Wouldn't you wonder more if they had no explanation why their 4th quarter came in a little bit light? They missed at least $1.3 billion in Mac sales relative to last year, and they also lost 1 week of sales. Put those two numbers together, and Apple would have had an extra $5 billion in sales for the quarter and an extra $1 in earnings. However, that leaves some room for higher Mac demand and an extra week of sales this quarter.
Most of the crap about the supply chain is just noise. The real question is why has Apple's cost of goods risen so dramatically over the past year. GM's haven't sunk because of lower ASP's, it's primarily been lowered by the higher cost of goods. Part of the increase can be tracked to the higher buildout cost for the iPhone 5, which was an entirely new product. I don't think the iPhone 4S had much higher costs than the iPhone 4, which the exception of Siri. However, they totally revamped the iPhone 5 which had to cost some serious money. Plus, they built out a lot of new locations in China to from 7,000 to 17,000 at the end of the year. All those buildouts had to cost some money.
Sales wise, I didn't see anything about the quarter that was anything but superior. Cost wise, the 38% margin speaks for itself - it was much lower than last year. |
