Anaylst expects Apple to beat Wall Street’s March quarter expectations

19 years ago

“Apple’s second quarter Mac and iPod sales are likely to come in just above Wall Street’s expectations, helping to drive slight upside to overall consensus revenue and per-share earnings estimates, according one investment research firm,” Slash Lane reports for AppleInsider.

“Following Apple’s announcement earlier this month that it had sold its 100 millionth iPod, PiperJaffray analyst Gene Munster performed product sell-through checks with 20 Apple resellers and found that 85 percent were expecting a slight quarter-to-quarter decline in Mac sales of about 5 to 10 percent,” Lane reports.

“‘The Street is expecting Mac units to fall 10 percent quarter-to-quarter, so we may see slight upside to Street expectations of 1.45m Macs,’ the analyst told clients in a research note Monday. ‘The other 15 percent of Mac resellers expect Mac units to be flat quarter-to-quarter,'” Lane reports.

“Apple TV, which did not ship until March 20th — 10 days before quarter’s end — is not expected to have a material impact on the quarter. However, Munster said his checks indicate that Apple did manage to ship each and every one of its pre-orders for the $299 streaming media device,” Lane reports.

“In pushing Apple TV to market, Apple is leveraging its iTunes user base of approximately 110 million users. Munster believes that addressable market will expand as the iTunes user base grows, and as more video content is added to the store. He’s currently modeling for sales of 2 million Apple TV units through calendar year 2007, where every additional 500,000 units will add 2 cents to the company’s earnings,” Lane reports.

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MacDailyNews Note: Analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial estimate Apple (AAPL) to earn 64 cents a share on $5.17 billion in revenue for its Q2 07 quarter. Apple previously forecast a profit of between 54- to 56-cents per share, and revenue of $4.8 to $4.9 billion. Apple Q2 06 earnings info (ended 4/1/06): revenue of $4.36 billion, net quarterly profit of $410 million, 1.112 million Macs, 8.526 million iPods.