Earlier today, Apple updated its investor relations page to inform  that it will  announce  its earnings for the first fiscal quarter of 2012 and host a live conference call regarding the earnings on Tuesday, January 24.  The conference call at 5:00 PM Eastern / 2:00 PM Pacific will reveal the earnings  itself, which is usually  announced  at 4:30 PM Eastern.

Apple’s conference call webcast discussing Q1 – 2012 financial results will begin at 2:00pm PT/5:00pm ET on Tuesday, January 24, 2012.

Last quarter,  Apple announced that  fourth quarter profits rose nearly 54 percent to $6.62 billion  driven by record sales of more than 11 million iPads and nearly 5 million Macs.  Surprisingly, these numbers were considered to be below expectationsby analysts/Wall Street and this was Apple’s first miss since 2002. However, it was not  emphasized enough that during the call, officials at Apple had already started to project that the were “confident”    they would set new company records for both the iPhone and iPad. In fact, it is projected that this quarter will be a $40 billion quarter for Apple.

Currently, Wall Street expects Apple to report profits of $9.83 billion on revenue of $38.16 billion. A total of 46 analysts polled skew as high as $10.74 billion and as low as $8.88 billion in their predicted revenue.  The December quarter not only included the  holiday  shopping season, but also the launch quarter for the iPhone 4S. During the quarter, it was Apple’s fastest iPhone roll-out yet. They debuted the quarter in the U.S., U.K., Japan, Hong Kong, India, Russia, Brazil, and Taiwan.