“Gene Munster, one of Wall Street’s most respected and notable analysts who covers Apple Inc., left his position at Piper Jaffray to start a venture capital firm that focuses on virtual reality and artificial intelligence,” Jayson Derrick reports for Benzinga.
“Munster’s new firm, Loup Ventures, released on Tuesday a preview of Apple’s December 2016 ending quarterly results, to be reported on January 31,” Derrick reports. “The analyst turned fund manager reaffirmed his prior view that he remains positive on Apple’s story and expects the company to advance its lead in artificial intelligence-enabled devices with its next iPhone device, which will likely be named the iPhone X.”
“For the December 2016 ending quarter, Munster now expects Apple’s iPhone shipments to grow by 4 percent year-over-year to 78 million units,” Derrick reports. “He continued that Apple’s December quarter ending guidance didn’t factor in the iPhone reaching equilibrium and estimates at that time called for Apple to ship 77 million iPhone units.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple’s all-time iPhone unit sales record was set during 2015’s holiday quarter (Apple’s fiscal Q116) at 74.779 million units.
what else is new?
humans be loving them some iPhones.
Gosh is it that time already? Doesn’t time fly?
We must be coming up to an Apple financial report and the analysts therefore need to switch from ‘Apple is doomed” mode into the “iPhone sales are surprisingly strong” mode so that they can set up impossibly high expectations for Apple and then after Apple announces the actual sales numbers, the analysts will be able to claim that the sales numbers were a fail because they were below analyst’s expectations, even if they exceeded Apple’s guidance and turned out to be massively better than the analysts had been predicting for the entire quarter with the exception of the final two or three weeks.
Just as the signs of spring often come suddenly, the signs of a forthcoming Apple financial announcement also appear just as quickly. It seems like only last week that we were being told that iPhone production was being cut right back, but this week things are suddenly looking great.
If it were a movie it’d be “Apple Corp. & The Predictable Analyst Cycle Of Up Then Down Doom.” Self-serving as always.
I predict Munster’s predictions will be as bad as they usually are.