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Technology Stocks : Apple Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Doren who wrote (174897)	9/23/2014 2:33:01 AM
From: pyslent	1 Recommendation Recommended By rnsmth Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 213176

So merely gaining 10% over last year seems like... No one who is serious about evaluating the company should be fooled into thinking that demand for this iPhone generation is reflected by the 10% launch shipment growth. The 5C channel fill made the YOY comparison meaningless. Refer to Cook's comment on shattering the sell-through record. That's a far more meaningful statistic.

To: Doren who wrote (174897)	9/23/2014 6:52:53 AM
From: rnsmth	1 Recommendation Recommended By JP Sullivan Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 213176

<<So merely gaining 10% over last year seems like... nothing really. And really its not a big deal. Status quo. Now if one adds in higher ASP, higher margins, better iTunes sales, rising Mac sales, expansion into China and a few other profit areas they'll be having a good year. Maybe better than people expect. >> I do not know what people expect, so better than people expect is a bit nebulous. Ten million is a good number. Production is likely up to close 600,000 a day between Foxconn and Pegatron - given the reports of 540,000 a day at launch between the two. I think Apple will come in at around 38 million iPhones sold in this quarter, and about 60 million in Q1, the holiday quarter. For last year, the holiday quarter came in at a bit over 51 million iPhones. That was a sequential increase of 51% and a year over year increase of 6.77%. Using the above estimates for this quarter and next quarter, the comparison numbers for this year will be around 60% sequential growth and 17% year over year growth. Not bad, in fact, pretty darn good. Not the hyper growth of 2009-2012, but pretty darn good, solid growth. Then Doren goes on to add some pretty important stuff: < Now if one adds in higher ASP, higher margins, better iTunes sales, rising Mac sales, expansion into China and a few other profit areas they'll be having a good year. Maybe better than people expect.> Financially, I think the higher ASP and higher margins (and I will be happy with maintained margins), may be the most important of that list, but.... ....also important for Apple's results, is the close to 40 billion dollars left to be spent on share repurchases between the end of the past quarter and the end of calendar 2015 - that will take share count down about another 6% during that time. These continued buybacks will magnify all of the above on earnings per share. Darn good solid growth on the revenue side will translate into better than darn good solid growth on the earnings per share side. Dismiss it as financial engineering if you wish, but not without looking at examples of other companies that have steadily reduced their share count over the past years and have very modest growth in revenues with very good EPS and share price growth. IBM is one such example. Short-term I do not know what Apple's share price is going to do. Over the next 6 months and year my Apple share price indicator points UP. I am pleased to have Apple as one of thirty some positions in my dividend growth portfolio (remember the commitment made last quarter for annual dividend increases), and I am pleased that I returned to in the money AAPL calls and LEAPs, starting this past July. There are good odds that those moves, particularly the latter ones, are going to continue to work well.