Apple Reports Second Quarter Results
Best March Quarter Revenue and Earnings in Apple History — Apple® today announced financial results for its fiscal 2009 second quarter ended March 28, 2009. The Company posted revenue of $8.16 billion and a net quarterly profit of $1.21 billion, or $1.33 per diluted share.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the third straight year Apple has opened the spring with a quarterly report in this corpus — following July 2006's third-quarter results and January 2008's fiscal first quarter — but this one lands differently: $8.16 billion in revenue and $1.21 billion in net profit make it the best March quarter in company history, per the confirmed figures.
The call itself carried the news beyond the numbers. Syndicated pickups from AppleInsider and VentureBeat frame two strategic statements by Tim Cook: Apple is satisfied with AT&T and has no plans for a CDMA iPhone, and it will not chase the netbook category. Both answers land against a backdrop of active platform work — iPhone OS 3.0 reached its third beta on April 14 with revised push notifications, and Mini DisplayPort won adoption from third-party monitor makers the same week.
First-order effects
- Apple posts a record March quarter ($8.16B revenue, $1.21B profit, $1.33 diluted EPS), defying the seasonal trough and giving the company fresh leverage over suppliers and partners negotiating ahead of the June iPhone cycle.
- Cook's on-call answers settle two open questions for the market: no CDMA iPhone means Verizon stays outside Apple's carrier map for now, and no netbook means Apple cedes the low-price laptop segment outright.
Second-order effects
- AT&T's iPhone exclusivity is reaffirmed, so rivals' carrier strategies must compete around Apple rather than against a multi-carrier iPhone; any CDMA entry would now require Apple to reverse a stated position, raising the bar for rumors.
- PC vendors get a clearer lane in netbooks but face an Apple contenting itself with premium pricing — the competitive pressure shifts from matching Apple's hardware to matching the App Store distribution channel, whose governance was just stress-tested by the Baby Shaker app approval and hours-later removal.
Third-order effects
- The pattern across these reports points to Apple's earnings engine migrating from Mac refresh cycles toward the iPhone-plus-App Store system, where software updates (the OS 3.0 beta cadence running since March) drive both device demand and developer lock-in.
- Mini DisplayPort's first third-party monitor adoptions suggest Apple is extending the same playbook — proprietary standards opened selectively to licensees — beyond handsets, making standards control a second structural profit lever alongside carrier exclusivity.
The trend: Apple's quarterly results mark its transition into an iPhone-and-app-store-led business that holds carrier exclusivity and proprietary standards as its main competitive moats.