Low Q4 Earnings Expected for Apple Due to iPad mini Leaks
Apple just unveiled the iPad mini, the iPad 4th gen, a 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display, and redesigned iMacs. But the dust hasn’t settled just yet, as the world awaits their fourth quarter earnings call, scheduled for later today after the market closes.
Analysts are expecting Apple to report low earnings because consumers were bombarded with hoards of iDevice launch rumors all year, causing many to hold off on buying whatever iDevices were available at the time. Another reason why earnings may be low this quarter is that the supply for the iPhone 5 has been hampered, though demand hasn’t subsided.
“Expectations have been reset,” said Shaw Wu, an analyst with Sterne Agee in San Francisco. “A lot of people are expecting a miss. The stock has corrected. Right now, the big question is not as much about demand, but did they build enough? It’s a high-class problem. A lot of companies build too many products and nobody wants to buy them. Apple has the opposite problem — they don’t build enough to meet demand.”
Wu added that, though a lot of people criticized Apple’s products, people are still buying, and the demand for these devices just keeps growing exponentially.
Apple is expected to post $36.6 billion revenue, and at least $25 million in iPhone sales. But for the fiscal year 2012, Apple is expected to report earnings of $44.28 a share on revenue of $156.3 billion. The high expectations is attributed to the fact that the holidays will likely contribute significantly to iDevice sales.
Though analysts are expecting to see high numbers of iPhone 5 sales, iPhone 4 and 4S are still in high demand.
“The company activated 4.7 million iPhones, which is up 27% q/q. About 1.3 million of those activations appear to be iPhone 5’s, suggesting that the US received close to half of the initial 5 million allocation of iPhone 5’s from Apple, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster said in a research note. “While we remain comfortable with our 25m iPhone estimate, we note that early activation numbers from AT&T and Verizon suggest potentially stronger sales of non-iPhone 5s than we previously expected.”
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