Neil Hughes
This afternoon Apple will report earnings from the company's first fiscal quarter of 2014, and investors expect that the company will reveal record sales of its blockbuster iPhone and iPad product lines, with collective sales of both devices expected to top 80 million.
Consensus numbers on Wall Street provided by analyst Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray on Monday show anticipated iPhone sales between 56 million and 57 million units, which would be a new high for the company's best selling smartphone. The iPad is also expected to have a record quarter, with sales of between 24 million and 25 million tablets.
If accurate, that means that the iPhone and iPad would collectively exceed 80 million units sold in one quarter. And those figures would not include the iPod touch, which rounds out Apple's portable lineup of iOS-powered devices.
Market watchers expect Mac sales for the December quarter to be at 4.6 million units. With anticipated 37.5 percent gross margins, investors believe Apple will net $14.35 earnings per share on $58 billion in revenue.
Those numbers are largely in line with StreetAccount figures cited by analyst Maynard Um with Wells Fargo. Those figures call for 24.88 million iPad sales, 54.61 million iPhones, $57.5 billion in revenue, and $14.09 earnings per share.
To put those estimates in perspective, in the same quarter last year, Apple posted record quarterly profit with sales of 47.8 million iPhones, 22.9 million iPads, and 4.1 million Macs. Though the company set new records, investors viewed the year-ago quarter as largely disappointing, citing sagging Mac sales and unmet Wall Street expectations.
Apple will report its first fiscal quarter of 2014 earnings today after markets close. A conference call with Chief Executive Tim Cook is scheduled to follow at 5 p.m. Eastern, 2 p.m. Pacific. AppleInsider will have full, live coverage.
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32 Comments
Great job with the expectations, Wall Street.
This kind of high-expectation/low-faith attitude seems to be what keeps Apple's share price so low. If Apple meets the high expectations, many investors think that was "factored into the price," but the stock actually trades much too low for people to really believe they'll meet the analysts' forecasts. If Apple doesn't meet or beat the high forecasts, investors are disappointed, even if the market never really believed it would in the first place. What is really factored into the price is a kind of perpetual sense of disbelief that any company could be as good as Apple is.
Irrational sentiment is annoying, but it's going to shift eventually. At certain point the p/e will become so compressed that no rational person will be able to ignore it. When that moment of clarity comes, look out. We're going to blast off to another totally irrational high. Would be nice if Apple could just have a stable value relative to the success and profitability of its business.
Starting right on time with the "inflated expectations" so when Apple barely misses they have a reason to claim Apple is doomed.
Ahhh...Gene Munster. FWIW, I believe that Apple sold more than 1 but less than 1x10^9 iOS devices in the quarter.