As analysts attempt to predict Wednesday’s first quarter revenue report from Apple, one expert trimmed his expectation for both the December quarter and full fiscal year.
Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi told clients Monday he predicts Apple will report $9.3 billion for the December quarter, off slightly from the $9.76 billion Wall Street consensus.
He said data “may not be encouraging, given the lack of new products at MacWorld and Apple’s refusal to cut prices” along with CEO Steve Jobs’ recent health status downgrade.
The analyst foresees Apple reporting December sales of 2.57 million Macs, 3.5 million iPhones and 18.1 million iPods. Both desktop and notebook sales will fall during the quarter with notebooks slipping 30 percent and desktops dropping 15 percent compared to 2007.
Although revenue will be below consensus, the analyst expects Apple will report a gross margin of 33.5 percent as the Silicon Valley company was helped by falling memory prices.
Sacconaghi’s note to investors expected Apple will provide guidance of between $7 billion and $7.5 billion for the March quarter, slightly below the $7.7 billion consensus. For the year, the analyst predicted Apple will sell 10.3 million Macs, 45.4 million iPods and 18.2 million iPhones.
The Bernstein analyst hinges his prediction on Apple releasing an $800 MacBook or $950 iMac, a move that could greatly widen the market during the poor economy.
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.
