The latest: Share price tracks sales growth, and AAPL hits $600 in 2013
Morgan Stanley's Katy Huberty believes Apple's (AAPL) revenue most closely tracks how much it spends on new equipment (in MBA terms, CapEx ex-retail stores). Her chart looks like this:
Source: Morgan Stanley
By that formula, Apple's revenues will hit $183 billion by the end of fiscal 2012.
Asymco's Horace Dediu has drilled a little deeper into Apple's capital expenditures. He believes Apple's sales of iOS devices (iPhones, iPads and iPod touches) most closely track Apple's expenditures in machinery, equipment and real estate. His chart looks like this:
Source: Asymco
Dediu concludes that Apple's projected $8 billion capital expenditures in 2012 means iOS device sales -- the primary source of Apple's revenue these days -- will continue growing at the rate they always have: 100% per year.
On Wednesday, Seeking Alpha published an article by Bill Maurer -- a recent college graduate taking advantage of the site's open door policy -- to offer a third theory. Rather than bemoaning the fact that Apple's share price bears little relationship to its earnings (witness its shrinking price-to-earnings ratio), he suggests that the growth in Apple's share price most closely tracks its revenue growth. He's got a point. Over the past six years, Apple's ...
Earnings have grown 1852%
Sales have grown 677%
Share price has grown 660%
Maurer assumes (without explaining why) that Apple's revenues will grow 28.5% in fiscal 2012 and 15% in fiscal 2013, and he concludes that Apple's share price will hit $600 at the end of 2013. He didn't provide charts, so we took the liberty of graphing his spreadsheets. They look like this:
Data: Bill Maurer. Charts: PED
The revenue-to-price relationship is bumpier than Maurer's theory suggests, but it's interesting nonetheless. Especially if you substitute Huberty's or Dediu's future growth estimates for his.
In Japan, its profits grew 1,156% between 2005 and 2010. Europe's were up 1,518%
Source: Motley Fool
"Apple's international sales are simply on fire"
So wrote the Motley Fool's Erik Bleeker Monday in a piece assessing Apple's (AAPL) overseas demand.
It is, as he puts it, exploding.
This will come as no surprise to anyone who has been following COO Tim Cook's Q&As with analysts, where he's been highlighting Apple's growth in the Japanese MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Jun 28, 2011 7:38 AM ET
Selling alongside the iPad, the smaller Galaxy Tab has found a market.
Samsung said it had moved one million Galaxy Tabs less than two months after launch and less than a month after its U.S. launch on T-Mobile on November 10. Apple (AAPL) sold 2 million iPads in its first two months, though those weren't holiday shopping months (nor did Apple have any competition).
Samsung announced two weeks ago it had sold 600,000 MORE
Seth Weintraub - Dec 3, 2010 7:49 AM ET
How many CEOs have been head of HR, Engineering, Sales, Marketing, Finance or Legal? Probably none. Here's how they can overcome that and still hire good people in those roles.
By Ben Horowitz, contributor
Image via Wikipedia
The biggest difference between being a great functional manager and being a great general manager – and particularly a great CEO – is that as a general manager, you must hire and manage MORE
Oct 13, 2010 3:34 PM ET
By one estimate, pre-orders were coming in Friday morning at the rate of 25,000 per hour
The folks who hang out at Investor Village's AAPL Sanity Board are too impatient to wait for Apple (AAPL) to announce sales figures; they much prefer to work them out on their own -- in real time.
Entering the order numbers associated with their own purchases on a Google spreadsheet, they think they've cracked the code. MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Mar 12, 2010 12:58 PM ET
[UPDATE: Apple has published its Black Friday sale prices, and while the savings on MacBooks and iPods are in line with last year's, there are steep discounts -- 50% and more -- on third party products. The resellers, meanwhile, are offering unually steep price cuts. See MacRumors, AppleInsider and Gizmodo for some of the best bargains. To see what shoppers ended up buying over the first weekend of holiday sales, MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Nov 26, 2008 7:49 AM ET
Here's bit of upbeat economic news to brighten a gloomy Monday.
On Aug. 1, a London-based investor who calls himself "Tommo_UK" posted a message on The Mac Observer's Apple Finance Board asking anyone who had bought an iPhone 3G to provide three pieces of data: the serial number (with a few digits X'd out), the date of purchase, and the first 13 digits of the so-called IMEI number.
The International Mobile Equipment MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Oct 6, 2008 8:42 AM ET
On Saturday, Aug. 30, the daughters of "BillH" bought an iPhone at an AT&T store in Sunnyvale, Calif. The next day, their father, an Apple investor from Minneapolis, reported on The Mac Observer's Apple Finance Board (AFB) that the so-called IMEI number on the phone was 01 171400 6049xx x (the last three digits X'd out for safety sake).
That number may not mean anything to you or me, but to a group MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Sep 1, 2008 2:54 PM ET
UPDATE: Apple on Monday issued a press release announcing that it sold its 1 millionth iPhone 3G on Sunday. News from the company has apparently overtaken Gene Munster's analysis, below.
"iPhone 3G had a stunning opening weekend," said Steve Jobs, according to the press release. "It took 74 days to sell the first one million original iPhones, so the new iPhone 3G is clearly off to a great start around the MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Jul 14, 2008 7:50 AM ET
End-of-year sales figures for Apple's (AAPL) iPhone in Europe are trickling in, but not in any form that can be definitively pieced together.
That latest news comes from Germany, where the head of Deutsche Telekom's T-Mobile division said in an online interview Saturday that it had signed on 70,000 customers in the 11 weeks since the device went on sale. (link)
What's not clear is whether that number represents iPhone sales or MORE
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| Company | Price | Change | % Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bank of America Corp... | 7.95 | -0.16 | -1.97% |
| Microsoft Corp | 31.27 | -0.17 | -0.54% |
| Ford Motor Co | 12.28 | -0.25 | -2.00% |
| General Electric Co | 19.39 | 0.17 | 0.88% |
| Citigroup Inc | 32.36 | -1.00 | -3.00% |
| Index | Last | Change | % Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dow | 12,938.67 | -27.02 | -0.21% |
| Nasdaq | 2,933.17 | -15.40 | -0.52% |
| S&P 500 | 1,357.66 | -4.55 | -0.33% |
| Treasuries | 2.00 | -0.04 | -1.96% |
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