Apple Downgraded, Estimates Lowered Ahead of Annual Meeting

Ed Sutherland ()

stocks2Two analysts Tuesday downgraded Apple shares, trimming sales expectations a day before the Cupertino, Calif.-based company’s annual meeting.

Calyon Securities analyst Shelby Seyrafi warned clients Apple’s pricing “is vulnerable in today’s recessionary environment.” As a result, the analyst lowered Apple stock to Underperform from Outperform.

Seyrafi also lowered his Mac sales forecast for March to 2.19 million units from 2.35 million.

Declining PC sales prompted the analyst to reduce his Mac sales projection, according to Barron’s.

Pointing to a “more crowded” smartphone market, he also cut his iPhone projection to 3 million for the March quarter, down from 3.2 million.

While Kaufman Bros. analyst Shaw Wu retained a Buy rating for Apple, he trimmed slightly his sales and revenue expectations. The analyst now foresees Apple’s quarterly revenue at $7.7 billion, down a tad from an earlier $7.8 billion projection. Wall Street had expected Apple revenue to fall between $7.6 billion and $8 billion.

Wu Wednesday reported a slightly more pessimistic view of Mac sales while expressing the opposite for iPhone demand. Apple will likely report 2.2 million Macs sold in the March quarter, down from a previous expectation of 2.4 million. However, Wu projected 3.2 million iPhone sales during the quarter, up from 3 million.

Overall, Apple will earn $34.8 billion in fiscal 2009, down from $35.2 billion, according to Wu.

DON'T MISS
JPMorgan Cuts Apple Target Price, Estimates for 2009

Echoing Wu’s iPhone estimates, Barclays Capital analyst Ben Reitzes predicted Apple will sell 2.2 million iPhones in March, however demand should increase during the second half of fiscal 2009 after Apple unveils a refreshed line of handsets.

Wednesday, Apple holds its annual shareholders meeting. For the first time in 10 years, Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs will not attend.

2 comments »

About the author

Ed Sutherland

Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.

(sorry, you need Javascript to see this e-mail address)| Read more posts by .

Posted in News |

  • http://inletmedia.com Chris Peterson

    Didn’t even read it, saw analyst and assumed the following…

    “Apple is going to be hurt by the coming recession, consumers wont continue buying premium products and will instead buy crap.”
    “Apple should cut their prices, release a netbook they will make no money from and reverse the strategy that has given them the best quarter ever, even during the recession.”

    “I’m an analyst yadayadayada, I post something and it gives lazy blog writers something to post.”

  • http://www.ezdub.com Ezdub

    Analyze this! have you even been in an Apple store recently?!?
    I Suggest you check that out before you report this so dryly, Ed.
    That’s the real story. ‘recession drives consumers to the Apple store’ !
    …Coulda been an interesting point of view, and much more entertaining.