Shares of Apple (AAPL) are down $2.28, or 0.4%, at $524.03,� amidst another raft of negative notes regarding potential iPhone sales.
As I mentioned earlier, Susquehanna Financial Group‘s chip analyst Chris Caso argues iPhone sales in the March-ending fiscal Q2 may miss Street consensus, based on what he thinks is the trend in production cuts for the device.
In addition, Bernstein Research‘sToni Sacconaghi today reiterates an Outperform rating on the shares, while cutting his price target to $750 from $800, writing that his “five year model” shows, even though it’s difficult to look out more than two quarters in Apple’s case, that “growth is slowing.”
Sacconaghi values the stock as a combination of premium P/E multiple and consideration for its enormous cashbalance, though he thinks Apple doesn’t get much credit for cash because much of it is overseas and because the company only last year started returning cash to shareholders. Likewise, his estimates for Apple are close to consensus, as “Apple’s ability to eclipse EPS is much more muted going forward.”
Sacconaghi thinks Apple will be “range-bound” “in the near term” as investors worry whether it can “eclipse first-quarter and full-year 2013 estimates” and questions about whether gross margin will go up or down in coming quarters.
After spending the last several weeks, he writes, revisiting assumptions about “adoption curves” and market share in Apple’s existing product categories, Sacconaghi concludes growth will “remain strong for the next two years, driven by the core business.”
By 2015, thinks will slow substantially unless some new product categories come along, though Sacconaghi notes the many alluring aspects of the business nevertheless, including tons of cash generated:
No comments:
Post a Comment