It’s another day, another optimistic projection for Apple’s success over the Christmas season.
This time the report is from Piper Jaffray’s analyst Gene Munster, who analyzed 25,000 tweets featuring the hashtags @Santa and #wishlist — and found iPhone to be the “most mentioned item”.
Munster — who currently has an “Overweight” rating on Apple shares, and a $640 price target — noted that the iPad is also in third place, behind Sony’s newly-launched PlayStation 4.
The overall percentage of tweets referring to Apple products are actually quite small (maybe people are mistakenly prizing “world peace” and “family togetherness” over new iOS goodies), but it’s enough that Munster finds them encouraging:
“Apple products that appear in the top 10 most requested gifts in our analysis include: the iPhone, iPad, Macbook, and iPod with .49%, .33%, .15%, and .09% of the Tweets respectively. This compares with Galaxy, Tablet, Samsung, and Android at .14%, .08%, .08%, and .03% respectively (see table on page 2). We would also note that the list encapsulates items that consumers want if money were no object. Although this doesn’t directly measure sales, we view the data as a positive, knowing that consumers continue to look to Apple products as the most desirable holiday gift.”
No mention of whether children who are naughty get Kindle Fires — alongside lumps of coal — in their stockings.
Source: Barron’s
