“How well Wall Street receives Apple’s quarterly earnings these days depends almost entirely on the iPhone,” Philip Elmer-DeWitt reports for Fortune. “In a good quarter — like fiscal Q1 2012, when Apple sold 35 million iPhones — the device will account for nearly 60% of the company’s total revenue. In a bad quarter — like Q3, when the 16.2 million units Apple sold accounted for 46% of its revenue — the iPhone will drag the company and its stock price down with it.”

P.E.D. reports, “Estimating iPhone sales for Q4 2012 — the quarter that ended Sept. 29 — is particularly tricky. For the first 10 weeks, unit sales were depressed by customers holding out for the new phone they kept reading about. For the last two weeks, the company sold iPhone 5s as fast as it could make them. How fast that was, and how slow sales were before the iPhone 5′s release, is anybody’s guess.”

“The low estimate this quarter, 21 million, was submitted by an independent — Shafiq Shamji of the Braeburn Group,” P.E.D. reports. “And before he lowered his forecast to 26.5 million on Monday, William Blair’s Anil Doradla was sitting on a Street-and-independent high estimate of 33 million. The average among both groups is 26.3, and the median is 27 million.”

Read more in the full article here.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader "Dan K." for the heads up.]

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