Apple Profits Climbs 47% Tweet Tweet

Impressive:

According to the Wall Street Journal, the company’s fourth-quarter profit jumped 47 percent “as consumers continued to snap up its iPhones and Macintosh computers.” Surprisingly resilient demand for its laptops and smart phones have carried Apple though the recession. This past quarter, Apple sold 7.4 million iPhones and 3.1 million Macintosh computers. Apple’s CFO called sales of Macintoshes “phenomenal,” and the quarter, Apple’s “most profitable ever.” Brad Stone, in the New York Times, says it well: “Apple, in its recent history, has overcome nearly every obstacle thrown its way. Now it has surpassed another: the burden of high expectations.”

Sales of the iPod touch were up 100% year over year. Apple now has $34 billion in cash in the bank:

Apple watchers will also know that they have no debt. So what are they going to do with all this money? That’s $10 billion more than they had a year ago, and this past quarter alone, they added about $3 billion to the pile. Apple keeps saying that it will use the cash for “preservation of capital,” which is a fancy way of saying that they’ll be take little risk and keep it close.

That’s more cash than Microsoft has, and for some comparison, $34 billion is $10 billion more than the overall market cap of Yahoo. It’s also about $1.5 billion more than the market cap of eBay, and $4 billion more than the market cap of Dell. It’s almost exactly the same as the market cap of News Corp.

A shipping anomaly — an “abnormal sequential increase” in costs — has some speculating about a new type of product outside the ones it already offers is in the works.

And Mashable reports Apple has begun tweeting about iTunes…

…bringing the total number of their accounts to five. These are:

twitter.com/iTunesMusic
twitter.com/iTunesPodcasts
twitter.com/iTunesTV
twitter.com/iTunesMovies