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Meh: Apple's iPad Mini Makes $423 Million In Weekend Gross Profit

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Image via CrunchBase

Apple (AAPL) has something to celebrate. Just a week after Hurricane Sandy put much of New Jersey, Staten Island, and environs in a world of hurt, Apple fans were delighted to wait in line to be the first ones to own its new iPad Mini.

To ease their suffering, Apple decided it would be tasteful to introduce its new product on November 2 -- just as power was starting to go on in the southern part of Manhattan. And PCMag reports that IHS got right down to business disassembling and pricing out the pieces of Apple's latest tablet.

The result of its analysis is that Apple earns a 43% gross profit on the Mini -- below its average gross margin of 43.9%. That's  because IHS estimates that it costs Apple about $188 to build a "standard, Wi-Fi-only, 16-gigabyte iPad" that retails for $329 -- yielding a $141 profit

That 43% gross margin sounds fine -- until you consider what a huge come-down that is from the iPhone. For example, as I wrote in September, Apple sold the iPhone 4S for $649 but its bill of materials was a mere $190 -- a whopping 71% gross margin.

Perhaps Apple's pain was consumers' gain. After all, Apple boasts Monday of selling  three million iPad Minis and iPad 4s over the weekend. If we assume that Apple earned a 41% gross margin on those, that translates into a good weekends' gross profit of $423 million -- that's 0.6% of 2012's total gross profit of $68.7 billion.

Apple's stock has lost 17% of its value since it peaked out at $705. Maybe this will give a boost to the part of America that still has power and WiFi.