Are you sitting down for this one? Good. Here goes: Apple is going to keep taking market share from "traditional PCs." I know, it's a real shocker. But so says Zacks Investment Research (which is not, apparently, run by a dude named Zack as you'd think). They say that consumers are enjoying Apple's innovations, and that a strong product line lead by the iPod, iPhone, and the MacBook Air will continue to increase Apple's business and give them a bigger piece of the personal computing pie. Who knew?
But Zacks isn't jumping into anything -- they still say that the iPod line will slow down over the next few years, so they're going "hold" with AAPL. Still, it's a good thing they told us about that marketshare thing. Without analysts like these, we'd have no idea what we're buying lately.
In heavy trading volume today, Apple stock (AAPL) is down four percent after initially dropping to 176.23 halfway through the keynote at 1:55 p.m. Eastern time.
At the time of posting, AAPL was trading near 177, which is a decline of over four percent since the closing bell yesterday Friday. (It's been a long day.)
Apple stock has taken hits in the past on announcement days, usually due to traders looking to make a quick buck from the high interest surrounding coverage of the event.
We're going to be covering the Apple earnings call live at 5pm ET / 2 pm PT, now that the earnings report is out ($1.16 per share, hot hot hot!). To listen in on the call, you can pick up the QuickTime stream here. Remember, for ongoing coverage of AAPL be sure to check out our sister site BloggingStocks.
Over at Apple 2.0, Phillip Elmer-DeWitt has an excellent preview post on Apple's earnings report, scheduled for Wednesday afternoon at the market close. We'll be liveblogging the earnings call at 2 pm PT/5pm ET if you care to join in for the fun.
Despite spectactular sales and earnings growth for AAPL over the past couple of years, the Q1 earnings report (which featured extra-conservative guidance by Apple and some indications of a softening on iPod demand) triggered a selloff in the stock, with a drop in price from the lofty $200 highs at the end of 2007 (seen above) as profit-taking and recession fears drove investors to take their money and run. Will iPhone sales and Mac unit growth push profits (and the stock price) back towards the roof? Tune in Wednesday to find out.
OK, I get it. Equity investments are bets on the future, not rewards for the past, and a stock like Apple's with such stratospheric growth over the past 12 months is vulnerable to gloomy outlooks in a way that more plodding investments might not be. Still and all: another record quarter. Best sales, best revenue in Apple's history. More than 2.3 million Macs sold, and nearly as many iPhones (!). Over twenty-two million freakin' iPods. Year over year, the December quarter gained almost 2.5 billion dollars in revenue -- my goodness, it was a 9.6B quarter, which would have been a spectacular entire year for the Apple of recent memory. Apple beat the internal guidance by $0.34 a share... there's no way to describe this financial performance except "stunningly good" -- unless you're Doug Krizner of Marketplace Morning Report, who characterized the results today as "less than stellar." Man, I am so happy they made that guy stop signing off with "Make it a good day," because the way he said it made me want to get back in bed and hide my money under a mattress.
But I digress. With these results in mind, why would after-hours traders respond with the fiscal equivalent of "Go crawl in a hole and die, you hippie freaks?" Granted, Apple's CFO is anticipating earnings per share for next quarter around a dollar, which is less than analysts were hoping for and may point to some drag on the business from deteriorating economic conditions. It still seems to me that with iPhone revenue growing (remember, it takes two years to extract all the profit from those iPhone sales, so there's an upslope out there as the sales and new markets accumulate) and new streams coming in from iTunes rentals and the so-hot-it's-untouchable retail operation, we've gone from irrational exuberance to a gang initiation beatdown.
Oh well. If I wanted peace and quiet I probably should have bought Dell stock.
Disclaimer: I hold shares in AAPL. Bought them at a split-adjusted $13. Not selling, either.
In our last-of-2007 podcast, our resident AAPL-watcher Mike Rose pointed out Apple's exceptional fiscal performance as one of the most important stories of the year. Quite rightly so: Apple had, by all accounts, a phenomenal year. There's even predictions from analysts of AAPL reaching the frankly dizzying heights of $300 - $600 in the next 18 months - we'll see how those fare, folks.
With the financial analysts talking about Apple stock's seemingly rosy future, it's perhaps surprising news that AAPL has lost 7.5% (dropping nearly $15) just today. That's about $12 billion knocked off Apple's market cap. With Macworld around the corner, Apple stock is the subject of much speculation already - both for us covering the 'Keynote Index Fund' here at TUAW and over at Wired (to mention but a few). Undoubtedly, there's folks looking to partake in a little daytrading or trading over the duration of the entire Macworld week. With that in mind, might the Feds and SEC be more than interested in the interaction between the keynote (including its audience, one might fathom) and the effect it has on Wall Street?
For ongoing coverage of AAPL, check out our colleagues' posts at Blogging Stocks:AAPL.
Disclaimer: The points mentioned above come from a personal, and strictly non-professional, opinion, and should not be considered investment advice. For advice on stocks and investments, always seek advice from a regulated financial advice professional.
Update: We ought to add that the market did indeed drop as a whole. However, the drop in Apple's stock was disproportionate to the down day.
Post-holiday investor confidence in Apple's end-of-year performance appears to be high. Way high. Like, all time crazy high. Witness today's intraday price peak for AAPL, rising above $200/share for the first time.
There may be more upside to come with the quarterly numbers. Shaw Wu of ATR as quoted by the AP: "It's looking like Apple's most optimistic guidance in eight quarters [forecast sales of $9.2 billion and profit of $1.42 a share] is turning out to be conservative after all." What more is there to say? Well, one more thing: Your Mac Life is offering a chance to win a single share of Apple stock if you pick the day it first closes above $205. Fun!
A huge barrelful of unlocked iPhones. The announced estimate of phones sold to presumptive unlockers -- 250,000 -- was so high that some questioned whether I heard it correctly (including me). Apple, of course, knows both how many iPhones have been sold and how many AT&T contracts have been activated, so barring a large quantity of phones purchased as gifts and languishing in underwear drawers, that number has to be taken at face value. Our commenters also note that iPhone bulk purchases may be under tighter control now, and unlocked iPhones are readily available for purchase in the Far East.
With the fraction of iPhones sold to unlockers edging towards 20%, there has to be a powerful cognitive and contractual dissonance at work in the braintrust at One Infinite Loop. On the one hand, there's no subscription revenue from AT&T for those phones; on the other, hey, that's an additional 250K phones sold, not a bad thing. It will be very interesting to follow this number quarter-over-quarter and see if the legitimate EU introduction lowers the demand for unlocked devices.
Nine bigwigs at Taiwan's Inventec Appliances could be headed to jail over allegations of insider trading-- the executives allegedly failed to report lowered order numbers by Apple before dropping off $22.4 million worth of stock on the Taiwan Stock Exchange. Apparently, Apple decided to send more of its iPod order to China, and the executives reportedly knew in mid-January that the decision had been made to do so. But they didn't reveal the troubles until mid-March, at which point IA's stock tumbled, and the execs had already reportedly unloaded their stock.
In other executives and stock news, Jobsy picked up a few Apple shares this week-- 120,000 for $5.75 a piece. The stock price has actually been dropping since around August 1st, but considering the price is right around $117 right now, Steve is sitting pretty-- it's good to be the king. Apple says Jobs isn't selling at this time, though. Obviously-- he's got to wait until the ultraportable shows up, right?
Tuesday was a rough day for Apple investors, as shares dropped precipitously from post-earnings-report highs of $148 a share down into the low $130s. Most of the credit/blame for the selloff is being attributed to a rumor floated among traders and on a posting at TheStreet.com that Apple was cutting back iPhone production by 50% off the company's original plans.
Most of the potential sources later disavowed the information. Considering that there has never been an official production target other than the "10 million phones by 2008" number (note also that a production cut was not discussed during the earnings call), longtime Apple stock watchers on the Mac Observer forums characterized the bear run on AAPL as a "deliberate hit," executed by unscrupulous persons who have positioned themselves to take advantage of the drop in value to shore up their holdings.
Remember, AAPL investors, it's a marathon, not a sprint.
Back on July 10th I mentioned the likelihood that Apple's market capitalization might soon surpass that of the original Silicon Valley success story, Hewlett-Packard. (I also implied that both Steves once worked at HP; apparently Woz was full-time, but S. Jobs was more of a summer intern.) Well, as of this morning Apple's total value comes out to about $127 billion, and HP is at about $124 billion. If this holds through the close, it will mark a generational torch passing into the hands of the future... or something like that.
Who's next on the market cap hit list? Well, believe it or not, dear readers, that mom & pop semiconductor basement operation Intel has a valuation around $141 billion; not out of the realm of possibility, if some of the more glowing, write-Apple's-name-on-your-trapper-keeper analyst predictions ($200 a share? $250?) become real.
Even as the market at large turned downward at the open today, AAPL moved up in a big way. With overnight trading taking the stock on a roller-coaster ride (up over $150, settling down at about $145, almost $8 over the closing price Wednesday), the stock opened this morning at 146, a record high open and intraday record high.
If you listened to yesterday's earnings call (or followed the highlights on our liveblog) you heard a lot of interest about the initial days of iPhone sales, which barely made it into the June quarter numbers; Apple's not even recognizing revenue from AT&T subscription sharing until the September quarter. Meanwhile, the Mac and iPod businesses are, as they say in Pittsburgh, "ahn fahr" -- 32% Mac unit sales growth over the year-ago quarter, and nearly 10 million iPods sold in the quarter. Check out Georges Yared and his colleagues over at our sister shop BloggingStocks for more on the earnings story.
Disclaimer: I am long on AAPL, and short on temper.
According to the Dow Jones Marketwatch, apparently Apple's earnings last quarter are going to be much higher thanks to something called the iPhone. You probably haven't heard much about this device, but our sources tell us it's some sort of hybrid between a Personal Digital Assistant and one of those phones you can use in your car.
Investors are cooing about the tiny "iPhone", because even though it only appeared on Apple's quarterly cycle for two days, the estimated 500,000 units sold in the first weekend will probably be listed as at least partly responsible for the 34% rise in AAPL's profits. The iPod didn't do too badly either-- everyone's expecting Apple to announce that around 10 million iPods were sold last quarter also.
And not surprisingly, bigger things are on the way-- one analyst says "the iPhone will have an even stronger halo effect than the iPod on Macintosh's market share." If two days of the iPhone can do this much, how big will AAPL get with a whole quarter of the gadget?
The charts tell the story: AAPL is feeling the iPhone bump. Even without today's $2 runup on the on-again/off-again iPhone Nano rumors (triggering a busy day: 14% more AAPL trades than usual), the stock is now solidly up 55% year to date, putting Apple's market capitalization as of today's close hovering near $115 billion. Whatever aggravation or gripes one might have with Apple's newest product, it's clear that Wall Street is feeling the iPhone love in a big way.
Something really interesting might happen this week if the spike continues: Apple, Inc. market value may soon surpass that of the company where Steve & Steve got their start: Hewlett-Packard. HP's market cap is $117B, by no means out of reach considering the circumstances. (Of course, Google's market cap is over $162B... but that's just craziness.)
Talk about your irrational exuberance: Apple's stock shot up over $3 this morning on the announcement of better-than-expected battery life for the iPhone. This pogo-stick fluctuation of the stock price on every snippet of iPhone news is a mite stressful even for those of us (like myself) who are long + buy-and-hold on AAPL, and I can only imagine the volume of Maalox that's being consumed by more active traders.
I suppose it's too much to ask, when reputable mags like Business Week are picking up the price expectations of $160 a share from slightly rabid analysts, that everyone take a deep breath and try to be patient until the phone actually ends up in the hands of customers. Really, though.
Are you sitting down for this one? Good. Here goes: Apple is going to keep taking market share from "traditional PCs." I know, it's a real shocker. But so says Zacks Investment Research (which is not, apparently, run by a dude named Zack as you'd think). They say that consumers are enjoying Apple's innovations, and that a strong product line lead by the iPod, iPhone, and the MacBook Air will continue to increase Apple's business and give them a bigger piece of the personal computing pie. Who knew?
OK, I get it. Equity investments are bets on the future, not rewards for the past, and a stock like Apple's with such stratospheric growth over the past 12 months is 
In our 
I've been catching up on the Apple financial news today after yesterday's 
Nine bigwigs at Taiwan's 
Tuesday was a rough day for Apple investors, as shares dropped precipitously from 
Back on July 10th
Even as the market at large turned 
According to the Dow Jones Marketwatch, apparently 
The 
Talk about your irrational exuberance: 
