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

To: Alomex who wrote (18368)	9/22/1998 10:25:00 PM
From: Andrew Danielson	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 213177

<<So, Apple doubled it's sales during August.>> Typical of a bear. Using the term "double" to understate the full 125% increase that going from 6 to 13.5% represents. ;-) Sheesh. Seriously, though, you say that July sales were 214,000. A 13.5/6 growth in August sales means about 481,500 units. If September drops off a bit to 450,000, we still get approximately 1.14 million units shipped for Q4 (not all that far from one article's off-handed mention of AAPL possibly doubling units shipped). If this is anywhere near being true, analysts are going to be peeved at AAPL, which had previously advised them that strong top-line growth wouldn't happen until Q1. 1.14 mil. units is going to make all those "hold" ratings look a might silly. Of course, we're basing this whole thing on "retail" sales figures. The iMac is a consumer product, logically showing up with disproportionate strength in the retail element. On the other hand, it sounds like the iMac is selling well to the education market too. On the third hand, strong iMac sales to the education market may be merely making up for the apparent loss of previously strong AIO sales. Therefore, it might not be safe for us to extrapolate AAPL's retail growth rate to the education sector as well. Finally, I've read previous C/NET articles detailing data from this "PC Data." It seems these numbers fluctuate rather wildly on a month-to-month basis. That calls to question in my mind just how all-encompassing (and therefore how accurate) this data is. Compaq's May market share was listed at 22 and change %. August brought it all the way back up to 30.9%. Seems like an awfully large percentage change--that if accurate--we should be hearing whoops and yells from investors in CPQ as well... For now, I'm still sticking with my original figure of 940,000 units shipped for the quarter and a wee bit over $1,600 in revenues. My .67 estimate is probably too low, however, given that it was based on the notion of 24.8% margin and significantly increased costs (up to 310 million from 292 in Q3) As a consequence, .67 is increasingly for me turning into expectation rather than hope. Andrew