“Since Apple revealed its new iPhone lineup back in September, it has been clear that the company’s holiday-quarter performance would depend greatly upon supply and demand for the pricey iPhone X,” Adam Levine-Weinberg writes for The Motley Fool. “Apple saw massive pre-order demand for the iPhone X in late October. The supply concerns also began to fade after Apple provided strong guidance for the first quarter of fiscal 2018.”
“Recent iPhone X usage data indicates that supply is improving very rapidly — perhaps even faster than Apple had expected,” Levine-Weinberg writes. “As a result, Apple’s forecast from a few weeks ago may turn out to be overly conservative.”
“Apple’s first-quarter guidance calls for revenue of $84 billion-$87 billion, up from $78.4 billion a year ago. This projected sales growth is particularly impressive because there was an extra week in Apple’s first fiscal quarter last year,” Levine-Weinberg writes. “Analysts are underestimating the likelihood of an iPhone 6-like blowout, with revenue surging well past Apple’s forecast. If iPhone X supply continues to improve, Apple could easily surpass $90 billion of revenue this quarter, powering its earnings far beyond Wall Street’s expectations.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: If so — and we’re still trying to wrap our heads around this — Apple would have generated $1 billion per day for fiscal Q118 (calendar Q417, holiday quarter)!
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
I tried to read some tea leaves once, and the only thing I saw in my future was compost.
Oh, dear, are empirical data your only source of assessment? Eschew your demands for real data and embrace the hype. Will you feel the glow of unsubstantiated rumors? Can’t you accept the emotional appeal of speculation? Won’t you throw aside clear and convincing evidence for conjecture?
Apple news is ALL over the spectrum…good to bad. Nap resumes.
“Apple could easily surpass $90 billion of revenue this quarter, powering its earnings far beyond Wall Street’s expectations.”
Not likely in my opinion. Historically, since Luca Maestri became CFO, Apple has exceeded the bottom of range revenue Guidance by a Standard Deviation adjusted average of 5.44%.
Apple’s bottom of revenue range for the December quarter is $84 Billion. This strongly implies results of $88.569 Billion in revenue. Its a very long way from Apple’s implied results to Motley Fool’s $90 Billion guesstimate. So much so that Apple would have to exceed bottom of range revenue guidance by 7.14%, something has done only once (7.30%) in the last 9 quarters.
I would be very happy to see Apple exceed my revenue estimate of $87.902 Billion.
Disclosure: I hold 375 APR $195/$200 Call Spreads purchased at $1.00.
If you list all the times that Apple has failed to match it’s guidance and then compile a second list of the number of times that analysts have been wrong about Apple, you will be looking at one blank page and a big pile of closely typed pages next to it.
There are only 86,400 seconds in a day. So a billion dollars a day is $11,574 which is roughly the retail price of 10 iPhones X per second. Clearly not all sales are for the X, nor are all sales for the phone, but they are in ballpark of having to manufacture a staggering 10 phones per second, every second of every day. Unbelievable numbers.
Ten iPhone Xs sold per second.
31,000,000 seconds per year.
$1,000 per iPhone X.
That’s $310,000,000,000 per year.
Unbelievable? You bet.
“Unbelievable?”
As calculated, yes, it is. However, historically each year’s new iPhone accounts for ~75% of total iPhones sold through that fiscal year. If we discount that percentage, because of the presence of iPhone 8, to 45% iPhone X then iPhone X will sell ~110 Million units during FY2018, generating ~$110 Billion. I personally think that number is low.
Please approve me