Today at 2PM Pacific/5PM Eastern, Apple will announces its 2013 first quarter earnings. Cult of Mac will, of course, be covering it live, but here’s a very brief primer of what to expect.
I’ve been writing for Cult of Mac for almost three years now, and in that time I’ve covered some pretty farfetched Apple rumors. But the latest from Forbes comes with a whole new level of crazy.
“Some Wall Street sources close to some Apple executives” say the Cupertino company could be searching for a replacement for Tim Cook, it claims, before suggesting Cook could turn Apple into another Hewlett-Packard or JC Penney and insisting “Apple’s shine has faded” since the passing of Steve Jobs.
Earlier today, we reported that the Wall Street consensus was that Apple’s profit in this last quarter probably shrank for the first time in a decade, and that results will be even more dire next quarter, with iPhone sales units being extremely low.
But Wall Street’s pessimism in regards to Apple is, as usual, nuts. For Apple to perform as low as Wall Street thinks it will next quarter, Apple would have to show zero growth in the iPhone market compared to the same spring quarter a year ago. This would rank it as one of the smartphone industry’s worst disasters ever. Which is crazy, because Apple’s selling more iPhones than ever.
Samsung has today announced its estimated earnings for Q1 2013, and it looks like the Korean electronics giant is set for another record quarter, exceeding Wall Street expectations. The company has forecast a 53% rise in profit to 8.7 trillion won ($7.7 billion) for the three-month period between January and March, driven by smartphone sales.
The consensus on Wall Street seems to be unanimous: for the first time in decade, Apple will report lower income this quarter than it did the year before. But don’t panic: even Wall Street doesn’t think Apple’s era of profitability and innovation is at an end.
Wall Street has spent most of the last six months hyperventilating about the future of Apple, chomping at their fingernails and openly wondering if Apple is taking too long to innovate in the post-Jobs era.
Over at the Apple Gazette, Robin Parrish has put together a simple graphic, showing Apple’s historic product pillars. Essentially, if you add it all up, the average time between major product pillars for Apple is three years and ten months.
Rumors are swirling that Apple, a company which has been having a rocky time on Wall Street lately despite reporting their most profitable quarter ever, might announce a decision to issue a stock split tomorrow at their next shareholder meeting, to be held tomorrow.
Yesterday, there was a bit of a hub-bub about Apple’s enormous $137 billion cash hoard, after David Einhorn, the head of Greenlight Capital, sued Apple over a plan to discard preferred stock and pressed Apple to give a significant chunk of the cash hoard directly to investors. It was such a big deal that Apple felt as if it were forced to respond.
Is there a good reason for Apple to be keeping $137 billion in the bank? Yup, and if you want to know why, all you have to do is look at Dell.
Apple has been treading lightly with Wall Street in recent months. The company’s stock has continued to nosedive despite reporting record earnings for the last quarter. Many investors have been urging Apple to do something with its $137 billion cash hoard. Shareholders want a return on their investments.
Greenlight Capital, a prominent and influential Apple investor, has called Apple out for its proposal to eliminate preferred stock. Apple started paying a quarterly dividend of $2.65 per share last year, but investors want something more substantial. Greenlight Capital’s David Einhorn believes that “preferred shares would be a way to reward investors without putting the company at risk.”
Apple has officially responded with a press release:
It’s hard to forget the day that Apple surpassed Exxon Mobil to become the most valuable publicly traded company in the world. But a lot has happened to Apple’s stock since August of 2011. AAPL has ridden a chaotic roller coaster on the stock market. After announcing a record holiday quarter Wednesday with $54.5 billion in revenue and $13.1 billion in profits, AAPL dropped more than 10%. That’s more than $50 billion in market cap gone in a day. Poof.
Apple’s stock isn’t doing so hot, and after over a year in second place, today marks the day that Exxon Mobil dethroned Apple on Wall Street.
And that’s ok. This doesn’t mean that the company is doomed.
Apple stock opened at $457.70 this morning, down more than 10%, following its financial results on Wednesday. The Cupertino company announced $13.1 billion profit for the first quarter of 2013, a slight increase over the $13.06 billion it posted for the first quarter of 2012. But despite that increase, it’s clear Apple’s phenomenal growth has hit a stumbling block.
Apple will announce its quarterly earnings for the 2012 holiday season tomorrow, and investors are nervous. The company’s stock has been on quite the roller coaster ride since its $700 high back in September 2012. AAPL is now trading right around $500, which is the lowest it has been in more than six months.
Recent reports have said that demand for products like the iPhone is faltering. That’s why it may come as a surprise that Wall Street expects Apple to have its best earnings report ever tomorrow. So is it a good time to sell AAPL? Now may actually be the best time to buy.
On the evening of Apple’s latest earnings call, David Miller, a 40 year old trader at Rochdale Securities LLC, had a great idea. Apple stock price always goes up after an earnings call, right? So what he would do is buy 1.6 million shares of Apple stock worth over $1 billion, then “flip” them the next morning when the stocks rose, pocketing a personal profit of millions of dollars.
A fine plan, don’t you think? There was only one problem: Apple stock actually went down the morning after the latest earnings call. Now Miller is facing 20 years in federal prison for wire fraud, and his trading company might be going under.
You might have heard that Apple is set to unveil a new iPhone tomorrow. Wall Street certainly has, and analysts have been predicting how many units Apple will sell out of the gate. Anticipation for the iPhone 5 is ridiculously high, and Apple is expected to shatter the records it set with the 4S last year.
While estimates vary, the general consensus is that Apple will sell between 8-10 million iPhone 5s in September, which would be huge for Apple’s last fiscal 2012 quarter.
Before his tragic and untimely death last October, Steve Jobs’s chronic health issues were such a constant concern for investors that they arguably kept the stock price of the company artificially low for years, as Wall Street worried that the company would tank without its charismatic leader at the helm.
Obviously, that hasn’t happened. In fact, since Jobs’s death, Apple’s share price has soared to new highs. As sad as it is to say, in some ways, Jobs’s death finally liberated the stock from the hyperbolic threat of his death, and allowed investors to finally appraise the company as it actually is: the best on Earth, even without Steve, because he made it that way.
But Wall Street never learns. Since Google CEO Larry Page called in sick to last week’s annual meeting, investors are panicking.
In the last two weeks, Apple’s share price has plummeted over $60 from its all-time high ahead of reports suggesting that iPhone growth was stalling at domestic carriers. Today, though, Apple has again hurtled past the $600 barrier in after hours trading after Cupertino announced yet another record breaking quarter.
Looks like we can look forward to another three months of stock growth, until the next silly pre-earnings call investor scare.
[via]
Apple CEO Tim Cook will announce the company’s second-quarter earnings on April 24, and according to one analyst, it will report sales of 33 million iPhone, 12 million iPads, and 4.3 million Macs. Sounds like another great quarter, but those predictions are, on the whole, a little less than Wall Street is anticipating.
Conventional wisdom on Wall Street has it that eventually (and possibly as soon as the end of this year) Apple’s stock price will reach over $1000 a share, largely fueled by the iPhone. But one Wall Street analyst isn’t nearly so optimistic. In fact, BTIG Research analyst Walter Piecyck is downgrading his recommendation on Apple stock from “Buy” to “Neutral…” and his reasons actually make a lot of sense.
Apple stock just keeps going up, up, up… except when some computer goes bananas, starts screaming “SELL SELL SELL” and all of Wall Street panics. Which is pretty much what happened earlier today, when Apple stock lost 9% of its value in just a blink of an eye.
For the first time ever, Apple stock briefly touched, then dropped below, the price of $600 per share. Making that milestone even more impressive is the fact that AAPL just reached $500 per share for the first time a month ago.
Mark my words, Woz is right: Apple’s going to reach $1000 per share become the world’s first trillion dollar company.
[via MacRumors]
Yup, it’s finally happened: buoyed by the imminent launch of the iPad 3, Apple (AAPL) stock has just hit a historic high of over $500.00 a share, and now is worth a $466.29 Billion, over $70 billion more than the world’s second most valuable company, Exxon Mobil.
That’s amazing, but there’s still plenty of room to grow, believe it or not. In fact, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster believes that Apple could go as high as $1000 per share, at which point, every man, woman and child on this Earth will be an Apple employee, grown to order in special chemical vats in Brazil and China, but designed, as ever, in Cupertino, California.
Once again, Apple has found itself the most valuable company on Earth, attaining a market capitalization of about $456 billion today, beating ExxonMobil’s market cap of just $402 Billion. Yawn.
More interesting, however, is that Apple’s combined value is more than Google and Microsoft put together, who are worth $198.9 billion and $256.7 billion, respectively.
As we watch Apple race to be the world’s first trillion dollar company, I wonder what we’ll all be measuring its value against next. Silicon Valley? The United States? The Moon? The secret to immortality?
If you were concerned that Apple was all out of surprises, Tuesday put that all to rest. The Cupertino, Calif. tech giant surpassed Wall Street expectations and the amateurs, making analysts fall over themselves describing Apple’s first quarter of 2012 results as “historic.”
What sort of numbers should Apple report later today for the first quarter of 2012? The third quarter surprised all analysts as Apple announced a rare under-performing quarter due to the late introduction of the iPhone 4S. Stung by that rebuke, professional analysts are offering conservative projections for the first quarter of 2012. This sets up a classic pros versus independents cliffhanger.
Good news for Apple shareholders: stock reached an all-time high during mid-day trading today, peaking at $427.75 per share. The last record was set in October of 2011 at $426.70 per share. Despite some slightly tumultuous times on Wall Street after Apple failed to meet analyst expectations with its fourth-quarter earnings report, Apple stock has continued to climb to new heights year after year. The company will announce its earnings from the first-quarter of 2012 (or the 2011 holiday season) on Tuesday, January 24th. Apple also released its proxy statement for 2012 to investors this afternoon, in which it is revealed that CEO Time Cook received a total of $376,180,000 in compensation for 2011.