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Apple Reports Third Quarter Results

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Re: Apple Reports Third Quarter Results

#71

Post by btilly »

rimantas wrote: post #66
btilly wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A rule that I learned a long time ago in tech is, "The commodity always wins." And it seems to work out that way most of the time. If there are two technologies, and one manages to become a commodity that is installed all over, that's the technology that you see innovation coming from and the future coming out of. It is often the worse technology. But it wins. I don't have a horse in the phone race. But when I see Ap…

Please, everyone, when talking about "wins"—do specify, what is won. In this case—the race to the bottom?

What I mean by win is that they will wind up becoming the dominant technology with the lion's share of the market, revenue, and other companies building on top of. The also ran technology may survive, but it becomes relatively insignificant.

For example compare the Mac vs Microsoft Windows. The Mac was better, had better product margins, etc. Microsoft was the commodity and completely owned the market.

For other historical examples compare VMS vs Unix, Lisp vs C, OSI protocols vs TCP/IP, Smalltalk vs Java, traditional client-server vs web apps, CORBA vs SOAP (vs JSON rpcs), Perl vs PHP, and so on. In many cases the losing technology was technically much nicer to work with. But the winning technology won.

For a famous essay reflecting on why, see http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html from the Lisp vs C war.

Re: Apple Reports Third Quarter Results

#72

Post by myspy »

tazzy531 wrote: post #60
InclinedPlane wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can make $8 billion profit in a single quarter and for some reasons the estimates where higher, that's a problem with the estimators, not with your business. In 2012 on the planet Earth averaging nearly $4 million in profit every single hour of every single day is tremendous business.

Sure, but the stock multiple prices in the estimates. If it can't meet the estimates, the stock is overvalued.

They beat their own estimates, but analysts are proven to be wrong all the time and the make up some numbers which don't reflect what really happens.

Re: Apple Reports Third Quarter Results

#73

Post by diminish »

myspy wrote: post #72
tazzy531 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but the stock multiple prices in the estimates. If it can't meet the estimates, the stock is overvalued.

They beat their own estimates, but analysts are proven to be wrong all the time and the make up some numbers which don't reflect what really happens.

Here is a better TL;DR. Apple, missed average estimates for most of the reported values for iPhone, Mac, EPS, revenues and profit margin, but beaten its own guidance, which is usually quite low. The stock price was down over 5% after markets.

Most articles blame the next iPhone for the lower than expected sales. So In 1 year there are 4 quarters, and in the last 2 quarters misses on estimates are explained by rumours for the next iphone, this year and last year. Finally, will the current quarter also be worse for iPhone due next release approaching?

Analysts; please be clever enough to take care of new releases in your estimates.

Re: Apple Reports Third Quarter Results

#74

Post by ubernostrum »

polycom wrote: post #59
thechut wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Apple said its earnings per share were $9.32 on revenue of $35 billion. Analysts polled by Thomson One Analytics predicted earnings per share of $10.36 on revenue of $37.19 billion." Via http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_21147940/apples-... It doesn't matter how much money you actually make when you are as big as Apple, it matters what you make compared to what people (analysts) think and expect you to mak…

You said "their estimates" which I took to mean Apples own estimates. Isn't it tradition for Apple to beat their own estimates, fail to meet analysts estimates, and having their shares drop for a period of time afterwards? I'm not a trader though so correct me if I'm wrong.

It is a tradition. Manipulation of Apple's stock price by people looking to make a quick buck goes back at least a few years now, with even some big names openly admitting to having done unscrupulous things to make it happen.

Re: Apple Reports Third Quarter Results

#75

Post by ubernostrum »

AlisdairO wrote: post #65
suprgeek wrote: post #58

Inspite of being the most valuable company on Earth and making an amazing profit by any metric - you still lose value (stock price) if you come in under "analyst" estimates. The relentless march of capital may be increasingly going off the rails.

It makes perfect sense. If you're widely expected to make a lot of money, people will price that into your stock. If you make a lot minus n, you're doing less well than the analysts expected, and so your stock is overvalued. The failing here is not that the stock price dropped on results that were worse than the market expected, it's that the market expected too much in the first place, causing the stock to become ov…

If it happened once, sure.

The thing is, analysts have shown, historically, that either:

1) They are really, really bad at their jobs to have such a consistent track record of producing poor estimates for Apple, or

2) They are really, really good at their jobs, but the jobs they're doing aren't the jobs we think they're doing.

Re: Apple Reports Third Quarter Results

#76

Post by rimantas »

btilly wrote: post #71
rimantas wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please, everyone, when talking about "wins"—do specify, what is won. In this case—the race to the bottom?

What I mean by win is that they will wind up becoming the dominant technology with the lion's share of the market, revenue, and other companies building on top of. The also ran technology may survive, but it becomes relatively insignificant. For example compare the Mac vs Microsoft Windows. The Mac was better, had better product margins, etc. Microsoft was the commodity and completely owned the market. For other hist…

So how your theory explains Apple's success in recent years? Comparing Mac to windows makes no sense, but still: just look at the sales trend of Mac's vs. other computers. Then see how much companies are making with Android: many adopted the OS but only a couple actually get profits from it.

Re: Apple Reports Third Quarter Results

#77

Post by ZeroGravitas »

rimantas wrote: post #66
btilly wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A rule that I learned a long time ago in tech is, "The commodity always wins." And it seems to work out that way most of the time. If there are two technologies, and one manages to become a commodity that is installed all over, that's the technology that you see innovation coming from and the future coming out of. It is often the worse technology. But it wins. I don't have a horse in the phone race. But when I see Ap…

Please, everyone, when talking about "wins"—do specify, what is won. In this case—the race to the bottom?

Yes. Because the people who benefit from a "race to the bottom" are the customers. It's a basic tenet of free market capitalism and seems, more or less, to be working.

Why the apple community feels the need to attack the concept of free market competition I have no idea, I think they just like the sound of the phrase, it's certainly become popular recently without any outward sign that most people who use it even know what it means.

Re: Apple Reports Third Quarter Results

#78

Post by AlisdairO »

ubernostrum wrote: post #75
AlisdairO wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes perfect sense. If you're widely expected to make a lot of money, people will price that into your stock. If you make a lot minus n, you're doing less well than the analysts expected, and so your stock is overvalued. The failing here is not that the stock price dropped on results that were worse than the market expected, it's that the market expected too much in the first place, causing the stock to become ov…

If it happened once, sure. The thing is, analysts have shown, historically, that either: 1) They are really, really bad at their jobs to have such a consistent track record of producing poor estimates for Apple, or 2) They are really, really good at their jobs, but the jobs they're doing aren't the jobs we think they're doing.

> The failing here is not that the stock price dropped on results that were worse than the market expected, it's that the market expected too much in the first place, causing the stock to become overvalued.

I don't really see how what I said disagrees with what you said - what I was pointing out was that a stock price falling when the company fails to meet expectations is good and rational behaviour. The problem is the bad analytics that caused the inflated expectations in the first place. Feel free to speculate as to the cause of that as you wish :-).

Re: Apple Reports Third Quarter Results

#79

Post by jusben1369 »

bryne wrote: post #39
jusben1369 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This caught my eye. 26 million iPhones. Galaxy S III just did 10 million in 6 weeks since launch? That's 20 million in a quarter. Assume the iPhone number is a blended number too between older and latest model. So did we just see the first real example of one phone model legitimately challenge the iPhone? The argument was always that Android success was across so many phones. Now is the breaking down? Please don't fl…

A better comparison would be to a quarter introducing a new phone model - Apple sold 37.04 million iPhones in Q1 2012, the fiscal quarter during which the iPhone 4S launched.

I think that's a good comparison. Maybe not to the iPhone 4S though as by then the franchise was established as where the S III is, up till now, a less established brand. But you're right that we should compare some sort of launch to launch data.

Re: Apple Reports Third Quarter Results

#80

Post by jusben1369 »

taligent wrote: post #40
jusben1369 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This caught my eye. 26 million iPhones. Galaxy S III just did 10 million in 6 weeks since launch? That's 20 million in a quarter. Assume the iPhone number is a blended number too between older and latest model. So did we just see the first real example of one phone model legitimately challenge the iPhone? The argument was always that Android success was across so many phones. Now is the breaking down? Please don't fl…

Are you seriously comparing the sales for a device just launched (Galaxy S3) with one about to be replaced (iPhone 4S). Because that would be dumb.

Don't make these pages even longer to scroll by adding comments with no intellectual value.
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