Money, money, money…

Apple posted record results this week – with shares up 8% in early trading on Wednesday to $454.45, making it the world’s most valuable company with a market capitalisation of $430 billion.

Apple sold 37.04 million iPhones and 15.43 million iPads in the Christmas season and, according to Simon Andrews’ Mobile Fix, the company also sold more iPhones in 2011 than it sold in 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010 – combined! And it made more profit in Q4 ($13.1 billion) than Google made revenue in the same period ($10.6 billion).

Apple and Google are now worth more than the entire European telecoms sector! Although Google’s shares fell 8% last week after the search giant underperformed on both revenue and earnings in the holiday season.

However, the big news surrounding Google this week is privacy. It is re-writing its privacy settings – combining the current 60 documents into just one policy. The impact of this, of course, is that the company will now be able to merge user data across all of its products. It will mean Google can better target ads, search results and recommendations. There is no opt-out for Google users. It would be surprising if this didn’t raise significant regulation issues!

But back to money, it has been a busy earnings season… Netflix has reported Q4 profit of $40.7 million with revenue up 47% to $875.6 million – well ahead of analysts’ expectations. And Samsung posted a record quarterly profit this morning, with best-ever smartphone sales. The South Korean firm reported a 5.3 trillion won operating profit ($4.71 billion) for Q4 2011, up 76% year on year.

Nokia, meanwhile, posted a £900 million loss in the last three months of 2011 – despite launching its new Lumia device (it has sold a million Lumia handsets since November). Smartphone sales fell 23%, while overall sales were down 21%. Despite the figures, shares in the Finnish company rose by more than 5% following Nokia’s results annoucment.

Facebook has also suspended trading of its shares on the private secondary market until the end of the week – a sign that it may be about to announce its IPO?

And with this being the US election year, MAGNAGLOBAL predicts that the quadrennial boost of 2012 will help generate US year on year revenue growth of 3.7% in 2012. However, as Sir Martin Sorrell moots, 2013 will be a lot stickier for the US economy…