Apple announced its quarterly results on Wednesday, and the company surprised just about everyone by not only blowing away iPhone unit sales estimates, but in setting a March quarterly record while it was at it. The company sold some 43.7 million iPhones, well ahead of consensus estimates of 38 million, as well as 4.1 million Macs and 16.3 million iPads. I’ll walk through the detail on each below:
iPhones
Nearly 44 million in a quarter is a March quarter record for Apple. This comes out to 5.6 iPhones every second for all of January, February, and March, and soundly beats the 38 million units being tossed around by analysts.
Part of this record number included new and emerging markets for Apple, where Apple saw double digit growth in several key international markets. for instance, Apple CEO Tim Cook told analysts that Apple's internal estimates found that 60 percent of new iPhone customers were switching from Android in China.
Japan saw iPhone sales increase 50 percent over last year, and Vietnam and the UK were also mentioned as markets where Apple saw significant gains.
iPads
Sales of iPads break down to just a smidge over 2 iPads every second of the quarter, coming in at the high end of Apple’s guidance numbers, but below analysts figures. Wall Street was expecting some 19 million units, while Apple reported sales of just 16.4 million.
During the Q&A part of the earnings call, however, incoming CFO Luca Maestri said that Apple decreased channel inventory by some 1.1 million units, meaning that the shortfall in units sold was less significant than its appeared.
Macs
Compared to the other figures 4.1 million units looks like a throwaway number, but I don’t know any other computer company who could sell a computer every two seconds for three solid months and not be pleased by it. Apple usually doesn’t break the numbers down further to talk about iMacs vs Mac minis, or what percentage of MacBooks with Retina Display are sold compared to mere mortal displays, so even followup questions don't tend to have a lot of Mac sales in them.