Despite Apple’s recent 6.8 percent drop in share prices, the Cupertino, Calif. iPhone and iPad maker has a bright future, one bullish analyst told investors Wednesday. “We believe a sustainable 25-30 percent growth rate in earnings could be achievable through 2015,” writes Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster.
Why? He believes the iPhone will grow at 35 percent a year, selling 200 million handsets in 2015 – with the iPad expanding at an even faster pace. Backing up his claim, the analyst offers the iPhone’s dramatic audience increase since bursting onto the smartphone scene in 2007.
Although the iPhone started with an exclusive arrangement with AT&T’s 58 million subscribers, by the end of its first year the phone was offered to 100 million subscribers, including in Europe. Today, the Apple handset has an addressable audience of more than 1.7 billion global subscribers and no troublesome exclusive carrier arrangements.
Along with the recent addition of Verizon’s more than 90 million subscribers, the CDMA iPhone in 2011 could also reach another 90 million customers with China Telecom and an even larger 110 million subscribers in India’s Reliance, according to Munster.
With such growth potential, the recent dip in Apple share prices pales by comparison.
[Fortune]
