“Pacific Crest analyst Andy Hargreaves said Monday that despite component-price increases, Apple Inc. still should be able to grow its gross margins by almost 5% for its 2007 fiscal year,” Rex Crum reports for MarketWatch.
Crum reports, “Hargreaves said that [despite expected increases in the costs of items such as flash memory and LCD panels], gains Apple has made due to lower component prices earlier this year, as well as being at the early stage of a new product cycle, should help the company’s margins improve from a year ago.”
Full article here.
Don’t forget Steve made deals /investments with the memory manufacturers last year and I’m sure he has prices locked-in at last year prices.
That MarketWatch website renders real proper in Safari.
(sarcasm and poor English intended)
No price estimate given though. Is he a real analyst?
Dear cynic:
“That MarketWatch website renders real proper in Safari.”
I dont see no difference in two other browsers. Could it be the site?
Or is my eyes going bad? Didnt try IE, though.
I used to work as a microelectronics package engineer. These fluctuations in prices are temporary. Nobody at Apple needs to lose sleep over this. There was one year that Tantalum bypass capacitors where at a premium ( as tech watchers may remember this is famous component that gave Asus a black eye). This too shall pass.
One year all memory was pricey. This happened because there was a fire at the only chemical plant that made the encapsulant plastic used for all RAM. That fire drove up the prices of all 128MB and 256MB memory modules. Now 1GB will cost you less than the market price of 256MB in 1995.
Just my $0.02