After a couple months of questioning, tech giant Apple is expected to answer Wall Street concerns with a resounding successful third quarter, led by blockbuster iPad 2 sales and the return of the ‘Wow’ factor.
“The return of the wow factor and new product cycles should jettison the fear that had been dogging valuation the last couple of months,” JPMorgan Chase analyst Mark Moskowitz said.
Apple should report $5.5 billion in third-quarter profit with sales of $25 billion, according to a consensus of Wall Street experts polled by Bloomberg Tuesday. The tech giant is expected to release official figures for the three-month period ended June 25 later today.
Despite no new iPhone until September, Moskowitz forecasts Apple will sell 19.6 million devices, up from 8.4 million during the same period last year. The company sold a record 18.7 million iPhones during the second quarter of 2011.
This quarter likely will be “fairly mild” for iPhone sales, says Needham & Co. analyst Charlie Wolf, but increased move from feature phones to smartphones should benefit Apple. “The iPhone is likely to capture a significant percentage of feature phone users who migrate to smartphones,” he tells Bloomberg.
Although iPhone sales may be mild, not so for iPad 2 demand. Analysts expect Apple will announce 7.7 million iPads sold during the last quarter, up from the record 7.3 million sold during the 2010 holiday period. The third quarter was the first full three-month sales period for the iPad 2. The company recently freed itself of supply shortages that caused some delays and loss of sales, according to Pacific Crest Securities analyst Andy Hargreaves.
As for Mac sales, Stanford & Bernstein’s Tony Sacconaghi expects 4.26 million Macs will sell, up from the record 4.13 million Macs in the first quarter. As for the all-important gross margin, analysts surveyed by Bloomberg expect 39.2 percent, landing squarely between Apple’s forecast for 38 percent and the second quarter’s 41.4 percent.
No matter the numbers, Wall Street is seeing Apple in a renewed light. The only question is will that renewed enthusiasm spread to consumers deluged by news of the latest item coming from Steve Jobs’ Cupertino idea factory.
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.
16 responses to “Analysts to Wall Street: Expect Apple’s Quarterly Results To Melt Your Face Off”
The picture is licensed with the following Creative Commons License:
http://creativecommons.org/lic…
which stipulates that it is not to be used for commercial purposes. Have you secured permission to use it for your commercial product?
The image isnt used for commercial purposes, not the image itself. Sure the site is add supported and it will thereby be in an article on a site that provides an income but it’s not like they are selling the image.
They are allowed to copy, distribute or display the work which is what they in my mind are doing, displaying it.
Guess it’s a question of how you interpret the license and commercial purposes though…
Analysts consistently underestimate Apple’s results. Apple itself guided for 40-50% growth, analysts expect 60-70% and the amateur bloggers who follow the stock (and who are consistently more accurate than the pro analysts) expect 80-100% growth.
Melt your face off indeed.
That is sort of no longer correct, though the subject remains fuzzy. Since “Non commercial” had never been defined and caused a lot of confusion, in 2008 Creative Commons started a study amongst content creators and content users, asking for their understanding of commercial for several use cases. The results were published in 2009 (https://creativecommons.org/we…. Now this is not an official definition, but at least it gives some directions.
The specific use case here (website making money from advertising) was considered to be commercial by 83%, so RawBob is right, Cult of Mac is non-compliant with the license. The numbers were slightly different for ads that just cover the hosting costs and non profit organizations, but most people interpret anything with any ads as commercial.
The fact that they sell the text, not the image does not really matter, since a) the image is used to support the text and b) the whole license would be kind of pointless if it only applied to direct sales and excluded embedding in e.g. websites. That’s like saying you can use it for car commercials, because they are about selling cars, not selling the commercial.
It would be pretty hard to sue anybody for abuse, since this survey (http://wiki.creativecommons.or…Â probably isn’t legally binding in any way, and a court would have to define itself what “commercial” means due to the lack of formal description in the license. But since creative commons is a “good thing”, we probably should avoid pissing the content creators off and stick to the conservative “ads = commercial” definition. It’s not that hard, since Google image search, flickr and others allow searching for images licensed without the NC restriction.
I would actually like to see this formalized in the license, so that less people pick the NC option “just in case” once they realize that this prevents the use even for personal home pages if they carry a single Google ad. The current state is very bad, because a lot of people will shy away from using and contributing CC licensed media because of the fuzziness.
Cult of Mac’s business model is to publish “articles” that bring in ad revenue. That makes them a commercial product. The images constitute a substantial part of the commercial value of the articles, making the articles “derivative works” of the images. Therefore, if they are being used without permission, Cult of Mac is violating the NC clause of the Creative Commons licenses that employ it.
It may be the case that Cult of Mac is securing explicit permission from the intellectual property owners, but since they have refused to answer my questions about this (many times), this seems doubtful.
Most other sites that I have seen choose to use only non-NC CC-licensed material for this purpose.
If Cult of Mac is respecting the intellectual property rights of Flickr users, it would be very easy for them to say so. The silence is deafening.
Numbers are out… Analysts under estimated.
Where well :p
Can’t argue with that, haha
Thanks for some random facts. Interesting in a way :p I wouldn’t have thought some many would call it commercial use
The usual idea is that you would use NFC to set up the link between the two devices and then do an automatic hand over to a different protocol for doing the actual transfer of data – eg Bluetooth,iphone 5