Herb, good post. If the quarter was ruined in July then Anderson shouldn't have been so positive in mid-September on his Australian swing. I've seen this too many times--business is soft and a company just "hopes" that the final month will rescue it.
Seems like a great time to buy AAPL but it would also be nice to hear what they have to say at the conference call for more certainty. I'd like to know of the investment gains are going to continue as they have the past two years as well.
An interesting snip from a Bear-ons article (not by Malone):
<<Last June, Apple quietly decided to fire some 50 educational resellers and shift distribution to a
company-run, direct-order Website. In a sort of damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't move,
Apple appears to have made the right decision, but at the wrong time. It would have been far wiser
for the company's impatient chief executive, Steve Jobs, to have waited until after the critical summer
and fall quarters before announcing the transition. Here's why: Jilted resellers appear to have
stopped pitching Apple, working instead to solidify their administrative contacts at the schools in
hopes of saving their businesses. The result: a lousy quarter.
For a decade or so, the educational reseller program had been a winner for Apple. Once 300
strong, the network had been consolidated to 50 productive resellers. The brokers would sell the
machines and servers, and Apple would ship direct from its warehouses, with the resellers taking
healthy cuts as commissions. The arrangement worked well. But Wall Street analysts constantly
harangued Apple for forfeiting too much of its margins to resellers.>>
Marc |
