“Ananda Baruah with Brean Capital again pounds the table this morning for shares of Apple, reiterating a Buy rating and a $170 price target,” Tiernan Ray reports for Barron’s.
We believe that Jun Q iPhones are very likely tracking to 52M – 53M units, stronger than the Street projection of 48M – 50M and stronger than some of the recent estimate revisions of 50M – 51M. We believe that AAPL’s implied unit guidance was ~49M units, so this would signify material unit upside to guidance. Additionally, we continue to believe that the mix of iPhone 6 Plus remains materially stronger than the Street models, signaling potential ASP and GM upside as well. — Brean Capital analyst Ananda Baruah
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: What was that we wrote a year and a half ago, nine months before the launch of iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus? Oh, yeah:
When Apple finally extracts their collective head from their collective ass and ships iPhone models with larger screens, they’ll do more damage to slavish copier Samsung than all of their endless, plodding patent infringement cases combined.
We believe that Apple became infatuated with the fact that only they could produce small, thin smartphones with an efficient OS that could work with the small batteries that these compact iPhones housed. “Nobody else can do such things.” Meanwhile, battery-hogging Android leeches like Samsung slapped larger screens on their phones to hide the fact that they needed significantly larger batteries in order to run for even a few hours (Android phones are notorious for running out of charge).
Far too many otherwise intelligent consumers saw little or nothing of Apple’s considerable engineering superiority (the iPhone 5s is simply the best smartphone anyone has ever produced), these otherwise intelligent consumers only saw iPhone’s smaller screens. They didn’t see Android’s inefficiency or inferior ecosystem, they only saw phones with larger screens.
If we’ve heard from one person who went with an Android phone for a larger screen who in fact really wanted an iPhone – “I’d have gotten an iPhone if only they had a larger screen” – we’ve heard it from a thousand. These are top tier, cream-of-the-crop customers (i.e. Apple’s target demographic), not low information cheapskates. They want to be Apple customers and participate heavily in Apple’s ecosystems, but, for a few years now, Apple has been blowing these sales by failing to deliver the product these high value customers desired. It’s inexplicable; any downsides (fragmentation, inventory management, etc.) are vastly outweighed by the vast sales potential to those who should be Apple customers, but are now carrying a plastic piece of crap from Samsung.
Bottom line: Apple screwed the pooch on this one. Shit or get off the pot, Tim.