Apple on Wednesday posted a $19 million profit or 5 cents a share, for its fiscal third quarter, down from $32 million, or 9 cents, a year ago. Revenues for the quarter were $1.545 billion, up 8 percent from the year-ago quarter and up 5 percent sequentially, and gross margins were 27.7 percent, up from 27.4 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 39 percent of the quarter’s revenues.
Apple’s earnings beat the consensus estimate from Analysts polled by Thomson/First Call, who were expecting Apple to report a profit of 3 cents a share on sales of $1.49 billion.
Apple said it sold a total of 771 thousand Macintosh units during the quarter.
“This was a great new product quarter for Apple, starting with the iTunes Music Store and the new third-generation iPods, and ending with the announcement of the Power Mac G5 and the developer preview of Panther, the fourth major release of Mac OS X,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Customer response to our new products has been very strong, and this quarter we are focused on delivering Power Mac G5s beginning in August and finishing Panther for release later this year.”
While pleased with the results, Apple CFO Fred Anderson said looking ahead to the fourth quarter the company expects an increase in revenues and a slight increase in earnings relative to the June quarter.