“Apple’s stunning iPhone sales in the December quarter took almost everyone by surprise, except for KGI analyst Ming-Chi Kuo,” Mark Hibben writes for Seeking Alpha. “His prediction of 73 million iPhone unit sales seemed outlandish at the time, but even this number was slightly below the reality of 74.47 million.”
“Mr. Kuo apparently has some very reliable contacts in the Apple supply chain. His numbers for iPhone, iPad and Mac unit shipments were about as close as it gets: iPhone: -1.98%; iPad: -0.07%, Mac: 6.28%,” Hibben writes. “Mr. Kuo has been making other outlandish predictions about Apple of late. Perhaps we need to pay attention.”
“I’ve pointed out that Apple has pioneered a fabless, custom-designed system on chip (SOC) business model. I’ve asserted that this is part of a semiconductor manufacturing paradigm shift away from commodity processor manufacturing as exemplified by Intel,” Hibben writes. “Mr. Kuo has also picked up this theme of the paradigm shift in making a prediction that Apple could shift Macs to custom ARM processors in 2016, which has been greeted with some understandable skepticism… Given Kuo’s recent accuracy, we should all give the prediction a little more credence.”
“I believe the arrival of the new higher performance SOCs will help restore iPad sales,” Hibben writes. “Despite numerous rumors of a 12-inch iPad Air Plus, Cook’s comments at the conference call seemed to indicate that there was nothing new on the iPad horizon that would boost sales in the next couple of quarters. Even if we have to wait until next Fall for a new iPad, I believe it will benefit considerably from the new process technology.”
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