Business Users Help Apple’s Red-Hot Quarter

Apple just beat expectations for its first quarter with record sales of the iPhone and iPad leading the way, as a growing number of businesses are latching onto them, the company says.

The company's stock prices fell Monday after it was announced that CEO Steve Jobs was going on medical leave. But the company’s profit surge for the most recent quarter as revealed in its earning call Tuesday are easing those concerns. The reported net income for the first quarter , which included the holiday season, totaled $6 billion, or $6.43 a share, up from $3.38 billion, or $3.67 a share in the same period last year.

Verizon, which will begin selling the iPhone on Feb. 10, will have a strong headwind for those forthcoming sales. Apple sold 16.2 million iPhones compared to 8.7 million in the previous December quarter, marking 86 percent year-over-year growth, Apple's CFO, Peter Oppenheimer pointed out in the earnings call, adding that revenue would have risen more had the company been able to build more iPhones. The iPhone outpaced International Data Corp. 's latest published estimate of 70 percent growth for the global smartphone market overall in the December quarter.

Suits are signing up for the iPhone, too, according to Oppenheimer, who said that 88 of the Fortune 100 companies and almost 60 percent of the Financial Times Europe 100 companies are now either testing or deploying iPhones.

As for iPads, Apple sold 7.3 million of the tablets, a sequential boost of over 3 million, with distribution in 46 countries by the end of the December quarter.

More than 80 percent of the Fortune 100 are already deploying or piloting iPad, up from 65 percent in the September quarter, with recent examples including JPMorgan Chase, Cardinal Health, Wells Fargo, Archer Daniels Midland, Sears Holdings and DuPont. As a growing number of companies release new tablets to rival the iPad, rumors that the iPad 2 is on its way this spring still continue, but nothing was confirmed.

Among Apple's less stellar performers were its Mac computers, but even those saw 23 percent growth over the year-ago quarter, with a new quarterly record sales of 4.13 million Macs. That compares to IDC's estimate of 3 percent growth for the PC market, Oppenheimer said.

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