UBS, PJ, CG, BS, GS, TE, AmTech all up Apple target, stock falls
Shares of Apple Inc. fell more than 3 percent in pre-market trading on Thursday as concerns over the company's outlook and Mac sales momentum outweighed simultaneous price target upgrades by nearly a dozen Wall Street firms.
For Apple, the 1.6 million unit total also represented a slight but uncharacteristic sequential decline between its fourth and first fiscal quarters. By comparison, Apple during its fourth quarter ended September sold a total of 1.610 million Macs.
Of similar concern to investors was the company's guidance for its second fiscal quarter of 2007 ending March, which came in soft at 54 cents to 56 cents per-share earnings on revenues of $4.8 billion to $4.9 billion.
"Management tends to guide conservatively, but we believe that as Apple becomes more of a consumer electronics company, we will see greater quarterly fluctuations between the quarters due to stronger and stronger holiday sales," said Ingrid Ebeling of JPM Securities, who took a different approach than most analysts on Thursday in downgrading shares of the company from a "Strong Buy" to "Market Outperform."
Meanwhile, analysts at nearly a dozen other firms looked past the Mac target miss and conservative guidance in upgrading their price target on shares of Apple.
"We maintain our Buy rating as we believe Apple is morphing into a four-prong vertically integrated play," said American Technology Research analyst Shaw Wu, who upped his price target on the company to $115 from $99. "We see several catalysts in the quarters ahead, including Mac OS X Leopard, new movie and carrier partners, lower cost cell phones, and further extension of its core technology franchise into new business areas."
A summary of other firms that increased their target on Apple follow:
Shares of Apple were trading down $3.26 or 3.43 percent to $91.69 in early morning trading on the Nasdaq stock market.
12 Comments
i love talking about AAPL because its always crazy... let the predictions begin
good news released, stock plummets. bad news released, stock plummets. its the day to day incremental that makes the money over the long term.
I'll never claim to understand the stock market.
Say they had MISSED earnings this quarter, but predicted a great quarter coming up. That would have killed the price.
The problem with stock market pundits is they always try to over simplify and point to ONE thing that is the catalyst. Capitalism is not that simple.
When people say "stock plummets", I think people forget the 10 points or so the stock increased just prior to the quarterly results. The stock really didn't plummet, it just increased a little less than it really should have.
When people say "stock plummets", I think people forget the 10 points or so the stock increased just prior to the quarterly results. The stock really didn't plummet, it just increased a little less than it really should have.
True and many AAPL buyers are the same sheep that bought an 'investment property' in 06. Blindly follow what they think is a quick get rich idea. They don't actually study the company in question.
I also think some of them believe everything they hear from 'experts' ... could some of the 'expert's' negative comments about Apple in such places as CNN Money be anything to do with the Apple - AT & T alliance ... Perhaps Time Warner have a conflict here?