CNNMoney:
The Cupertino, Calif.-based company said its fiscal first quarter profit rose to $13 billion, or $13.87 per share, more than double the profit Apple booked a year earlier.
It was one of the most profitable quarters ever for any U.S. company, trailing only ExxonMobil’s record-setting $14.8 billion quarter from the fall of 2008, when oil prices were at an all-time high.
Apple is sitting on most of those profits. It now has $97.6 billion in cash.
You might want to read that again. Apple, a company many left for dead in 1996, a company who’s share price was less than its cash on hand at one point in the 1990s, a company that once desperately hoped to be bought by Sun Microsystems, just had the second greatest quarter in US financial history. Congratulations to everyone at Apple.
And Apple is heading for the greatest quarter in history in Q1 2013, unless some flash memory disaster occurs.
Redesigned iPhone and a Retina iPad + iPods + TVs (box or set) + redesigned Macbook Pros and iMacs + whatever else. 13bn to 15bn is not such a difficult leap.