Apple seems inoculated against the economic virus besetting PC sales. Indeed, sales of iPhones and iPads make shares of the Cupertino, Calif. tech giant worth $520, a Goldman Sachs analyst told investors Wednesday.
Goldman’s Bill Shope raised his previous estimate of $480, noting “Apple’s momentum appears even more resistant to macroeconomic pressures than we previously realized.” Apple shares have “significant upside from current levels — even after recent outperformance,” he writes. Put more plainly, even though everything with an Apple logo is selling like hotcakes, the hunger for anything ‘i’ hasn’t been sated.
He expects Apple will announce selling 26.3 million iPhones during the December quarter, up from 26.8 million. For this quarter, Shope expects 16.92 million handsets and 13 million iPads with fourth quarter revenue of $28.71 billion, up from $27.37 billion.
Shope is just the latest Wall Street analyst to praise Apple’s increasing sales in the face of a tepid economy. Credit Suisse’s Kulbinder Garcha Tuesday announced a $500 price target for Apple, saying the company “is only at the cusp of unleashing its vast emerging market potential” worth as much as $68 billion in additional sales.
As for the fourth quarter, it’s all gravy for Apple. The iPhone maker has “positive momentum into the holidays with a major new iPhone product cycle along with share gains in PC’s with Macs and iPads,” exudes Barclays Capital’s Ben Reitzes.
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.
