“According to a new report [from Intermedia], small and medium sized businesses prefer Apple devices to all others,” Tim Parker writes for Benzinga. “The margin between Apple and everybody else is huge… About 190,000 iPhones and iPads were activated on its network during the first 10 months of 2013. The second most popular, Samsung, only had 29,000 activations.”
“In other news, a November study by research firm Changewire found of all the people who reported being in the market for a tablet, 72 percent said they would only consider an iPad. That’s up from 55 percent reported during the firm’s August survey,” Parker writes. “Samsung dropped 13 percent to only nine percent and Google’s nexus fell three percent to nine percent.”
“Charlie Wolf, of Needham & Co. said that market share matters ‘very little’ because the Apple ecosystem is so vast that each customer will purchase more than just the device. This will include apps, music, and other hardware devices. Google’s Android devices hold a larger market share but the margins are lower and the ecosystem isn’t as developed,” Parker writes. “‘Indeed, there appears to be no correlation between market share and the viability of a platform. In surveying the variables that determine the viability of a platform, we would argue that the breadth and depth of the platform’s application library and ecosystem play a far more important role than does market share,’ Wolf said.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Chris Renaldi” for the heads up.]
as long as Apple cant grow , Apple is doomed.
There are always limits to growth. It is possible to thrive without steady growth. As long as Apple maintains a substantial and loyal customer base and serves them well, everything will be fine. Products will sell, profits will flow, R&D will continue to refine existing product lines and seek new opportunities, and everyone but the greedy, churning, Wall Street money grubbers will be happy.
Mel —
You missed the implicit /sarcasm tag.
It all comes down to the difference between an iPhone and a Feature phone, a tablet and an iPad, a malware infested Android store and iTunes and last but not least, Windows and OS X.
This is an odd time of year. Portfolio managers of mutual funds and hedge funds are performing “window dressing” e.g., buying and selling stocks to make their portfolios appear to look better by the end of the year, when mutual funds have to report their various holdings.
As a result, a more modestly growing stock this year (such as Apple) might get sold, and shares of a hot performer like Netflix could be bought in their place. That has little to do with the underlying fundamentals of a stock, but rather to make the portfolio manager appear to look competent. Add to that institutional investors might be selling for tax purposes, and you have a result that runs counter to the fundamentals of a given stock holding.
If you are a long-term investor, this is all the more reason not to obsess this time of year. In the short run, the market is a voting machine, as Warren Buffett has observed. But in the long run, over the course of years, not days or one day, a stock’s price will more closely correlate with this underlying valuation – its earnings and cash flow generation.
Of interest is something I read today: tracking the growth of a company’s stock dividends, if a company like Apple (which it does) pays dividends with its stock. Studies have shown that of the companies that issue dividends, if a company’s dividends increase over time, it correlates closely with how the company itself is growing. While Apple is pretty new to the dividend paying game, if Apple continues to increase its stock dividends, and consistently pays a dividend, there is a very strong correlation that Apple will continue to grow, and over the long term, the company’s stock price will continue to increase.
Long story short: if you are a patient, long term investor, tune out all the noise and crap. Sit back and watch your investments grow. Rinse and repeat.
Season’s greetings.
I’m clueless as to why all the good news about Apple, and they’re near monopoly (in the US at least) on mobile devices, is unable to allow it to sustain a rally. What are now? 4% down from their recent intra-day high? Is it really the case that until Apple releases the next big thing, we’re not going to see any more respect? I’m a long-term investor, so I don’t really care that much about these recent highs and lows, but I sure would like to understand where the movement comes from, one way or the other.
Market movement comes from market manipulators. Carl Icahn for instance. The market is not value based. Expect the market to behave erratically. You will not be disappointed.
Clueless? All the clues are posted here week after week.
It’s profit-hungry Wall Street predators using FUD to devalue the stock, then letting it rally, before trying to devalue it again, purely to make money in the short-term on the shares.
It’s what hedge-fund traders do.
It’s not voodoo.
It’s good to be long-term with aapl. Keeping that long term view of aapl, what is hard to understand is the constant complaints on this site about manipulation of its stock price. If you look at the price of aapl over the last 10 years you see very few blips up and down in an otherwise very steady upward trend. See here for example: http://investing.money.msn.com/investments/charts?symbol=AAPL#{“zRange”:”9″,”startDate”:”2003-12-31″,”endDate”:”2013-12-12″,”chartStyle”:”mountain”,”chartCursor”:”1″,”scaleType”:”0″,”yaxisAlign”:”right”,”mode”:”pan”}