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Apple store on posh 5th Av.
in New York: iPhone remains the most important product
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The tech giants' business is climbing new heights in the corona pandemic.
Apple, Google and Microsoft alone made nearly $ 57 billion together in the past quarter.
Their business was consistently better than analysts had expected.
The numbers demonstrate how corporations are thriving in the pandemic as everyday life is changing.
As consumers and businesses increasingly do their shopping online, Google's revenue from online advertising is growing.
In addition to the iPhone, Apple is selling more Mac computers and iPad tablets for working and studying from home.
At Microsoft, the cloud boom is generating more business.
However, Apple and Google warned at the same time of risks for the economy from the dangerous Delta virus variant - and the iPhone company is gradually feeling the delivery bottlenecks in the electronics industry.
In the past quarter, however, things went as well for Apple as it used to only during the Christmas business.
Revenue grew 36 percent year over year to $ 81.4 billion.
The bottom line was a good $ 21.7 billion left - 93 percent more than a year earlier.
For the current quarter, Apple again promised a double-digit increase, but this will be weaker than before, among other things because of the shortage of components.
In the past quarter, it was again the iPhone that provided the majority of the growth.
Sales in the smartphone business rose by almost half to around 39.6 billion dollars, as Apple announced after the US market closed on Tuesday.
Mac sales grew 16 percent to $ 8.2 billion, and the iPad business grew 12 percent to nearly $ 7.4 billion.
The US group is threatened by competition law. Apple charges app providers a fee of between 15 to 30 percent of the revenue generated, for example when concluding subscriptions or in-app purchases. The "Fortnite" maker Epic Games is taking legal action against it. And the Federal Cartel Office also wants to scrutinize US technology companies like Apple more closely.
For market observers, however, the focus is on the question of how well Apple can continue to fight the global supply bottlenecks, including for semiconductors.
For the past quarter, Apple had already forecast three to four billion dollars lower revenues from scarce components for iPads and Macs.
In the end, the burden was lower, said CFO Luca Maestri.
In the current quarter, however, it will hit the iPhone and iPad - and the negative effect will be higher, he warned without precise figures.
The bottlenecks were mainly triggered by the higher demand for PCs.
At the Google parent company Alphabet, sales rose in the last quarter by 62 percent year-on-year to around 61.9 billion dollars, and profits to a good 18.5 billion dollars.
The year before, it was just under $ 7 billion.
Online advertising in Google's search engine and other areas is still the mainstay of the business.
Google's advertising revenues rose in the second quarter by around 69 percent to a good 50.4 billion dollars.
The video platform YouTube brought in 7 billion dollars - after 3.8 billion dollars a year ago.
The biggest contributor to the increase was the retail advertising spending, said manager Philipp Schindler.
In addition, the travel industry and financial service providers have also spent more money on advertisements.
At Microsoft, the revenues climbed in the three months to the end of June year-on-year by 21 percent to 46.2 billion dollars.
Net income increased 47 percent to $ 16.5 billion.
Microsoft could once again rely on its lucrative cloud services.
The Azure platform, which offers numerous other companies and apps IT services and storage space on the network, increased sales by a surprisingly strong 51 percent.
The PC division, which in addition to Windows software also includes hardware products such as the Xbox game console and "Surface" tablets, grew by 9 percent to $ 14.1 billion.
Investing.com analyst Haris Anwar said that Microsoft had significantly exceeded forecasts in almost all areas.
However, the shares of the US group have risen so strongly since the beginning of the pandemic that they are now "perhaps taking a break".
The Microsoft share initially fell after the hours to 2.1 percent.
This year the titles have so far increased by almost 30 percent.
Given the market capitalization of nearly $ 2.2 trillion, some analysts are speaking of an overvaluation of the paper.
mik / dpa-AFX