“Apple stock has been one of the great Wall Street darlings over the last few years. Despite the companies ‘blockbuster’ first quarter, investors would be wise to pay attention to a few trends. First, revenue declined from Q1 at the fastest pace in three years,” Matt Marcewicz writes for Forbes.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple’s fiscal Q1 (holiday 2011) comprised 14 weeks. Apple’s fiscal Q2 was 13 weeks.
Marcewicz writes, “It is also important to note that revenue was guided down for Q3. In the last decade, Apple has grown revenue sequentially in every Q3 except 2008.”
MacDailyNews Take: Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer already explained this during Apple’s Q212 Conference Call. Here’s what he said regarding Q312 guidance, verbatim:
The manufacturing ramps for the iPhone 4S and the new iPad were extremely successful for us. They yielded the highest launch supply and the fastest country rollouts for these product families that we’ve ever had. As a result, we were able to fulfill demand in the March quarter rather than the June quarter this year, and that generated revenue of over $39 billion. Therefore, unlike last year, we expect a sequential decline in revenue this year. I’d highlight 5 primary factors that have influenced our thinking:
The first, the iPhone channel inventory changes. As I discussed in my prepared remarks, we increased our iPhone channel inventory by about 2.6 million units in the March quarter this year, and we exited within our target inventory range of about 4 to 6 weeks. Last year, we continued to add new countries into the June quarter, and we built an additional 700,000 units of iPhone channel inventory last year in the June quarter. So the combination of these channel builds in the March quarter of this year and the June quarter of last year will impact the sequential comparisons from this year to last.
The second factor: fabulous iPhone 4S execution. As we told you in January, we exited December with significant iPhone 4S backlog, which led to a huge January. We launched China and 20 other countries also in January, which completed the rollout of the iPhone 4S into all the countries where iPhone is currently shipping. And as I said before, we exited the quarter within a supply and demand balance.
The third factor: our new iPad execution was also fabulous. We had an incredible start with the new iPad. We launched with significant supply, leading to sales of 3 million units in the first couple of days, which was the — and also the fastest country rollout ever. We therefore were able to satisfy much more of the demand for the new iPad in the March quarter this year compared to the iPad 2 in the March quarter of last year. This resulted in a shift of iPad volume into March this year versus last, and it will also affect the sequential compares this year to the last.
Fourth, we decreased the entry price of the entry iPad to $399.
And finally, the last factor to point out, the U.S. dollar has strengthened recently, and we expect this to have an impact on the sequential compare, especially versus last year when the dollar weakened against most currencies over the comparable time periods.
Marcewicz scribbles some more stuff, but he’s obviously an ill-prepared bullshitter and the rest of his pap is just as ill-informed, so we’ll spare you any more of Mr. Short’s FUD-fest.
Full article – Think Before You Click™ – here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Pocketrash ” for the heads up.]