If Apple's iTunes division was a standalone company
Delving deep inside Apple's quarterly earnings report, Horace Dediu of Asymco writes that revenue from Apple's iTunes/Software/Services group increased by 34 percent year over year.
Indeed, as we pointed out earlier, revenue Apple derived from its iTunes, Software and Services segment was responsible for 7.6 percent of Apple's entire quarterly revenue last quarter. Dediu also approximates that gross revenue from this segment now results in upwards of US$7 billion per quarter for Apple's ever-growing bank account.
Things get really interesting when we measure up Apple's iTunes, Software and Services segment to other Fortune 500 companies and Google's search business in particular.
Dediu writes:
To illustrate this, I plotted the history of gross iTunes revenues vs. Google's search business.
On a yearly basis iTunes/Software/Services is nearly half of Google's core business and growing slightly faster.
The iTunes "empire" of content and services would be ranked as number 130 in the Fortune 500 ranking of companies (slightly below Alcoa and above Eli Lilly).
A commentor on Asymco also highlights how massive Apple's iTunes operation is on a standalone basis, pointing out that iTunes "generates almost 5x the profit" that Amazon does on "less than 1/3 of the revenue."
