Stefan Redlich for Seeking Alpha:
Apple’s fiscal Q3 2019 results featured a comfortable double beat with EPS beating by $0.08 and revenue by almost $400M.
In the past Apple’s narrative always has been centered on the iPhone, precisely iPhone unit sales and the average selling price (ASP). Although Apple stopped disclosing that information in FY2019, analysts still have not abandoned coming up with out-of-the-blue unit estimates for iPhone. For instance, in mid July Loop Capital estimated 182M iPhone unit sales in 2019 with ASP of $733 compared to a consensus of 185M at $754 ASP. However, renowned Wall Street firm JPMorgan (JPM) has made a real fool of itself when it trimmed Apple’s stock price target by a full $2 from $235 to $233 as it revised its iPhone shipment estimates slightly. Not only will they never be able to verify their assumptions, as Apple won’t disclose these figures, but why a $2 reduction in a stock price target which is way above the current stock price is newsworthy will never be answered.
MacDailyNews Take: Predicting a number that will never be revealed is oh-so-daring.
We estimate eleventy gazillion iPhone units sales in 2019 and umpteen bazillion in 2020. And we’ll be just as right as every other so-called analyst, too, since Apple no longer reports unit sales. — MacDailyNews, November 29, 2018
Don’t mistake that [Apple’s] reduced reliance on iPhone as a claim that iPhone is dead since that’s very far away from reality… By selling $26B worth of iPhones, Apple’s active installed base of iPhone reached another all-time high in each geographic segment, and with customer satisfaction at almost 100% and ongoing loyalty in the B2B world as well, there’s no reason to believe that installed base will shrink anytime soon.
MacDailyNews Take: Yup.
Apple will continue to sell tens of millions of iPhones each quarter for many, many years. — MacDailyNews, August 1, 2019