(Image courtesy of AppleInsider)
Following a whopper of a quarter — particularly for the iPhone and the iPad — analysts are now more bullish on Apple than ever before.
Apple revealed on Tuesday that its profits increased by nearly 90 percent in the second quarter of 2010, racking up $3.07 billion for the company’s coffers. In the wake of Apple’s best non-holiday quarter ever, analysts are on fire with bullish praise for the company, according to AppleInsider.
The most prominent analysts on Wall Street are now predicting that Apple’s stock may go well beyond the $300 per share previously estimated, with RBC Capital Markets analyst Mike Abramsky increasing his 12-month price target for the company to $350 per share. “After the big run, what’s next?” Abramsky asks in a note to investors. “The big run.”
Thanks to surprising international momentum, Abramsky calls Apple’s iPhone sales “stunning,” with total revenue coming in at $5.4 billion, up 127 percent year-over-year. Now the analyst is setting his sights on Apple’s next “cash machine,” the iPad.
Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster is only slightly less bullish, forecasting Apple’s stock to hit $323 in the next 12 months on the heels of a new iPhone release expected in June. Munster notes that his earlier estimate of 7.5 million iPhones sold in the March quarter was more aggressive than many others on Wall Street, but Apple managed to exceed that with 8.75 million units sold in the quarter.
“Someone needs to explain handset seasonality to Apple,” jokes analyst Yair Reiner with Oppenheimer. “March units should be weaker than the seasonably strong December quarter — preferably by a good 20-25 percent. March units should never be flat and never ever grow. Break this rule and you’ll leave analysts wondering whether a secular shift is afoot to a radically redefined notion of mobile connectivity.”
Across the board, analysts have raised their expectations for Apple’s stock in the wake of Tuesday’s second quarter results, with J.P. Morgan analyst Mark Moskowitz stating that Apple’s revenue and earnings growth is expected to stay well above 20 percent over the next few years.
All great news for Apple and their investors — but probably not so much for the competition.
Apple reported sales of $13.5 billion and profits of $3.07 billion during its fiscal second quarter, thanks to strong gains in Mac and iPhone sales. Both revenue and profit figures represent a company record for a non-holiday quarter.
(Image courtesy of AppleInsider)
Analysts are already hard at work predicting that Apple’s February, 2010 Mac sales will be “blockbuster” — particularly when compared to early 2009.
Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster is telling investors that soft Mac sales in February, 2009 will help lift Apple’s sales in the same month this year, according to AppleInsider.
“We expect the strong (year-over-year) growth in NPD data that we saw in (January) to continue in the month of (February),” Munster writes in a note to investors on Monday morning. “We believe this presents a buying opportunity ahead of NPD data for the month of February on 3/15.”
As Munster notes, Mac sales in January, 2009 were down six percent from the year prior. But that helped lift the January, 2010 sales figures with a growth of 36 percent year over year, and “implied a range of 2.6 million to 2.8 million Mac sales in the first quarter of calendar 2010.”
The analyst anticipates the same kind of growth for last month’s sales when the numbers are released on March 15. “If Apple sells 2.8 million Macs in the first quarter of 2010,” AppleInsider notes, “it would represent a 26 percent increase over the start of 2009. In all, the first half of 2009 was down one percent year-over-year.”
AppleInsider also notes that while Mac sales were sluggish in the first half of last year, Apple saw record growth in the second half of the year — including a boffo holiday quarter where the company sold a record 3.36 million Macs, which lifted its profits to $3.38 billion.
Back in January, Munster called 2010 the “Year of the Mac” and has been quite bullish on Apple stock for this year.
