Apple’s Black Friday results questioned
With overall Black Friday results being seen as even with 2008, or perhaps slightly down, Apple’s numbers for the day, thought at first to be also up, are now being questioned as well.
The recession has been holding holiday sales down for a couple of years, including those for the infamous Black Friday. News was not much worse, at least in general, for the 2009 shoppers’ paradise day. Specifically for Apple, Black Friday was thought at first to be noticeably up this year, but some new analysis is saying that may not be the case, according to a SeekingAlpha story.
Gene Munster, the top-tier Apple analyst from Piper Jaffray, had a team in the field doing sales counts in Apple retail stores. In the three stores they looked at, Mac computer sales per hour were down more than 35 percent from the previous year, slipping from 13 to 8. If that held across all stores and lines, it is a significant drop in sales. One must wonder, however, how scientific a survey like this one is, and whether or not it can be taken as a national trend. Munster did note that comScore estimated that Apple’s online sales were up on the order of 39 percent.
Other analysts felt that retail sales of Macs was up this year. Kaufman Brothers analyst Shaw Wu felt that many stores were so busy that they ran out of stock, and is predicting very high Mac sales for the quarter based on that information. Deutsche Bank analyst Chris Whitmore agrees, noting that both MacBooks and iMacs were flying out the door in Apple stores. His optimistic statement was, “Channel checks were carried out at 120+ Apple retail stores and 25+ AT&T (T) stores in conjunction with a series of online checks (Apple, Amazon (AMZN), Best Buy (BBY), MacMall, Target (TGT)and Wal-Mart (WMT)). Our checks show demand for Macs, iPhones and iPods remains healthy and Apple stores enjoyed heavy traffic throughout the holiday weekend.â€
It seems that Munster is almost alone in his judgment that Apple retail sales were not so great on Black Friday. There is, of course, no real way to know whether his analysis is right or wrong since Apple is certainly not saying. If an average is taken of the analyst’s guesses, it still looks like Apple had a good Black Friday, and that it can look forward to booming sales for the rest of the quarter.
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