Lion's AppleWatch

	maandag, 22 april 2013

Something's very fishy....

How much are Samsung's dirty tricks hurting Apple's shares?

By Philip Elmer-DeWitt April 20, 2013: 12:00 PM ET

Conspiracy theories grow after charges it funded agent provocateurs in three countries.

Chairman Lee

FORTUNE -- There's a somewhat paranoid theory being circulated among Apple (AAPL) investors in the wake of the company's seven-month, $296-billion loss in market value.

It goes something like this:

Revealed as a patent copycat last summer by a California jury's $1.05 billion verdict -- a PR disaster of the first order that shook top management and tarnished the image of an entire nation -- Samsung quietly declared war on Apple.

Drawing on a massive $5.3 billion sales, promotion and marketing budget, the company poured a fortune into a high-profile ad campaign designed to caricature Apple's customers as foolish sheep. Meanwhile at the retail level it paid mobile phone salespeople cash "spiffs" (bonuses) for every smartphone customer they could persuade to choose Samsung over Apple.

Behind the scenes, the company engaged in more surreptitious stratagems. It began paying students and other heavy users of social media to post anonymous messages talking up the virtues of Samsung's products and spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt about Apple and other competitors.

Most deviously of all, it took a massive short position in Apple in the U.S. securities markets, putting selling pressure on the stock and tarnishing Apple's once-glowing reputation on Wall Street.

OK, so that last bit is admittedly a stretch and purely speculative. Apple's shares were due to fall of their weight as the company entered several quarters of tighter margins and slower growth.

But the rest of this nightmare fantasy is pretty well-documented fact.

The shocked reaction of Chairman Lee Kun-hee to the California verdict last summer was widely reported in South Korean media. Samsung's marketing budget comes directly from the company's quarterly reports. The anti-Apple ads were aired on prime-time American television. Some of Samsung's spiff rates are posted online. And just this week Samsung's Taiwanese subsidiary admitted that it paid students to post negative comments about rival HTC in its home market. Reports have since surfaced in the U.K. and Sweden that it was engaging in similar practices in those countries.

To be fair, Samsung is a world-class electronics manufacturer and a fierce competitor whose smartphones have steadily improved and increased market share on their own merit.

But the company certainly has pockets deep enough to do real damage to a company it might choose to target by other means. What's not clear is how low it's been willing to go.

2:27:20 PM

	vrijdag, 19 april 2013

Apple's Calendar Chaos Trade Of 2013

AAPL shifting product release cycle has created a high degree of investor uncertainty within the quarterly biased tradition of Wall Street.

For a company that attracts more product release hype than any other in the history of planet earth, this shifting product release calendar has caused investors and analysts to be mislead regarding the true state of Apple's financial health.

It's a phenomenon unique to Apple because no other company elicits the scope of product release volatility like Apple does. Especially in the most recent upgrade cycle to iPhone 5 in which Apple sold 47.8 million units in the holiday quarter, Apple has demonstrated a one-of-a-kind ability to generate product release hype that remains the envy of all its competition.

Unfortunately for investors, this recent round of hype has not translated into stock returns. The shifting of the product release calendar and its uncertain effect on year over year

Complete Story » By Jason Schwarz. [AAPL - News and Analysis from Seeking Alpha] 3:30:32 PM

	maandag, 4 maart 2013

Has Apple ever been so cheap?

Even a long-time Apple naysayer like Henry Blodget is talking about buying the stock

Source: Greg Bates

FORTUNE -- In a 1,300-word Business Insider story in which he rattles off a litany of reasons why Apple's (AAPL) shares "crashed to a new low" Friday, Henry Blodget refers seven times to the stock price as "cheap," "cheaper" and "screamingly cheap" and ends by confessing that although he doesn't buy individual stocks these days, if the dividend were increased to 4%+, he might find Apple "irresistable."

So how cheap is Apple? Don't be fooled by its $404 billion market cap. With a closing price of $430.47 Friday and $137.1 billion in the bank, Apple may be cheaper now than it's ever been -- and perhaps cheaper than any mega-cap growth stock in history. NOT QUITE: See update below.

I tend to screw up the math in these things, so reader Greg Bates volunteered to calculate Apple's current price-to-earnings ratio ex cash (6.45) -- arguably a better measure of the company's current valuation than its straight trailing 12-month PE ratio (9.76). (For the record, the S&P 500's PE ratio is currently 17.27.)

I asked Asymco's Horace Dediu if Apple had ever been so cheap. His records don't go back far enough to know for certain. It's possible, he says, that Apple's valuation was lower in, say, the fall of 1997 when the stock was trading for $16.50 a share and there were real questions whether the company could survive.

I have Apple's share price back to September 1984 and its quarterly EPS back to 1987 (see charts below), but not its PE ratios.

UPDATE: Wolfram Alpha has the answer. Apple's PE ratio touched 5.76 on Dec. 19, 2000, when the stock closed at $7 a share. Thanks Josh Staiger for digging that up. See the Wolfram chart below the share prices.

Source: AAPL Pain's Travis Lewis

Source: Wolfram Alpha

2013 'iWatch' debut could rake in more profit than an Apple television set

The current wristwatch market has much higher gross margins than HDTV sales, which could set the stage for Apple to sell its own hugely profitable wearable hardware as soon as this year.

Citing Citigroup analyst Oliver Chen, Bloomberg reported on Monday that the current gross margins on watch hardware is about 60 percent — a number four times bigger than the margins on televisions. He views it as a $6 billion opportunity for Apple with "plenty of opportunity for upside."

Artist's rendition of purported Apple smartwatch. | Source: Yrving Torrealba

In fact, Chen believes that if Apple took just a 10 percent share of the watch market, it could earn gross profit of $3.6 billion. A 10 percent share of the PC market, however, would result in just $1.79 billion in gross profits, based on Chen's estimates.

Monday's report also made note that Apple's chief designer Jony Ive has had interest in watches for some time. He owns many high-end models, his team has visited watch factories, and the company also reportedly ordered a number of Nike sport watches in the mid-2000s.

Citing an anonymous source, the report indicated that Apple could launch its own wristwatch as soon as this year.

Bloomberg first reported last month that Apple allegedly has a 100-person team working on an unannounced smartwatch product. The team reportedly includes marketing, software and hardware personnel who previously worked on the iPhone and iPad.

It's been speculated that that the sheer size of Apple's purported "iWatch" team is a sign that the company's plans for wearable computing have gone beyond the experimentation phase and are set to become an actual commercial product.

Reports of an Apple watch picked up steam last month when The New York Times said Apple was experimenting with a "wristwatch-like devices made of curved glass" that run iOS and can perform minor smartphone operations.

Apple may be planning to enter the wristwatch space as a number of products have begun to hit the market and generate buzz. The Pebble watch recently began shipping to consumers, while a consumer-oriented version of the MetaWatch has been shipping to customers since late last year. Both products rely on connectivity to a smartphone to deliver information like phone calls, text messages, weather and more. 2:43:47 PM