Wednesday, January 12, 2005

Why street got AAPL estimates so wrong

Usually companies like to beat expectations by a penny or two even if they can do say four pennies, because they don't like uncertainty and they move shipments to next quarter for backup. AAPL on the other smacked one out of the ballpark and then some. AAPL beat EPS estimates by unheard of $0.29! Now what are the buy-siders paying for when the sell siders estimates are not even in the same time zone? AAPL reported $0.70 in earnings, did you know the street was looking for $0.60 next XMas and AAPL delivered better than that this Xmas.

The iPod brand has transformed itself into a eco-system and it's just very tough to get all the variables right when a product becomes a "economy" by itself. The iPod has been one of the best marketing blitz in AAPL history or for that matter in consumer technology and it does not matter how many channel checks you do, how closely you monitor the food-chain, it is just going to be very tough to get this cultural phenomena down to a number. So cut sell siders a break and watch for the next iPod-like product because this cycle will be repeated.

No I am not a sell sider who covers AAPL.

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Interesting that the stock hasn't moved much considering how big they blew out numbers by. Yes, it had a big run since August, but it was consolidating in the mid-60s for over a month.

Jake

10:40 PM  
Blogger Slash said...

Certainly not as much as it did since August. They reported on Jan12 and since then the stock is up 10% where as the Nasdaq is basically unchanged.

8:10 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

True, APPL is certainly outperforming for good reason. I meant to say it's a bad sign for the Nazz that a blowout quarter from AAPL couldn't ignite the market and couldn't even really ignite its own stock.

Jake

11:01 PM  

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