Analysts expecting Apple to deliver weak quarterly results tomorrow
Tomorrow afternoon, Apple will post its earnings from its fiscal third quarter and the consensus on Wall Street isn't looking all that rosy.
Investors have come to expect astronomical growth from Apple and there's no denying that as Apple becomes ever more profitable, delivering staggering earnings growth quarter after quarter becomes more of a challenge.
According to the consensus on Wall Street, for the quarter gone by, Apple will post revenue of $35 billion and a net profit of US$7 billion. While most companies can only dream of recording that type of quarter, those figures, if indeed accurate, would mean that Apple's profits declined year over year.
During Apple's third fiscal quarter in 2012, the company posted $35 billion in revenue and $9 billion in profits.
That's a nasty development for a company that was regularly posting startup-like profit and sales growth as recently as a year ago. Between October 2009 and March 2012, Apple doubled its quarterly earnings in eight out of 10 quarters. Apple's sales grew by more than 50 percent in nine of those quarters.
Apple will post its earnings for its third fiscal quarter tomorrow afternoon at 2 PM PT / 5 PM ET, after which Apple executives will hold an earnings conference call.
As a point of reference ahead of Apple's earnings report tomorrow, Apple during the same quarter a year ago posted the following results:
26 million iPhones sold
17 million iPads sold
4 million Macs sold
6.8 million iPods sold
