Apple beats the sh*t out of 'Great Depression 2.0'

It's past midnight and Apple's conference call for reporting fiscal Q4 results, which I finally managed to attend for the first time via webcasting, just came to an end. My jaws hit the ground and stayed there for more than 30 minutes, especially after His Jobness, in a rare appearance (8 years ago last) at the analyst conference call, jumped in to comment on the company results. Eat your hearts out filthy shortsellers. I'm gonna laugh my way to the bank watching you covering your short positions tomorrow. A-holes! It's already happening in afterhours trading where the stock picked up more than 10 bucks on top of the day-close, before even the conference call was over. Wow! What a company. What fabustunning achievements! We should preserve His Jobness' genetic material and clone a few dozens like him to save the world. How about that?

Anyways, the market will be soon overwhelmed by detailed reports of praise about the mind boggling records Apple broke again this quarter. In the meantime, see for yourselves some of their achievements that I personally picked-up during the call.

Total number of iPhones sold in the September 2008 quarter (most of them 3G): 6.9 million
Total number of iPhones sold in all previous quarters since the launch of the iPhone: 6.1 million
Do the math: Total iPhones sold todate since launch: 13 Million. Initial target Jobs set : Ten Million by end of 2008. Holiday season hasn't even started yet and the dudes beat their aggressive target by 30%. Stick around... there's more. They overtook RIMM in terms or revenue generated in the quarter. Remember RIMM tanked a few days ago as they reported lesser margins because of the iPhone competition... Breath some and stay focused! Apple managed to be the third largest worldwide supplier of phones behind Nokia and Samsung! Can you believe that?! And there's more folks. iPhone already accounts for 39% of Apple's revenue. And they only started! Jezus, Maria, Josef!

Oh, BTW, they only recognized 802 M of iPhone revenue in the fourth quarter although their bookings number was 4.6B actually! How so? Well, they decided to apply GAAP deferred revenue models in their recognition of iPhone revenues based on future income from their sold iPhones that enters their books from a piece they get off the subscription pie baked by the operators. That is, of the lifetime long revenue from any given iPhone sold and linked to an operator subscription, Apple recognizes only a subset in any given period. This is just supercool and many companies moved to a subscritption model of revenue recognition as it seems to be hedging against lower future revenue streams in case recessionary times come knocking on their doors.

Interesting remark El Jobso gave responding to a question about the reason they are so successful on the iPhone. It is because they built product functionality based on their know-how of the software platform, as software became the real differentiator in smart phones. In other words, putting OSX on the iPhone was a competitor killer.

Stay tuned. Tomorrow (today actually) the 200 millionth iPhone app will be downloaded from their app store. 200 million apps in 102 days! 2M downloads a day, taking into account that it's been the summer too and many geeks, want it or not, do take some holidays to recharge their batteries...

Annual revenue 2008 was 32 billion and change! Margin for the quarter was 34%. EPS 1.26 bucks per diluted share. This compares to 1.11 of a Reuters consensus estimate... I betsa (Sarah, oh, Sarah!) in less than five years they will take over Microsoft for sure! And in six to seven probably IBM and HP! What a company! And yes, they got shitloads of cash: 25 Billion and counting... and no debt! What a treasury!

COO Cook, CFO Openheimer and His Jobness were all present at the call! Steve sounded healthier than ever before! His enthusiasm was contagious... I felt like opening a bottle of bubbly! Honest to Goad, I am so pissed with the tricks shortselling gamblers have been playing on the stock. This is the best fundamentals any company ever achieved, the best products any company could ever make (these folks are from the 22nd century, really) and they got the highest potential for massive growth of their market share in all their product lines, led by the best manager of all times! This company should surpass 500B valuation in my lifetime real easy, hands down!

Here's to you semi God Steve! We love you dearly!

PS... in the meantime afterhours trading continues in all tension... AAPL is 11 bucks and change in the green. By the time I wake up in the morning they'll be probably trading at 110 bucks. Yeah!