Apple’s Q1 2013: Revenue Up 17.7% to $54.5B, $13.1B In Profit

Here's my question: Why is the stock down 5% on an announcement that beats estimates, and is a record for the company, along with positive guidance. I do not understand the markets as much as I thought I did.

One of the more interesting parts of the call is them saying they are abandoning their conservative guidance for a more "likely" one.

TL;DR:<p>-- Music players remain a shrinking niche.<p>-- Mac sales have (at least) plateaued and are likely sinking in lockstep with the rest of the classical PC industry.<p>-- Apple is doing fine. 75%+ of their revenue is now from iOS.<p>-- China is important.

There's one thing that has me worried here. And it has nothing to do with EPS and profit margins and the like, let Wall Street worry about that, what I'm worried about has little effect on Apple's bottom line these days. It is that Apple sold just 4.1 million Macs, missing the estimates badly.<p>General-purpose computing is starting to look more and more like a profitable hobby for Apple. That it is in retreat over the whole industry only makes it worse. Maybe the day when most everybody has been herded into a walled garden isn't too far away.

Strange this article has 30 pts, is 1 hour old and is at the bottom of page 2.<p>A 3 year old article with similar pts is in the top 20.<p>Does Apple take 30% of the HN points too? Techcrunch penalty?

Interesting stuff indeed:<p>Q1 2012 46.3B Revenue 13.1B Profit (28.3% net profit) Q1 2013 54.5B Revenue 13.1B Profit (24.0% net profit)<p>So 4.3% of your net profit (2.3 billion dollars) went somewhere. Did anyone see on their balance sheet where it went? Any extraordinary items? Down payment on the new HQ or anything?

FYI: Q1 2012 = 14 weeks Q1 2013 = 13 weeks<p>Q1 2012 profit/week = $0.93B Q1 2013 profit/week = $1.00B

How much of the profit is trapped outside the US? It seems a tax holiday on repatriating those funds is unlikely to happen, given that Google just sunk $1bn into a new London HQ. What will Apple execs do?

Ars live blog of the earnings call:<p><a href="http://live.arstechnica.com/apples-2013-q1-earnings-call/" rel="nofollow">http://live.arstechnica.com/apples-2013-q1-earnings-call/</a>

Tim Cook, from the call:<p>"In addition to reporting changes, to further increase transparency, we're changing our guidance approach In the past, we've given a conservative estimate. Going forward, we plan to project what we are likely to achieve"<p>And the projection for the Jan-Mar quarter:<p>"we are expecting between $41 and $43 billion for the next quarter"

Nice graphs, courtesy of TechCrunch for visual people.<p><a href="http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/23/apples-record-first-quarter-of-2013-in-charts/" rel="nofollow">http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/23/apples-record-first-quarter...</a>

(to save others the trouble of doing the math themselves) It means 6 iPhones/second and (almost) 3 iPads/second.

With a company as big as Apple ($485B market cap) you can pretty much throw out the fundamentals. The question is, can they continue to grow?<p>I personally don't think they can grow to be much bigger than they already are.

$13 Billion in profit a quarter and Wall Street slams their stock. I guess they expect 20% growth year to year on a company valued at $500Billion.