Cancer
How Apple gets to $2,000
May 9, 2012: 6:50 AM ETAndy Zaky has a plan
Click to enlarge. Source: Andy Zaky
FORTUNE -- Most Apple (AAPL) analysts will offer estimates that look a few quarters or even a year in advance.
Andy Zaky is not like most analysts.
For one thing, his estimates over the past four years have been considerably more accurate than your average Wall Street analyst (see, for example, here).
For another, he's not afraid to stick his neck out -- way out -- both in his published pieces (including more than a dozen for Fortune.com) and in his closely followed posts on Bullish Cross, his subscription-only blog.
Now he has put together an Apple forecast that looks not a few quarters, but a few years into the future.
The chart above shows Apple's past and future quarterly trailing earnings per share (TTM) according to Zaky, with most recent quarter ($41.04) at the center in dark blue. (For an explanation of TTM, see here.)
At Tuesday's close, Apple was trading at just under 14 times its current TTM (14 x 41.04 = $574.56).
If Apple is still trading at 14 times earnings in fiscal Q4 2015, it will, according to Zaky, have topped $2,000 (14 x $145.96 = $2043.44).
"I'm fairly confident about these numbers," Zaky writes. "Here's what I think will guide that:
Q1 2013 = 55 million iPhones shipped
Q1 2014 = 80 million iPhones shipped
Q1 2015 = 110 million iPhones shipped
"2014 is the golden age of Apple and the peak growth year," Zaky concludes. "After 2015, growth will stall and Apple will become a mature company -- at least for this era."
To enter another golden age, Zaky says, Apple has to do something spectacular. He's lobbying for nanomedicine and a cure for the type of cancer that killed Steve Jobs.
Curing cancer seems to me like a stretch, even for Apple.
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Cancer, then a CEO's kindness
When Salesforce employees fall ill, the company provides more than insurance. Marc Benioff calls, tweets -- and picks up thousands in extra costs.
By David A. Kaplan, contributor
FORTUNE -- John Greene thought he worked for a pretty good company. Then, at 40, he got cancer -- and found out for sure.
In November 2010, after he'd been in Salesforce (CRM) engineering R&D for barely a year, Greene was diagnosed with acute myeloid MORE
Jan 19, 2012 7:00 AM ET -
Cell phone use is way up. So why did brain cancer rates fall?
Despite a 500-fold increase in radiation exposure from cell-phones since 1990, brain cancer rates have fallen.
FORTUNE -- During the 1980s, just as Americans began pumping low-frequency radiation through their skulls with cell phones, brain cancer rates in the U.S. slowly increased. At the beginning of the decade, doctors delivered the devastating diagnosis of brain cancer to 63 out of every 1 million Americans every year; by 1990 that number had risen MORE
Scott Woolley - Jun 7, 2011 11:22 AM ET -
Steve Jobs is still kicking
The six weeks the National Enquirer gave him are up
A supermarket tabloid shows a radio talk-show doctor and a Florida critical care physician photographs of a patient they have never examined. They pronounce him gravely ill and give him six weeks to live.
You might think that the takeaway message from this would be a story about medical ethics. But the patient was Steve Jobs, and what happened instead was a MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Mar 30, 2011 7:14 AM ET -
Steve Jobs went to Switzerland in search of cancer treatment
Fortune has learned that Apple CEO Steve Jobs spent part of 2009 at a hospital in Basel, Switzerland seeking treatment for neuroendocrine cancer, which he had surgically treated in 2004.
By Doron Levin, contributor
In early 2009, the tech and investing worlds were trying to untangle a puzzle about Apple. The company was putting out incredible devices, but it was unclear why the legendary leader wasn't there. As Fortune reported [See: "The Trouble MORE
Jan 18, 2011 11:42 AM ET -
Steve Jobs takes another medical leave
Reasons are vague. No end-date given. COO Tim Cook will once again step in to run Apple.
The text of his letter to Apple's (AAPL) staff, issued Monday morning as a press advisory:
Team,
At my request, the board of directors has granted me a medical leave of absence so I can focus on my health. I will continue as CEO and be involved in major strategic decisions for the company.
I MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Jan 17, 2011 9:16 AM ET -
Inside Steve Jobs' home office (2004)
Rare photos taken shortly after his cancer operation are now available in Getty's archives
On July 31, 2004, Steve Jobs underwent surgery to remove a malignant tumor from his pancreas. A few weeks later, he permitted Diana Walker, his favorite Time Magazine contract photographer, to shoot him in his Palo Alto home.
A selection of those photos have surfaced in Getty Images' archives, where they were discovered by allaboutstevejobs.com. On Monday they MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Nov 16, 2010 7:25 AM ET -
To Tell or Not to Tell?
Some tech CEOs are more forthcoming than others about their illness.
Kenneth Oshman
Oshman, chairman and then CEO of electricity-grid equipment maker Echelon, put out a press release in November 2009 that he was suffering from lung cancer. The release stated that the cancer was "both treatable and curable."Steve Jobs
Oct 7, 2010 12:42 PM ET
The Apple CEO informed his board that he had cancer in 2003, but a public disclosure was not made by Apple until August MORE -
A sick CEO's full disclosure
When Hugh Martin learned he had cancer, he did the unimaginable. He revealed everything.
Everyone at Pacific Biosciences knew something was up when CEO Hugh Martin called for an all-hands meeting on a Thursday. The company always held its big meetings on Friday, and it was rare that the staff didn't know the agenda in advance. So it was with some anticipation that all 300 employees of the fast-growing MORE
Michael V. Copeland, Senior Writer - Oct 7, 2010 3:00 AM ETPosted in: Cancer, CEO, disclosure, executive succession, gene sequencing, Hugh Martin, multiple myeloma, Pacific Biosciences -
Steve Jobs: 'I was almost one of the ones that died waiting for a liver'
A year later, he talks about the liver transplant operation that saved his life.
"I was lucky," said Steve Jobs in brief remarks Friday in support of a new California organ donation bill. "Because many others died waiting for a transplant."
After being introduced as "the Steve" by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Apple's (AAPL) CEO spoke for only the second time in public about the liver transplant he received in great secrecy MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Mar 19, 2010 7:36 PM ET
