“Topeka Capital Markets’s Brian White today reiterates a Buy rating on Apple (AAPL) shares and a $1,111 price target, while warning that June sales data for a basket of Taiwanese suppliers to the company’s personal computers were ‘well below historical seasonal trends,'” Tiernan Ray reports for Barron’s.
“The ‘Apple Monitor,’ as White terms the basket of companies, showed a 13% month-over-moth decline in sales in June, far worse than the average 1% uptick in the month over the course of the last seven years,” Ray reports. “For the suppliers in that basket, about 50% to 60% of sales come from Apple products, White estimates.”
Ray reports, “White Avers the drop-off is probably a result of some pause in Apple product buying in advance of new products expected ‘in coming months.'”
Read more in the full article here.
Anal-ysts who always interpret this as some dire warning that Apple is headed for a slump rarely look to the fact that savvy buyers know updates are coming and hold off. Same reason Mac Pro sales will probably be moribund until next year (shoulda been THIS year!) as CEO Tim Cook has promised.
Promised a seriously great Mac Pro update that is.
Perhaps a new paradigm is emerging – the Chinese sneeze = world flu
China snooze maybe. Any sales projection based on economic information from China is pure bunk. All information released from China is propaganda. Don’t figure iPhone sales in China in forecasts. P&G is in the already in the dumps for believing phoney Chinese forecasts. Analysts are using the same figures in Apple projections.
Also, this today:
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/roubini-perfect-storm-unfolding-now-104907590.html
Ray reports, “White Avers the drop-off is probably a result of some pause in Apple product buying in advance of new products expected ‘in coming months.’”
This.
I’m OK with what Brian says. I’ve already got my parachute ready. Actually, his warning is just a heads-up and probably means very little to Apple’s quarter. As long as Apple beats its own expectations things will probably be fine. However, I still see no relationship between Apple’s earnings and current share price.
Doesn’t take into account that the drop-off may be entirely on the PC side due to the economy and the iPad.
If Apple has shown anything since the economic crash, it’s that it’s largely uneffected.