Alabama native Tim Cook leads Apple to largest profit of any company in history

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January 27, 2015

When visionary Apple founder Steve Jobs passed away in 2011, many questioned the ability of the company to retain its creative edge and juggernaut status against competitors.

Alabama native and Apple CEO Tim Cook just proved them all wrong.

Tuesday afternoon Apple announced its profits for the last quarter of 2014, and the numbers are nothing short of amazing.

With sales of $74.6 billion, the company posted a profit of $18 billion—the largest profit in corporate history. To clarify, that isn’t only the largest profit Apple’s ever seen, it’s the largest profit any corporation has ever seen.

The profit was an increase of 35% over the previous quarter. Though iPad sales fell 18%, Mac sales were up 15% and Apple sold 74.4 million iPhones during Q4 2014—that’s more than 9 iPhones every second of every day for three months.

The news sent Apple’s stock soaring by 5% in after hours trading.

The tech giant ended the quarter with $178 billion on hand. To put that in perspective, that’s about $15 billion more than Alabama’s 2014 GDP.

Credit for much of Apple’s growth in the last year has been attributed to surging sales in China, where it has become the top smartphone manufacturer, but the larger iPhone 6 and 6 plus also lured many customers away from rivals.

“We brought on more new people to iPhone than ever before,” Mr. Cook said in an interview Tuesday. “Many of those are switching from Android, and we couldn’t be happier about that.”

Cook has answered doubts about whether he could lead the company to record heights without Jobs’ oversight, but his longterm test will be whether the company continues its innovation streak, rather than just maximizing profits from products created during Jobs’ tenure.

Only time will tell if Apple will be able to sustain its current place as the richest and most successful tech company on the planet, but right now it looks like they are in good hands.