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Apple Posted The Biggest Quarterly Profit In History

This article is more than 9 years old.

Apple broke several records Tuesday with its fiscal first-quarter earnings report. The most remarkable of them all: posting the biggest quarterly profit in history.

Its $18 billion in net income easily beat the $16.2 billion that Russian oil and gas giant Gazprom posted in the first quarter of 2011, and the $16.18 billion that Royal Dutch Shell earned in the second quarter of 2008. (The full list of record corporate results is here.)

These are stunning numbers, and the result is that even after investors had baked their expectations for a blowout quarter into Apple’s shares, the stock looked set to pop before the market open on Wednesday.

Apple was 9% higher at $119.02 in pre-market trading, putting it within scraping distance of its all time high of $119.27.

Apple’s CEO Tim Cook relayed a sense of his own astonishment in prepared remarks he made during a conference call with analysts on Tuesday. “Demand for the iPhone has been staggering," he said. "The volume is hard to comprehend.”

The Cupertino, Calif-based company sold a record 74.5 million iPhones in the last three months of 2014, beating even the most optimistic forecasts by analysts, who’d predicted sales of between 60 million and 71 million in the first quarter.

Apple's iPhone business is said to bring in approximately 60% of the company's revenues, and sales of the device in China are key to the company hitting yesterday's historic milestone.

Sales in the Greater China region jumped 70% to $16.1 billion, and while Apple didn't break out how many iPhones it sold in there, here's another telling stat: sales in the Greater China region represented 21.6% of total revenue in the first quarter, up from 16.5% a year ago.

A big reason the iPhone is suddenly doing so well in China is Apple’s contract with China Mobile , sealed at the end of 2013, to distribute the devices. China Mobile is the country’s biggest mobile carrier with more than 800 million subscribers; around 335 million of them are on its 3G or new 4G network, and thus potential iPhone customers.

Cook himself played a key role in making that deal happen.

Apple started negotiating with China Mobile in 2008 when Steve Jobs was at the helm, but Jobs never visited China in his capacity as Apple CEO.

Some time after taking the reins late 2011, Cook visited China three times in just over a year to meet with China Mobile Chairman Xi Guohua. Cook gave Guohua a gold iPhone once the deal was signed, and the rest is history.