Latest Headlines

August 13, 2008 - Piper Jaffray

Our 25 hours of counting iPhone sales in Apple retail stores throughout the country lead us to believe Apple is on pace to beat our previous estimate of 4.1 million iPhones for the September quarter.

We believe Apple will sell 1.78 million units at its U.S. retail stores, and 0.90 million phones at U.S. AT&T locations. Our estimate assumes each of the 2,200 AT&T stores will sell an average of 5 phones per day from the July 11th launch through the end of the September quarter.

We believe that our revision may be conservative and that Apple will meet our estimates. The August 22nd launch in additional countries should provide another catalyst to sales."

August 6, 2008 - Piper Jaffray

We note that the MacBook has had the same design since its launch over two years ago, and the MacBook Pro has had essentially the same design since its launch over 2.5 years ago, which was very similar in design to the PowerBook G4 released over 5.5 years ago. To compare, the long-running iMac G5 design lasted three years.

We believe there is an 80% chance Apple will introduce redesigned MacBooks and possibly new MacBook Pros at lower price points. Specifically, Apple may re-enter the $999 price point (currently $1099) with the MacBook, or test the $1,799 price point with the MacBook Pro (currently $1999).

[Multi-touch] gestures are just the beginning of Apple's exploration of multi-touch on the Mac. Eventually, we expect Apple to change the trackpad to backlit color screens for a more dynamic user interface on the Mac.

We believe Apple is getting slightly more aggressive with its pricing, but overall the company is not diverting from its strategy of premium pricing."

August 5, 2008

Lehman Brothers analyst Ben Reitzes on a new iPhone form factor:

While we believe Apple is working on a lower-end iPhone form factor, we do not think one will come until Spring 2009. While we have picked up indications of a product like this in the supply chain, it doesn’t appear that the company has yet solidified the form factor, so it may be hard to get it finalized in time for the holidays.

We believe that strong demand in the initial countries could make a rollout overseas take longer simply based on supply. We believe that initial demand overseas could be quite strong and estimate 8.3 million iPhones could be sold [in the December quarter] with 24.2 million sold in fiscal 2009."

July 3, 2008

iphone chart

June 11, 2008 - Piper Jaffray

Mobile service adoption rates show that iPhone owners are more sophisticated mobile users, likely a result of both the user profile and the device itself. The bottom line is that we expect similar adoption of the App Store to other advanced services. Mobile users haven't seen apps like this before

According to April m:metrics data, 45% of smartphone users play a game on their phone at least once in a month. For iPhones, data suggests the rate is closer to 32%; however, we believe the rate of application users/gamers for iPhones is depressed given that third party developers were not able to produce applications for the iPhone previously.

Applying this 70% higher likelihood [of iPhone users to consume video on their phones] to the rate of game usage for smartphones, we arrive at 75% of iPhone users engaging in downloading third party applications. The reason we believe this could be conservative is that the iPhone heavily overindexes other smartphones in advanced services.

We see [Enterprise apps] as a positive indicator of the potential for Enterprise adoption of the iPhone. We found the average cost of iPhone apps on the App Store to be $2.29, with 71% being free.

Based on our scenario analysis, we believe the App Store could be a $1billion+ market (aggressive case), and add 1%-3% to operating income in CY09."

June 10, 2008 - Citigroup, Lehman Brothers, RBC Capital

Citigroup analyst Rich Gardner raised his AAPL price target from $248 to $287 saying:

We remain aggressive buyers of Apple shares at current levels. Apple's decision to move from a revenue share model to a traditional subsidy model for the 3G iPhone is a significant positive because Apple receives iPhone-related cash flow sooner.

The biggest surprise was the speed with which Apple is abandoning the revenue sharing model in favor of a traditional subsidy model. AT&T obviously believes that the higher upfront investment will pay off in higher subscriber adds, higher average revenue per unit, and lower churn."

Lehman Brothers analyst Ben Reitzes maintains his Overweight rating on AAPL and raised the price target from $202 to $234:

We believe weakness in the stock initially was a combination of a 'sell on news' reaction and some concerns about the product shipping about 2 weeks later than we expected. Also, we believe there is some confusion about the altered iPhone business model. We would use weakness in shares to accumulate the stock given Apple is creating a top of the line mobile community with multiple revenue streams that we believe should benefit investors over the long-term.

We believe focusing on the minutiae around shared average revenue per unit streams (just like earlier this year) misses the big picture impact of the significant growth in iPhone units and the ripple effect on the rest of the company."

RBC Capital Markets analyst Mike Abramsky maintains his Outperform rating on AAPL with a target price of $220:

We estimate Apple needs to sell 60% more subsidized handsets vs. unsubsidized to offset the loss of service revenue, which we believe is more than achievable, given our prior estimate that $199 pricing can boost sales over 100%."

topTop of page  | RSS feed