[opendtv] Apple Stock Plunges 10 Percent
- From: "John Shutt" <shuttj@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 12 Oct 2005 15:05:15 -0400
Apple Stock Plunges 10 Percent
Apple Stock Plunges After Company Reports Good Sales of PCs and iPods but
Has Shipments Lower Than Expected
By MAY WONG
The Associated Press
SAN JOSE, Calif. - Shares of Apple Computer Inc. continued to tumble
Wednesday, after the company reported robust sales of its personal computers
and still-sizzling iPods, but overall shipments of the digital music player
falling shy of Wall Street's high hopes.
The reaction was immediate Apple shares plunged more than 10 percent late
Tuesday after the company reported its fourth quarter results. Shares fell
$3.26, or 6.3 percent, to $48.33 in Wednesday morning trading on the Nasdaq
Stock Market.
Analysts were expecting anywhere from 7.5 million to 8.5 million units sold,
said Shaw Wu, analyst with American Technology Research. Instead, Apple sold
nearly 6.5 million iPods in the quarter, bringing cumulative sales of the
portable player to about 28 million units, said Peter Oppenheimer, Apple's
chief financial officer.
Still, Apple's results were far from glum.
For the quarter ended Sept. 24, the Cupertino, Calif.-based company said
Tuesday it earned $430 million, or 50 cents a share, up from the previous
year's fourth-quarter earnings of $106 million, or 13 cents a share.
Excluding a special 12-cents-a-share tax benefit, Apple said it would have
earned 38 cents a share. On that basis, the results exceeded the per-share
estimate among Wall Street analysts by a penny, according to research firm
Thomson Financial.
Revenue rose to $3.68 billion up from $2.35 billion in the year-ago quarter
but short of the $3.73 billion in sales analysts were expecting.
In the fourth quarter, the iPod accounted for nearly a third of the
quarter's revenue; Macintosh computers Apple's historical core product
accounted for about 44 percent with 1.2 million units sold.
For the year, Apple said it earned $1.335 billion on revenue of $13.93
billion.
"We had nearly $14 billion in revenue the best in our history," Oppenheimer
said.
Riding high on the success of its market-leading and ever-evolving line of
iPods, Apple's share price nearly tripled from its 52-week low of $18.83 on
Dec. 12, 2004 to close Tuesday up $1.22 at $51.59 on the Nasdaq Stock
Market.
The company is set to unveil yet another new product Wednesday, and industry
observers speculate it will be an iPod capable of playing video.
After Tuesday's report, however, perhaps investors are sobering up, analysts
say.
"When you're such a class act, it's hard to keep it going," Wu said of
Apple. "I think investors got a little too excited, the stock got too high,
and the stock is just trying to correct itself now."
For the first quarter, Oppenheimer said Apple expects to reach sales of $4.7
billion, up $1.2 billion, or about 34 percent from the year-ago quarter.
Meanwhile, during a conference call with analysts, Oppenheimer cited an
"enormous backlog" in orders for Apple's newest portable player, the
pencil-thin iPod Nano released Sept. 7. One million of them were shipped
before the fourth quarter ended, Oppenheimer said.
He refused to say when he expected production constraints to ease so that
supply would meet demand.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
You can UNSUBSCRIBE from the OpenDTV list in two ways:
- Using the UNSUBSCRIBE command in your user configuration settings at
FreeLists.org
- By sending a message to: opendtv-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word
unsubscribe in the subject line.
Other related posts: