What sort of impact did Verizon have on iPhone 4 sales? Very little, according to one analyst. Verizon iPhone sales have been “solid, but not spectacular” during the March second quarter, BMO Capital Market’s Keith Bachman told investors Friday morning.
Quarterly iPhone sales should reach 16 million units with Verizon adding 1.5 million to 2 million handsets, Bachman adds. The numbers assume the usual 10 percent slide from the year’s first financial quarter, ended December 31. As a result, there likely won’t be a “material upside” for this quarter, the analyst writes.
While Bachman set a $410 price target, another analyst earlier set the bar higher at $500 per share, forecasting Apple could control the tablet market for the next four years.
Credit Suisse analyst Kulbinder Garcha told investors Thursday Apple could control a market worth $120 billion by 2012.
“This means that iPad should become a $34 billion business by” fiscal 2012, Garcha writes. “Further, our proprietary bill of materials (BOM) analysis implies that gross margins for this business will expand to 35% [by the end of fiscal 2011] from around the 27% levels seen in fiscal 2010.”
Clearly, talk that supply problems may hurt Apple sales is drowned-out by shouts of continued growth. But how long can Apple shares rise before reaching a natural plateau?
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.
