Apple Inc. (AAPL) Sets Earnings Record With 74.5 Million iPhones Sold, $18B Profit

Apple Inc. blew past Wall Street expectations on Tuesday, setting new records for iPhone sales and revenue, while fueling anticipation for the Apple Watch. But the iPad continued to struggle, despite recent efforts to reinvigorate it within the enterprise market.

The company posted earnings of $18 billion, or $3.06 per share, on $74.6 billion in revenue, soaring past analyst predictions of earnings of $15.3 billion, or $2.58 per share, on $67.4 billion in revenue. Apple’s revenue also shot past its own guidance from October, which placed its fiscal 2015 first-quarter revenue between $63.5 billion and $66.5 billion.

“We’d like to thank our customers for an incredible quarter, which saw demand for Apple products soar to an all-time high,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a statement. “Our revenue grew 30 percent over last year to $74.6 billion, and the execution by our teams to achieve these results was simply phenomenal.”

Driving those profits were Apple’s iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, which the company could hardly keep in stock for most of the holiday season. It sold 74.5 million units in the quarter, up 46 percent from 51 million in the same period in 2013. As a result of growing demand, iPhone market share grew in the U.S. to 42.3 percent in 2014, up from 40 percent in the previous year ,according to eMarketer.

While the U.S. is Apple’s largest market, the company saw an extra boost out of China, where the smartphone has been booming since its release. The iPhone 6 proved so popular that it took top spot in the country by units shipped in the December quarter for the first time, soaring past Xiaomi, Samsung and Huawei, according to market research firm Canalys.

Beyond the iPhone, Mac sales saw healthy growth to 5.5 million units, up 14 percent from 4.8 million units sold in the same period last year. Despite aggressive advertising efforts for Apple’s iPad, sales continued to slump, with 21.4 million units sold, down 17.7 percent from the 26 million units sold in 2013. But the tablet market has seen a massive growth slowdown as a whole, dropping from 52.5 percent growth in 2013, to 7.2 percent in 2014, according to market research firm IDC.

With Cupertino’s results now in the open, analysts and investors will now look to the Apple Watch, which will ship in April. For accounting purposes, the company has stated its intentions to keep the all-new product grouped together in a category called “Other Products,” which also accounts for the Apple TV and the declining iPod.

Apple's fiscal 2015 second-quarter guidance expects revenue between $52 billion and $55 billion, with gross margin between 38.5 percent and 39.5 percent.