Filed under: Apple Corporate, Retail, Apple Financial
Speculating on Apple's Black Friday sales
With US consumers hesitant to buy big-ticket items and Apple's modest Black Friday discounts, it will be interesting to see retail reports from last weekend. The Wall Street analysts are starting to weigh in with their predictions.Gene Munster with Piper Jaffray expects to see a year-to-year decrease from retail stores, though strong online sales should compensate for that discrepancy. He also notes that it's "...too early" to make predictions about the December quarter.
Meanwhile, Shaw Wu with Kaufman Bros. believes that 3rd-party retailers had a significant role in what will be seen as "strong" weekend sales for Apple. Amazon, Best Buy (a big box store in the US), and others were aggressive with discounts, many of which have extended to Monday, November 30th. Some retailers bundled free gift cards with purchases to entice buyers. Many retailers, like Amazon, were reporting low inventory or out-of-stock on Monday morning.
The Natick Apple Store, which I visited on Friday, was packed. In fact, shoppers had to wait outside for a signal to enter, and even then were only admitted in pairs.
Kaufman Bros. has maintained its price target of $235 for AAPL stock and reiterated its "buy" rating.

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Chris said 2:37PM on 11-30-2009
I was going to upgrade, finally, to a 3GS if it was discounted a reasonable amount this weekend but it wasn't even touched so I stayed away from the Apple/AT&T stores. So, Apple has at least lost one sale.
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Murphy Mac said 4:31PM on 11-30-2009
Munster's methods are about as unscientific as one can get collecting data. Sorry, I can't help but post that every time he does one of these reports.
Basically his numbers mean nothing because of the huge margin of error.
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Joshua said 5:06PM on 11-30-2009
Yeah, I surely wish they would've dropped that sexy new 27" iMac by a few hundred bucks :p
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jonathan said 8:31PM on 11-30-2009
It was discounted. Maybe only a hundred. But it was on sale at the apple store I stopped at
Maple said 12:38PM on 12-02-2009
The $20 off the iTouch 8GB was not a bad, deal even better if you happened to be in a Best Buy that price matched, and then took off another 10% — I probably shouldn't have opened up all the iTouches to the apple website ;o)
They sold out of 8GB models while I was there, and I seemed to make a lot of parents happy (and some 12 year olds on Xmas morning), with the deal.
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