Ahead of next week’s fourth quarter earnings report, Apple is expected to announce earning $30 billion, driven by iPhone sales, one analyst told investors Friday. Although Wall Street consensus is for $29.2 billion, the iPhone 4’s release at the end of Apple’s fourth quarter should result in a brighter financial outlook.
“We believe some investors expect iPhone units to be down sequentially ahead of [the] iPhone 4S,” UBS Equity Research analyst Maynard Um wrote Friday. However, unlike the June 2010 quarter, the new iPhone was released in October, the start of the first quarter of fiscal 2012.
As such, Um expects a $34.7 billion first quarter, compared to the Street’s $36.3 billion. His previous estimate of 25 million iPhones during the quarter could be conservative “given strong pre-orders & aggressive carrier launch schedules.”
Apple could report selling 4.16 million Macs and 12 million iPads during the last quarter of 2011.
The lack of any radical design departure of the iPhone 4S from the iPhone 4 should benefit Apple. “Given the physical similarities of the iPhone 4 and 4S, we expect scale to help improve gross margins over time & potentially help drive wholesale pricing down to the prepaid market by the time the iPhone 5 is released,” according to Um. Meanwhile, “Apple has its strongest ever product portfolio heading into the holidays.”
