Apple beats Wall Street estimates on surging iPhone sales in China

iPhone sales up 40% from year-ago quarter, iPad sales down 23%

Apple Inc beat Wall Street's revenue and profit forecasts on Monday on the back of surging iPhone sales, especially in China, but it gave no sales figures for its new Apple Watch.

As investors had expected, the most valuable publicly traded US company raised its dividend and boosted its share repurchase programme. Its shares rose 1.6% in after-hours trading to $134.52.

Apple sold 61.2 million iPhones in the quarter, up 40% from the year-ago quarter, but down from the record-breaking holiday quarter. It sold 12.6 million iPads, down 23% from a year ago.

Revenue in China rose 71% to $16.8 billion, making it Apple's biggest market behind the Americas, helped by strong sales of the iPhone.

Apple gave no sales figures for its recently released Apple Watch, but did say the current quarter was off to "an exciting start".

Wall Street hailed the results but share reaction was muted.

"A 60 million-plus iPhone number is a home run and will be cheered by the Street as this remains the bread and butter of Apple," said FBR Capital Markets analyst Daniel Ives.

Apple increased its share repurchase authorization to $140 billion from $90 billion announced last year.

On top of that, it raised its quarterly dividend 11% to 52 cents per share. Together, Apple estimated that would mean returning $200 billion to shareholders by the end of March 2017.

Even so, that was "a bit lower than expectations," said Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi.

Apple said net income for the fiscal second quarter rose to $13.57 billion, or $2.33 per share, from $10.22 billion, or $1.66 per share, a year earlier.

Analysts had expected earnings per share of $2.16 per share, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

Overall revenue rose to $58.01 billion in the second quarter ended March 28, from $45.65 billion a year earlier. That beat Wall Street's expected revenue of $56 billion.