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CUPERTINO, Calif. - Apple shares plunged 11 per cent shortly after the opening bell after the company predicted its sales would grow just seven per cent in the current quarter.

The projection is a let-down for a company that has regularly posted growth rates of more than 50 per cent.

Apple stock was down $57.27 to $456.73 on the Nasdaq in early trading today.

The Nasdaq fell 20 points to 3,133 — Apple is the biggest component of the technology-heavy index.

Apple's blockbuster revenue growth is slowing drastically, as iPhone sales plateau and the company finds itself lacking revolutionary new products.

The company's warning was issued Wednesday as part of its financial results for the holiday quarter.

Analysts said the warning suggested Apple can no longer sustain its growth without some completely new products.

Its last revolutionary creation, the iPad, was launched in 2010. Co-founder Steve Jobs, who was the engine behind the creation of the iPod, iPhone and iPad, died in 2011.

Apple said it expects sales of between $41 billion and $43 billion in the current quarter, which ends in March.

That would usually be little cause for concern, even though analysts were expecting $45.6 billion, because Apple usually lowballs its forecasts. But Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer said the company is changing its practices and providing a reasonable range rather than a single, easily achievable number.

That means Apple is looking at sales growth of about seven per cent from last year's January to March quarter, a striking number for a company that's posted double-digit increases in every quarter except one since 2008.

Apple's enviable profit growth also hit a wall in the October to December quarter. It said net income in the fiscal first quarter was $13.1 billion, or $13.81 per share, flat with a year ago. That still beat expectations, as analysts polled by FactSet had forecast earnings of $13.48 per share.

Revenue was $54.5 billion, up 18 per cent from a year ago. Analysts were expecting $55 billion. Sales were held back by the fact that the latest quarter had 13 weeks, one less than the corresponding 2011 quarter.

Apple shipped 47.8 million iPhones in the quarter, about 1 million less than analysts were expecting, and 22.9 million iPads, also about 1 million short.

Most surprisingly, Mac sales were also 1 million short, at 4.1 million. That's a 22 per cent drop from shipments a year ago. Oppenheimer said this was because Apple couldn't get the new iMac desktops out before December.

Most technology companies would be ecstatic if they posted 18 per cent sales growth and $13 billion in profit for a single quarter, but Apple is held to a high standard, set by the shocking, iPhone-propelled success of the last few years.

Investors have already been concerned that Apple's strategy of keeping the price of the iPhone high means it's losing out on sales, particularly overseas. Consumers are instead opting to buy cheaper smartphones running Google Inc.'s Android software, which has propelled South Korea's Samsung Electronics to the world's largest maker of smartphones.

There's speculation that the company will produce a cheaper iPhone, but that would cut into its profit margin, which are the whole reason it's become the world's most valuable company.

Apple had warned that the holiday quarter's profits would be lower than Wall Street was initially expecting, because it had so many new products coming out, including the iPhone 5 and iPad Mini. New production lines are more expensive to run and yield more defective products that need to be redone or thrown out rather than sold.

News from © The Canadian Press, 2013