iPhone frenzy drives Apple record

Sales of the smartphone more than doubled in the 14 weeks to December 31, which included the launch of the latest model, the iPhone 4S, and helped Apple’s net profit more than double to 13.06bn US dollars (£8.4bn).

The company, which was founded by Steve Jobs, who died at the start of the quarter at the age of 56, also delivered huge sales of its tablet computer, the iPad, selling 15.43m in the three-month period, compared with 7.3m a year earlier.

The stellar results, which also revealed a 26 per cent increase in sales of its Mac computer to 5.2m, beat analyst expectations and cheered investors in Asia, where markets posted solid gains overnight.

Chris Weston, institutional trader at IG Markets, said: “It’s hard to paint the numbers as anything but blowout, and clearly despite reasonably elevated expectations, they simply took consensus down to the woodshed and chopped it apart.”