“Has Apple (AAPL) hit rock bottom? Oppenheimer’s Yair Reiner thinks maybe it has. This morning, Reiner repeated his Outperform rating on the stock, though he cut his price target to $145 from a no longer realistic $213. He’s also trimmed estimates, and now sees FY Q4 at $1.11, down from $1.17, with ‘09 down to $5.64, from $6.29,” Eric Savitz reports for Barron’s

“That said, he makes a pretty strong case for the stock, noting that the shares now offer a 10% free cash flow yield, a strong brand in a sustainable industry and a strong balance sheet, with $23 billion in cash and no debt. ‘To put Apple’s current valuation in perspective, on a trailing cash flow basis, it’s trading in line with the historic trough multiples of HPQ and DELL,’ he writes. ‘You have to look back to the darkest days of 2001 – pre-iPod – to find Apple’s multiple this beleaguered,’” Savitz reports,

MacDailyNews Take: Uh, Reiner didn’t get the memo: Due to massive quota overfulfillment, “beleaguered” and “Apple” are never to appear in the same sentence ever again, regardless of context.

Savitz continues, “Reiner concedes that if the global economy ‘plunges into a hall of horrors’ – aren’t we already there? – then no one will be immune. But he says Apple should still keep growing and outperforming, given a secular shift to Macs from Windows, the iPhone’s “incursion” into the handset market and ‘a global Halo 2.0 effect that’s bringing iPhone users into the Mac fold.’”

Full article here.