Apple earnings report

I awoke at 3AM and thought, "Apple must have released it's 4th quarter results by now!" (Doesn't the performance of Apple wake everyone up in the middle of the night?)

(The rest of this post goes quite a bit deeper into the weeds than I expected.  Not worth reading if you are not interested in stocks.)

The numbers were an eye-opener:

• Sales of $46 billion from which they made a profit of $13 billion.  
• They are sitting on $96.7 billion in cash.  
• In three months they sold 37 million iPhones - blowing away all estimates.  They also sold more than 15 million iPads and 5 million Macs.  

The real story is not the sales, it's the profit.  Apple squeezes every dime out of its Chinese suppliers and is able to charge its customers a premium for its products.  A net profit of $13 billion on $46 billion in sales is simply unbelievable.  That's an astounding 28% net profit margin. Want some comparisons?
Exxon-Mobil in the last quarter had $10.3 billion in profit on $120 billion in revenue (sales):  8.6%
Wal-Mart a paltry $3.3 billion in profit on $110 billion in revenue: 3%

Google had almost as high of a net profit margin and Microsoft did better than Apple:
Google had $2.7 billion in profit on 10.6 billion in revenue - a 25.4% net profit margin.
Microsoft does even better on a percent comparison:  20.8 billion in revenue yielding $6.6 billion in profit - Their net profit is 31.7% of revenue.

The difference:  Apple generates most of its profits from selling physical items - phones, tablets, and computers.  Most of those companies make a very small profit margin.

HP - in their best quarter in the last year (spring) - had a 7.3% net profit margin and only .7% in the most recent quarter.
Dell's net profit margin: 5.8%

So Apple's numbers are nothing short of astounding.  It will be interesting to watch the stock price.