Apple beats everyone’s expectations in Q2, attributes growth to high iPhone sales of 43.7M

No one expected many surprises from today’s Apple’s earnings — and Apple surely wasn’t giving us any hints ahead of time. But the iPhone maker still managed to deliver a shock.

Apple reported $10.2 billion in profit on revenues of $45.6 billion for the second quarter today. These results compare to net profit of $9.5 billion on revenue of $43.6 billion from the same quarter last year.

Analysts polled by Fortune predicted revenues of around $43.78 billion for the quarter, while Apple predicted Q2 revenues between $42 billion and $44 billion during its last earnings report.

The company took a significant stock hit when it released those second quarter predictions back in January. It’ll be interesting to see how the market reacts to today’s news. Apple’s stock closed at $531.70 and is up a whopping 8 percent in after hours trading.

Apple sold 43.7 million iPhones, 16.4 million iPads, 2.76 million iPods, and 4.14 million Mac computers during the quarter. The company is attributing today’s surprising numbers to strong iPhone sales, though it notes that it missed iPad sales estimates from analysts due to inventory issues.

Gross margin was 39.3 percent compared to 37.5 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 66 percent of the quarter’s revenue.

AAPL data by YCharts

Although the company had a fairly good last quarter due to the holidays, expectations were not enthusiastic and fairly conservative for this quarter. Outgoing chief financial officer Peter Oppenheimer predicted that Apple would have similar revenues as last year’s second quarter ($42-44 billion), and most analysts predicted similar numbers.

During the past quarter, Apple have been making some product and inventory changes, notably launching an 8 gigabyte iPhone 5C internationally due to low sales of the more expensive version, and killing the iPad 2 in favor of making the iPad 4 its new cheapest large tablet.