Apple profit gain 54%

For any other big company, a 54 percent increase in profit and a 39 percent jump in revenue would be enviable. For Apple though, weak sales of its star product — the iPhone — were enough to overshadow everything else when it reported fourth-quarter results on Tuesday, sending the company’s shares tumbling nearly 7 percent in after-hours trading.

In a rare disappointment, the company missed Wall Street forecasts for its iPhone business. Apple shares fell 7 percent after the release of the results at the close of normal trading hours.

Investors and analysts largely accepted Apple’s explanation, in part because of the sales of the iPhone 4S. The company reported sales of 17.07 million iPhones.

Despite the disappointing iPhone sales, Mr. Cook said he was confident that Apple would set “an all-time record” for iPhone sales in the current holiday quarter. While routinely overshadowed by the company’s younger, more glamorous businesses, the most venerable product family in Apple’s lineup — Mac computers — continued to perform well. Apple said it sold 4.89 million Macs in the quarter, up from 3.89 million a year ago.

Apple managed those gains because Mac shipments grew almost 26 percent during the third quarter, compared with IDC’s estimate of less than 4 percent growth for the overall computer business. Apple’s iPhone sales show the company is still thriving in the mobile phone market, even though Google’s Android operating system now powers significantly more smartphones. In the second quarter, handsets running Android software accounted for 43.4 percent of the worldwide smartphone market, compared with 18.2 percent for Apple, the research firm Gartner estimates.