Peter Oppenheimer
Analyst · Bank of America Merrill Lynch
Thank you, Nancy. Thank you for joining us. We are very pleased to report the highest March quarter revenue and earnings in Apple's history. We set a new all-time quarterly record for iPhone sales, and a new March quarter record for Mac sales, and we're thrilled with the momentum for iPad. Revenue for the quarter was $24.7 billion, which was $11.2 billion over the prior March quarter's result and represents the largest year-over-year quarterly revenue growth we've ever generated. This tremendous increase of 83% was fueled primarily by record iPhone sales, very robust demand for iPad and strong growth in Mac sales. Operating margin was an all-time high of almost $7.9 billion, representing 31.9% of revenue. Net income was almost $6 billion. This represented 95% growth over the year gross quarter's earnings and translated to earnings per share of $6.40. Turning to the details of the quarter. I'd like to begin with our Mac products and services. We established a new March quarter record with sales of 3.76 million Macs, representing 28% growth over the year ago quarter. We're extremely pleased with this very strong growth, particularly given IDC's most recently published estimate of a 3% contraction for the PC market overall. This result makes the March quarter the 20th consecutive quarter that we outperformed the PC market. We experienced strong Mac sales growth in each of our operating segments, most notably in the Asia-Pacific segment, where Mac sales increased 76% year-over-year. The growth in Mac sales was fueled primarily by the continued great popularity of MacBook Air, which was updated in the December quarter, as well as very strong sales of MacBook Pro. We updated the entire MacBook Pro family during the March quarter with the next-generation processors and graphics, high-speed Thunderbolt I/O technology and a new FaceTime HD camera. The new MacBook Pro lineup offers twice the speed of the previous generation and customer response has been excellent. We began at the end of the quarter with between 3 and 4 weeks of Mac channel inventory. During the quarter, we released the developer preview of Mac OS X Lion, which takes some of the best ideas from the iPad and brings them back to the Mac. Lion features Mission Control an innovative new view of everything running on the Mac. Launchpad, a new home for all your Mac Apps, full screen apps that use the entire Mac display and new multi-touch gestures. Lion is scheduled to ship to customers this summer and we look forward to showing more of its great features at our Developers Conference in June. Moving to our music products. We sold 9 million iPods compared to 10.9 million in the year ago quarter. Though lower year-over-year, total iPod sales were ahead of our expectations with iPod touch continuing to count for over half of all iPods sold. iPod share of the U.S. market for MP3 players remains at over 70% based on the latest monthly data published by MPD, and iPod continue to be the top-selling MP3 player in most countries we track based on the latest data published by GFK. We ended the quarter within our target range of 4 to 6 weeks of iPod channel inventory. The iTunes Store turned in its best quarter ever with revenue of almost $1.4 billion, thanks to record revenue from music, video, iOS apps and books. We were very pleased to begin offering a full catalog of 17,000 ebooks from Random House on the iBookstore during the March quarter. The iBookstore now includes ebooks for more than 2,500 publishers in over 20 categories, and customers have downloaded over 100 million books. I'd now like to turn to the iPhone. We were thrilled to have sold a record 18.6 million iPhones compared to 8.8 million in the previous March quarter. This represents 113% year-over-year growth which is significantly ahead of IDC's latest published estimate of 74% growth for the global smartphone market overall in the March quarter. Recognized revenue from iPhone handset and accessory sales was $12.3 billion during the quarter compared to $5.45 billion in the year ago quarter, an increase of 126%. We continue to experience very strong year-over-year iPhone sales growth in all of our operating segments with sales in both the Americas and Asia-Pacific regions more than doubling year-over-year. We were able to make a significant increase in our capacity, once again, allowing us to expand distribution and get much-needed supply to our channel partners. We were very pleased to begin selling iPhones on the Verizon network in the U.S. in the March quarter, and we were also happy to add SK Telecom in Korea, as well as Saudi Telecom in Saudi Arabia. Including some carrier consolidation, we ended the quarter with iPhone distribution through 186 carriers in 90 countries. We ended the quarter with about 5.2 million iPhones in channel inventory, a sequential increase of about 1.7 million to support new carrier launches and existing channel partners. This placed us within our target range of 4 to 6 weeks of iPhone channel inventory. iPhone is continuing to see strong growth within the Enterprise segment. Today, 88% of the Fortune 500 are testing or deploying iPhone. With strong employee demand and custom app development fueling adoption, we are seeing great scale of iPhone deployments in businesses worldwide. In fact, hundreds of private and public companies worldwide are supporting thousands of iPhones on their corporate networks. Some examples include Cisco, Prudential, Boston Scientific, General Motors, American Airlines, Deloitte, Yum! Brands and Xerox. Turning to iPad, we continue to be thrilled with its momentum. We sold 4.7 million iPads during the March quarter, launching iPad 2 in U.S. on March 11 and in 25 additional countries on March 25. Customer enthusiasm has been tremendous for iPad 2 and we're working hard to get it into the hands of customers as quickly as possible. Including both the original iPad and iPad 2, we had distribution in 59 countries by the end of the March quarter. Given the very strong customer demand and despite the increased geographic distribution, iPod (sic) [iPad] channel inventory declined by 400,000 from the beginning of the quarter, implying sell-through of about 5.1 million. This resulted in ending channel inventory of below 850,000, which was below our target range of 4 to 6 weeks. We sold every iPad 2 that we could make during the quarter and would have liked to end the quarter with more channel inventory. Recognized revenue from sales of iPad and iPad accessories during the quarter was $2.8 billion. Employee demand for iPad in the corporate environment remains strong and CIOs continue to embrace iPad in an unprecedented rate. In just over a year since its debut, 75% of the Fortune 500 are testing or deploying iPad within their enterprises. Some recent examples of enterprises that are deploying iPad include FORTUNE 500 companies such as Xerox, AutoNation, Yum! Brands, ADP, Boston Scientific, Estée Lauder, Disney, Stryker, Prudential Financial, Rite Aid and USAA. Combining iPhone, iPad and iPod touch, we reached just under 189 million cumulative iOS device sales through the end of the March quarter. In March, we introduced iOS 4.3 with new features including faster Safari mobile browsing performance with the Java Nitro script engine, iTunes Home Sharing, enhancements to AirPlay and the Personal Hotspot feature for sharing an iPhone 4 cellular data connection over Wi-Fi. The App Store continues to be incredibly successful with over 350,000 apps available and well over 10 billion downloads to date. In February, we announced a new subscription service available to all publishers of content-based apps, including magazines, newspapers, video and music. Publishers set the price and length of subscription and customers select the subscription and length they want with 1 click. And it was also a great pleasure to announce in March that we have made more than $2 billion in payments to developers since opening the App Store. I'd now like to turn to the Apple Retail Stores. We are approaching the Retail Stores 10th anniversary on May 19, and we're on the verge of achieving a major milestone. In the next few days, we will be thrilled to welcome our 1 billionth visitor. Store traffic continues to be amazingly strong. And in the March quarter, we hosted a record 71.1 million visitors in our stores compared to 47 million visitors in the year ago quarter, an increase of 51%. Retail revenue was $3.19 billion compared to $1.68 billion in the year ago quarter, an increase of 90%. Capitalizing on the February MacBook Pro update, the stores delivered another record Mac quarter, selling 797,000 Macs compared to 606,000 Macs in the year ago quarter, an increase of 32%, and about half the Macs sold in our stores during the March quarter were to customers who had never owned a Mac before. To further enrich our Apple retail customer experience, we recently launched a program called Personal Setup. When customers buy a Mac, iPad, iPhone or iPod touch, our teams help the customer set up the product in the store so that they are up and running before they leave. Personal Setup includes the customer's e-mail, contacts, calendar, applications and more. In the March quarter, our stores set up over 1 million products. We operated 323 stores during the quarter. Average revenue per store was $9.9 million compared to $5.9 million in the year ago quarter, an increase of 67%. International retail store sales remain strong with our average international store volume exceeding our very productive average U.S. store volume. Retail segment margin more than doubled year-over-year to $807 million compared to $373 million in the year ago quarter. We anticipate opening 40 new stores in fiscal 2011, nearly 3 quarters of which will be outside the United States, including our fifth store in China. Total company gross margin was 41.4%, which was 290 basis points higher than our guidance. More than half of this difference came from better product mix than planned, particularly higher iPhone sales. The remainder was largely a result of leverage on the higher revenue and lower-than-expected commodity, service and other costs. Operating expenses were $2.34 billion and included $236 million of stock-based compensation expense. OI&E was $26 million and the tax rate for the quarter was 24.2%, below our guidance of 25.5% due to changes in our full year forecast of foreign earnings, R&D tax credit and state taxes. Turning to cash. Our cash for short-term and long-term marketable securities totaled $65.8 billion at the end of the March quarter compared to $59.7 billion at the end of the December quarter, a sequential increase of $6.1 billion. Cash flow from operations was $6.2 billion, an increase of 167% year-over-year. The increase in cash is net of approximately $900 million to combine prepayments and capital expenditures related to the strategic supply agreements that we referred to in our last quarterly call. As we move into the June quarter, I'd like to review our outlook, which includes the types of forward-looking information that Nancy referred to at the beginning of the call. We expect revenue to be about $23 billion compared to $15.7 billion in the June quarter last year. We expect gross margin to be about 38%, reflecting approximately $55 million related to stock-based compensation expense. We expect OpEx to be about $2.5 billion, including about $255 million related to stock-based compensation expense. We expect OI&E to be about $70 million and we expect the tax rate to be about 25%. We are targeting EPS of about $5.03. In closing, we're thrilled with the results and accomplishments of our record March quarter. We're extremely pleased with customers' response to iPad 2 and are working hard to get it into the hands of customers as fast as we can. We remain very confident in our strategy and are very excited about our new product pipeline. And with that, I'd like to open the call to questions.