products. That’s what matters to we consumers. Relax about Apple and smell the roses.
As usual, the stock is tanking afterhours.
And unusually, coming back up during the conference call.
Funny, I always thought beating the street was a good thing. Where is my error? Why is the price tanking now?
Because that is how the hedge funds make their money. They short the hell out of it and then buy back in before the 11th.
As long as they make money, they don’t care what the numbers mean. Stay calm and wait until the 10th and see what it looks like then.
The stock is down because before the announcement there was a chance for a big beat and big guidance. Now there isn’t. That potential sudden upside is gone, and so of course the price falls a bit.
And now it’s up, because in the call Apple explained it has deferred a significantly larger portion of earnings. Adding those back in makes for a bigger beat. Within a minute of saying that the price jumped $10.
Forward guidance on margins : 37% compared to 37.8% expected. It is what it is. The specs were known ahead of time.
No justice .. What is the meaning of meeting the estimate .
Buy!
Agreed! Buy, buy, buy and hold at least until the 12th.
No! Wall Street got a dog whistle message to short AAPL hard right now, and I think that’s going to push AAPL down for at least a couple days. Wait until the momentum is positive to buy in. Or, wait for the ex-dividend date (November 12) to minimize your capital gains tax slightly.
I do not like what I see. They are making huge profits. Time to sell.
Absolutely. Let’s buy Amazon.
Yes, YES! Especially since Amazon has such great profit margins . . .
Oh, wait . . . .
To Wall Street profits are highly overrated. It’s all about growth and market share and at this point Apple doesn’t have much of either. Honestly there is no way Apple can possibly get either one of them unless they get into some revenue-generating software business. Buy or build their own search engine. Apple should take over MasterCard and control mobile payments.
And other has big market share is coz they earn too little so they can ” grow “
As one astute MDN reader said some months ago, Applr should “rip their (Google’s) dick off” (by making iSearch). But payments is probably an easier route for Apple.
It’ll be interesting to see how pundits spin this as a ‘disappointment’.
Don’t be. I’ve seen that episode before and it wasn’t any good. The writing quality was horrible, the plot was convoluted and filled with holes, and the overall lack plausibility made it feel like an insult to its audience.
But I give it a 10. You can dance to it.
Strange!. How Wall Street behaved toward Apple. Sigh!.
Is there anyone has an answer for this question?.
Well the analyst on CNN put it this way. The market has gone up X% while Apple has stood still in recent months so sell the stock and invest in other stocks. Seems that this is a self fulfilling prophecy that actual performance is powerless to influence.
suck on that Carl Icahn
“We’re excited to go into the holidays with…the next generation iWork and iLife apps for OS X and iOS.”
Seriously? How about “we excited we dumbed down iWorks 09 to make it less useful for users and more compatible with IOS”.
I think Apple is resetting the iWork suite for cross platform compatibility, and will re-add features for all concurrently here on out. As evidence, note that Apple left the iWork 09 apps in their own folder for consumers to continue to use if they can’t deal the the feature downgrade from the Mac version.
Apple could have been more forthright about this transition and its implications. Hard to believe Apple prides itself on customer service.
Instead, I have the latest Pages/Keynote apps on my iPad that are incompatible with my various presentations and documents created on my computer (and some on my iPad) using previous iterations of iWorks. If I had known this new “dumbed down” version on the OS and IOS would not play nicely with iWorks 09, I would not have updated my iPad. 🙁 Again…communication from Apple on this matter has been woefully short of informative and helpful.
Strangely, AAPL seems to go up whenever there is any negative news regarding the company. Am I wrong to see that? Jumpers in China, +$3. Sold my purebred poodle for an iPad, +$4 (that’s actually good news). I’d buy more if I could but tapped out these days. Q114 earnings are gonna be stoopid!
DO NOT WORRY. DO NOT PANIC. There is no need. As others have commented, some are taking profits at the moment, and pundits will crow tomorrow about tightened margins (that match their tightened asses).
Let them blather and wail. it means nothing.
Forward guidance looks pretty good. The company is generating solid cash from operations. And stockholders will get a nice dividend to reinvest.
Look to the long term and don’t worry about the day-to-day hype, lies and CNBC-generated hysteria. it means nothing. As long as the company continues to grow its earnings and cash from operations, especially with the very low valuation that Apple has tied to its stock price, in the long run, the patient investor will do very well by Apple. Fast forward five to ten years from now, and if you reinvest your Apple dividends, the compounding of time, along with spurts in the company’s stock valuation (as Apple creates successful new product categories and closes deals like the one with China Mobile), investors will make a hefty profit.
Sit back and watch your sapling grow into a huge tree. That takes time. So don’t stare and fret – it won’t make the tree grow faster. But grow it will.
Yeah, sure. And meanwhile Amazon and Google climb straight up like giant sequoias reaching for the sky, unstoppable until they touch the heavens. Yet with Apple I’m forced to watch some sapling slowly grow a couple of inches a month with Wall Street stepping all over it. It’s time for Tim Cook to put some ReadyGro fertilizer in the form of reserve cash to accelerate growth tenfold.
I wanted to shout from the top of my lunges, Why?.
For the SEC to do its job would mean government staffing and intervention, wouldn’t it? Ironic, since this would also mean that the conservatives in Washington would have to cooperate to let such an investigation take place. Elizabeth Warren would have been in charge of such things but she was railroaded and had to take Scott Brown’s Senate seat instead. Very ironic indeed!
Close to 150B in the bank. Could have been more. Still that’s a lot of ammo to play with and fight the ripoff Korean pos companies in bed with gooople. 🙂
NO! But apple is doomed! Doomed I tell you! I’m sure after this news somehow their stock price will plummet with the total rational, sane, and logical thinking of the “experts”. Morons