Apple earnings rumors fly
As Apple prepares to announce its third quarter earnings this afternoon, there are a number of rumors circulating, and a few more which we can expect to see before the actual numbers appear.
The most important of these rumors has to do with the number of Macs that have been sold during the company’s third quarter. There is some dispute about that, with Gartner saying that it was an excellent quarter and IDC saying that the Mac numbers fell. As of now, most of the financial analysts are lining up behind the Gartner Group numbers.
The positive side in this dispute actually has it that Apple sold a record number of Macs last quarter, with sales up 16 percent over a year ago. Those are NPD Group estimates, and are very close to what Gartner released earlier. If those numbers are right, that would be 2.6 million Macs sold, which is somewhere near an absolute record, according to a ChannelWeb story. And that during a global recession!
Another persistent rumor is that iPod sales were down during the last quarter. Sales of iPods are supposed to be down this year by perhaps 10 percent. One has to wonder if the larger capacity iPhones are not causing more and more people to store their music on their phones and have one less device to carry through the world…
And those iPhone sales are indeed up, according to virtually all estimates. The iPhone 3GS sold a million units during its first weekend late in June, and cutting the price on the 8 GB 3G to $99 is sure to have lured a number of new users into the Apple smartphone fold, which will help build up the iPhone numbers. Analysts are betting that after selling 8.1 million iPhones during the first two quarters of this fiscal year, they were able to sell 5.3 million in the third quarter alone. No matter how one looks at those numbers, that is a tremendous sales increase.
If the numbers being predicted are anywhere close to correct, Apple will have had a nearly record quarter in a number of areas despite an economy in which both overall PC sales and overall cell phone sales were down. That is astonishing performance by any measure, and a ringing endorsement of Apple’s business model. Quality will sell in any environment.
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September 9th, 2009
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