Free Custom «Analysis of Apple» Essay Paper

Apple Inc. is a multinational Corporation based in the United State of America. The company focuses on consumer electronic products, such as the manufacture of personal computers (PC) and computer software, media players, mobile phones, computer hard wares, and accessories among others. The company was founded in April, 1976 in Cupertino, California, by Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs as Apple Computer Inc. Apple Computer Inc. co-founders were 26 and 21 years old respectively by then and had just dropped out of college when they started building boxes that allowed a long distance communication without any charges. Since then, Apple Computer Inc. has evolved to be the leading company in developing high quality consumer electronics products. The company focuses on manufacturing and designing electronics and other related consumer software products (Abilla 98).

Growth Patterns

Since inception in 1976, despite the stiff market, the company has made a tremendous growth in offering world class software, Internet settings, and hardware across the world. This is in line with the company’s perspectives of offering best computing experience to students, creative professionals, educators, and consumers. At the start, they only concentrated on making personal computers, but the name Apple Computers Inc. in 2007 was dropped from the corporate name. This was done to reflect the extensive growth that had been achieved by the company in terms of venturing the consumer electronics away from its traditional personal computers market. In the United States, Apple has cultivated high customers’ loyalty as most of them are devoted to the brand and the company in general. The most notable hardware sold by the company for personal computers includes the Macintosh hardware product for portable media players, such as the iPod and the iPhone. The Mac OS X and the life suite for multimedia are some of the notable software product from Apple. Moreover, Apple has used debentures to boot its financial status, thus enabling it to penetrate into stiff market.

Milestones

It is worth noting that the company has made tremendous milestones in its operations. Initially, the company targeted the American consumers as its headquarters were in California, but of late, it has gone global. This has been achieved due to the launching of online selling methods, which has increased the company customer base by 60% in the last five years. The company has highly shaped the world by becoming the powerful hit maker in digital technology. Out of this, the company has been able to raise itself together with its ecosystem higher than the dissonance of other giants in the digital industry who are fighting to own the customers. In 2009, the company signed over 200,000 companies to manufacture products compatible with Apple products, which represented a 26% increase from that made in 2008.

The other milestone made by the company is the increase in its annual revenues as a result of increased sales of its highly demanded consumer electronic products around the world. In the 4^th quarter, the company announced revenue of 9.87 Billion U.S. dollars, which represented a 24.9% in revenues. Similarly, the quarterly net profit rose by US $0.53 Billion from 1.14 Billion U.S. dollars made in 2008. This historical jump in profits by Apple was due to the sales of the ground breaking iPhone and Mac. The discovery of iPad was another great milestone which was made by the company. After launching the product, more than three million tablets were sold. The sale of the product has progressively increased with approximately 3.27 million tablets being sold in the third quarter this year (Hujin 64).

Current position of Apple Inc.

Current sales volume

It is highly notable that the company sales volume has shorted up rapidly as the company has ventured into the consumer electronics company. Despite the fact that the company focuses on other areas, it sold more than 90% of all the personal computers sold in the American and European continents in the 2009 (John 48). This year, the company sales volumes has sky rocketed by selling over 3.35 million pieces of Macintosh computers, which represented a 32 % increase from 2009. The tables below compare the sale volumes made by the company in 2009 and 2010.

Sales volume of Macintosh computers, iPods, iPhones, and iPads in 2010:

Product	1st Quarter	2nd quarter in	3rd quarter	Projected growth in 4th quarter
Macintosh computers	3,360,000	2,940,000	3,470,000	3,800,000
iPods	21,000,000	10,890,000	8,400,000	12,000,000
iPhones	8,700,000	8,750,000	9,410,000	8,000,000
iPads			3,270,000	6,000,000

Sales volume of Macintosh computers, iPods, iPads, and iPhones in 2009:

Product	1st Quarter	2nd quarter in	3rd quarter	4th quarter
Macintosh computers	2,534,000	2,220,000	2,560,000	3,050,000
iPods	22,700,000	11,010,000	5,458,000	10,200,000
iPhones	4,360,000	3,790,000	5,200,000	7,400,000
iPad	0	0	0	0

The table below gives the percentage differences in sales volumes between the two years

Product	1st Quarter	2nd quarter in	3rd quarter	Projected percentage growth in 4th quarter 2010
Macintosh computers	33	33	33	24
iPods	(8)	(1)	60	16
iPhones	100	131	(8)	48
iPads	0	0	0	46

Note: The figures in bracket indicate percentage decrease in sales volume from the previous year.

The sales volumes of most of the companies’ products have been on the rise, for example, in 2009, 3G iPhone of third generation category was launched in the 3^rd quarter of 2009 (Erick 92). As a result, the product sales volume was raised to approximately 5.2 million pieces over the same period the previous year. This represented 625% unit growth as it was the advancement from the 2G iPhone launched in 2008. In the 3^rd quarter of 2010, the company made a revolution by launching the iPad. During that duration, 3,270,000 units were sold, and this was a terrific start as more people were buying Macs than they previously did. As a result, the company exceeded its profit expectations by 15% to 4 Billion US dollars due to the invention of iPads (Gardiner 26).