Greatest quarterly earnings by a company (inflation adjusted)
- Who
- Apple
- What
- 20,065,000,000 US dollar(s)
- Where
- Not Applicable
- When
- 21 February 2018
The largest quarterly earnings ever reported by a publicly traded company is $20.065 bn (£28.059 bn) posted for the first quarter of the financial year 2018 (the period of 30 September 2017 to 31 December 2018) by tech company Apple (USA) on 21 February 2018. This is equal to $20.32 bn in August 2018 when adjusted for inflation.
The main driver of Apple's record profits was its iPhone line of smartphones, which shifted 77,316,000 units. The launch of the premium ($999 list price) iPhone X, sales of which helped the iPhone division to generate $61.576 bn (£44.025 bn) in revenue.
The US Government-backed mortgage securities broker Fannie Mae posted a larger quarterly profit in 2013, due to a restructuring of the company's deferred tax assets. However, Fannie Mae is a government-backed enterprise, rather than a conventional publicly traded company, and it was delisted from the NYSE in 2010 (shares in Fannie Mae trade on the over-the-counter, or off-exchange market).