Apple (AAPL) iPhone Sales Surge Leads to Biggest Profit for Any Company Ever

— -- Apple Inc. (AAPL) reported its biggest quarter yet as it sold more than 74 million iPhones. The $18 billion Apple earned is the best quarter in terms of profit of any public company ever.

CEO Tim Cook also revealed the Apple Watch will be available in April, later than expected. During a conference call to discuss its first quarter earnings, Cook said the Watch will ship sometime in April, after the company first said that it would be available early this year.

The numbers the company posted are breathtaking. Apple sold 30,000 iPhones every hour during the quarter, making the device the single best-selling gadget of all time. According to the Washington Post, Apple sold more iPhones in the last quarter than all TVs sold by the entire TV manufacturing industry.

In the last quarter, Apple sold:

74,468,000 iPhones

21,419,000 iPads

5,519,000 Macs

Apple beat Wall Street expectations by a huge margin for the three months ended Dec. 27. Apple stock rallied more than 5 percent in the aftermarket, after news of the company's "highest-ever" revenue and earnings.

“We’d like to thank our customers for an incredible quarter, which saw demand for Apple products soar to an all-time high,” said Cook in a statement. “Our revenue grew 30 percent over last year to $74.6 billion, and the execution by our teams to achieve these results was simply phenomenal.”

At the close of trading in New York today, Apple stock had fallen 3.5 percent to $109.14 a share.

Now Apple’s iPhone business is bigger than Google and Microsoft’s phone businesses combined.

The company, based in Cupertino, California, reported net profit of $18 billion in its first quarter, compared with $13.1 billion in the same period last year. Sales surged to $74.6 billion compared with $57.6 billion in the same period a year ago. International sales accounted for 65 percent of the quarter’s revenue.

Earlier this month, Apple announced that the first week of January set a new record for billings from its App Store with customers spending nearly half a billion dollars on apps and in-app purchases.

New Year’s Day 2015 was the single biggest day ever in App Store sales history, the company said. App Store developers have earned $25 billion from the sale of apps and games, the company said on Jan. 8.