Apple Earnings Scorching Hot – Jobs Drops Major Tablet Hint

Steve Jobs released a huge tip in the Apple financials report for the first fiscal quarter of 2010, stating that:

“The new products we are planning to release this year are very strong, starting this week with a major new product that we’re really excited about.”

This of course refers to the Apple event that is taking place this Wednesday, which is the focus of much speculation in the market. The Apple tablet is rumored to be making its initial debut at that event, after ample press coverage in recent months.

From the report: Apple sold some 3.36 million Macs, 8.7 million iPhones, and 21 million iPods during the quarter. The only main product class that saw total unit sales decline was the iPod line, with Year Over Year sales softening some eight percent. iPhone sales were up 100%, and Mac sales were up 33% YOY as well.

Apple is now a $50+ billion dollar company.

As we reported earlier, even though Mac sales are growing, OS X is still losing market share to other operating systems. While Apple is growing, other hardware manufactures are expanding their sales more rapidly, using cheap netbooks to explode unit shipments.

Apple posted total revenues of $15.68 billion, booking a $3.38 billion profit for the quarter. Gross margin came in at a high 40.9%, up from 37.9%. Apple was “very pleased to have generated $5.8 billion in cash during the quarter.” Of course, the holiday season is a very important quarter for Apple. For the coming quarter, they are expecting “revenue in the range of about $11.0 billion to $11.4 billion and we expect diluted earnings per share in the range of about $2.06 to $2.18.”

Apple has had very strong stock market performance in recent time, more than doubling its share price in the last year. All the analysts, pundits, fans, and anti-fans are expecting one thing this week; a tablet device that will explode and redefine the computing market. That too, along with their strong financial performance, is built into the Apple stock price.