“The cheapest Apple Inc. shares in 12 years are encouraging some of the world’s biggest investors to bet that the stock will rebound after losing 33 percent of its value on concern about slowing profit growth,” Lu Wang and Leslie Picker report for Bloomberg News.
“The world’s largest company by market value is trading at a 29 percent discount to the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index, near the widest gap since December 2000, data compiled by Bloomberg show,” Wang and Picker report. “While analysts have cut price targets by 21 percent since the stock peaked in September, the shares would rise 41 percent to $661 if investors valued the stock at the price-earnings ratio of the S&P 500, the data show.”
Wang and Picker report, “Apple has lost more than $200 billion in market value as increased competition and a lack of breakthrough products threaten to reduce profit margins. The pessimism is exaggerated because the company still dominates the smartphone and tablet markets and has enough cash to return to shareholders, according to Gamco Investors Inc., Thornburg Investment Management Inc. and Brown Advisory. Their funds bought Apple shares as they slumped from their record high in September.”
Read more in the full article here.
Whaddaya know… December 2000 is when I started buying.
The ball has been in Cook’s side of the court for a couple years now. Breakthrough products would signal that Apple has growth acceleration potential. A bolder global retail strategy would show that Apple is truly meeting the competition in serving global markets.
As it is, Wall Street has their eyes focused primarily on the Chinese market, where Apple progress has been no greater than any other manufacturer. Motley Fool reports,
“According to the research from Informa Telecoms & Media, one-third of all Android devices sold during 2012 were sold in China. Even more staggering, two-thirds of all ‘handsets sold in China’ are powered by the Android OS.”
Apple is not going to win the long game if it is giving 2/3 of smart phone handset sales to Google in the largest, fastest-growing market on the planet.
Mike, Mike, Mike, the majority of Android phones in China are not registered with Google so technically they aren’t Android.
To top that off, most of these fake Android phones sold in China are feature phones not Smart phones.
Apple doesn’t make feature phones. No money in that garbage.
Now, aren’t you an embarrassed little troll, eh Mikey?
Blah, blah, blah….
Hey C1, I got into AAPL in November 2000..
What a long strange trip it’s been.
( 5,000%!)