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.”
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.
2 responses to “The iPhone 4S Could Drive $30B Quarter for Apple [Analyst]”
“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.”
The 4S release will have absolutely no fiscal impact on Q4 earnings. The phone didn’t go on sale until October 7, and it wasn’t released until today. Thus, absolutely zero income from the 4S will be seen in last quarter’s results. It will only start impacting the current fiscal quarter (Q1FY2012) and subsequent quarters.
Analysts are idiots. You need to stop quoting them.