ELECTRONICS Spurred by the sales of iPod, Apple profit triples

The music player has raised the profile of the company's other products.
LOS ANGELES TIMES
Apple Computer Inc. said that its profit more than tripled as third-quarter sales hit an eight-year high.
Core to the performance: the iPod portable music player, which helped drive the sales of accessories, online music and even the company's signature Macintosh computers.
Earnings rose to $61 million, or 16 cents a share, from $19 million, or 5 cents, in the same quarter last year. Sales grew 30 percent, to $2 billion from $1.54 billion.
For the current quarter, Apple forecasts sales of $2.1 billion.
Wall Street analysts had expected fiscal third-quarter earnings of 15 cents a share on sales of $1.9 billion. Apple shares rose 36 cents to $29.58 in regular Nasdaq trading Wednesday and jumped to $31.55 in after-hours trading after the earnings announcement.
Analysts and Apple executives credited the iPod -- which has become virtually synonymous with digital music -- for raising the profile of the Cupertino, Calif.-based company's other products. "It brought a spotlight to the broad product line," said analyst Michelle Lin Gutierrez of Schwab SoundView Capital Markets.
Back to Mac
Apple's head of worldwide sales, Tim Cook, noted that half of the customers buying computers at the company's retail stores had never owned a Macintosh or were switching back to the platform after using computers with competing operating systems.
Apple sold 860,000 iPods in the quarter that ended June 30, up from 304,000 units a year ago. Sales of the iPod totaled $249 million, up from $111 million last year. Gutierrez said the company probably could have sold more but was plagued by shortages of the iPod Mini, which is smaller, cheaper and comes in more colors than standard white.
Since the iPod was introduced in 2001, Apple has sold 3.7 million of them, making the iPod the most popular digital music player. That helped Apple's online music store, iTunes, hit the symbolic milestone of having sold more than 100 million songs, more than any other authorized source of downloadable music.
Apple's core computer business improved as sales grew to $1.3 billion, from $1.1 billion a year ago.