Apple Reports Biggest Profit In History

US Technology giant Apple has reported the biggest quarterly profit ever made by a public company.

Apple reported a net profit of $18bn (£11.8bn) in its fiscal first quarter, which tops the $15.9bn made by ExxonMobil in the second quarter of 2012, according to Standard and Poor's.

Record sales of iPhones were behind the surge in profits.
Apple sold 74.5 million iPhones in the three months to 27 December - well ahead of most analysts' expectations.

In a conference call with financial analysts Apple's chief executive Tim Cook said that demand for phones was "staggering".

However, sales of the iPad continued to disappoint, falling by 22% in 2014 from a year earlier.

The demand for Apple's larger iPhone 6 Plus model appeared to help boost profits and increase the iPhone's gross profit margin - or how much Apple makes per product - by 2% to 39.9%.

However, Apple did not give a breakdown of sales for the iPhone 6 and other models.

Apple shares rose more than 5% in trading after the US markets had closed.

BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones said the iPhone had "transformed the mobile phone industry".

"Others have a bigger share of the market - Samsung, for instance, actually sells more phones than Apple - but Apple makes just an extraordinary amount of money from this one phone.

"A lot of this, at the moment, is about China, where this brand has got extraordinary cachet. They [Apple] sold more phones in China in the last quarter than they have in the United States."

He added that one possible shadow on Apple's future was the question of whether the firm could repeat the success of the iPhone.

"The next one [product] that's supposed to be coming along is the Apple Watch in April," he said. "I've got some doubts as to whether that will be the mass market success, beyond the geek population, that the iPhone has been."