Apple Earnings Call Nuggets: International iPhone Trends and Competitive Market Dynamics

Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL) recently reported its first quarter earnings and discussed the following topics in its earnings conference call.

International iPhone Trends

Kathryn Huberty – Morgan Stanley: It’s clear that iPhone 5 did incredibly well in the U.S. based on the carryover report to-date, but international sell-through data points have been more mixed, how would you characterize trends outside the U.S. for iPhone and are you confident that you have all the right price points and screen sizes to fully capture the non-U.S. demand for iPhone specifically?

Tim Cook – CEO: Katy, it’s Tim. As Peter said, sequentially we increased over 70% from the September quarter, which was 3.5 times market. So we could not be happier with that. In terms of the geographic distribution, we’d saw our highest growth in China and it was into the triple-digits, which was higher than the market there and so I would characterize it as we’re extremely pleased.

Kathryn Huberty – Morgan Stanley: Then maybe a question for Peter, with a such large cash generation again this quarter and confidence in the product pipeline, you made those comments and a stock price that is off at highs, why not step up and buy back even more stock than you had originally planned at this point?

Peter Oppenheimer – SVP and CFO: Sure. This is something that we continuously assess. The opportunities to both invest in the business and return cash. We’re pleased to have started our share repurchase program this quarter and combined with our dividend, we returned about $4.5 billion of cash this quarter and we started the buyback program and expect to return about $45 billion over three years to our shareholders. We do consider increasing these programs and we’ll do what we think is in the best interest of our shareholders.