by ilene - October 19th, 2009 7:49 pm
Courtesy of Henry Blodget at Clusterstock
Press release out…
HUGE quarter. Revenue of $9.9 billion blows away whisper of $9.4 billion. EPS of $1.82 blows away whispers of $1.65-ish.
iPhone sales of 7.4 million in-line with estimates despite supply constraints. Mac sales huge. iPod sales not as bad as many had feared.
Upside appears to have come from Macs and margins. The Mac resurgence is great news. This business had stalled, and Apple has a huge opportunity to gain share in the PC market.
December guidance comically conservative, but not alarming.
Overall: Wow. Apple is on its way to becoming the defacto platform standard in mobile. And the crumbling of Microsoft’s Windows monopoly has opened a huge window on the desktop. The company is galloping after both opportunities.
Conference call will begin at 5PM/2PM. Here’s the link: www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/earningsq409/ We’ll be covering it live.
CONFERENCE CALL NOTES:
5:00: Waiting for call to begin…
5:04: Call starts. Preamble crap.
5:06: "Extremely pleased." (Understandably.) Revenue up 25%. Operating margin highest ever: 22%. Adjusted numbers huge, too.
5:07: Macs. 3.05 million, up 17% Biggest ever by 440k. Growing faster than market 19 of last 20 quarters. Best user experience. 17% growth compares to 2% market growth = huge market share gain. laptops 74% of mix and all of the growth. Successful back-to-school. 12% growth to education. 50,000 Macbooks to Maine (lucky bastards). 3-4 weeks inventory at beginning and end of quarter.
5:10: iPods. 10.2 million, down from 11 million. iPod touch up 100% y/y, driven by back to school and App store. Share of US market still over 70%. Top-selling and continued to gain share year over year. Began and ended with 4-6 weeks of inventory. iTunes another great quarter. Largest music retailer, 11 million songs, 7500 movies.
5:11: iPhones. 7.4 million, up 7% (last year had 2mm inventory build). Sell-through up 38%. Widened lead in customer satisfaction. Start selling in China end of this month. Also expanding carrier relationship in UK and Canada. App Store: 500 million downloads in quarter. $2.3 billion in quarter.
5:13: Stores. $1.87 billion, vs $1.72 billion. 670,000 Macs vs. 576,000.
…
Tags: AAPL, Apple, Big Tech, Gadgets, IPhone, Mobile, Online
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by ilene - July 29th, 2009 11:20 am
Courtesy of Henry Blodget at Clusterstock
The official details of the Microsoft-Yahoo deal aren’t much different than the leaks we reported last night.
Here’s our take:
- The deal is significantly worse than expected for Yahoo, as the company will get no money upfront.
- The deal is positive for Microsoft, but largely because Microsoft was nowhere in search without it. Saving the upfront payment is also a help.
- Ironically, the deal will likely be positive for Google, which will now likely benefit from months of purgatory as Microsoft and Yahoo work to clear regulatory scrutiny and then go through the massive challenge of trying to integrate their sales forces and technology. Google itself will also now be able to argue persuasively that there is a big, viable (if discombobulated) competitor in the market.
Conceptually, the idea of Microsoft and Yahoo combining forces is smart. Neither alone has enough share of the search market to be a "must buy," and search relevance and pricing improves with scale. Both companies would likely just continue to lose share ad infinitum without a deal, so they have little to lose by working together. And Yahoo will gain some cost savings, at least for a while.
That said, we think the structure of the deal could end up being a disaster.
The deal calls for Yahoo to handle sales and Microsoft to handle technology. This separation of responsibilities is likely to create headache upon headache for both sides. When a Yahoo client is unhappy with the technology execution, will Yahoo salespeople call Microsoft engineers to complain? When Microsoft is unhappy with the way Yahoo is selling search, will Microsoft’s engineers call Yahoo to complain? When the combination misses targets, will investors call Microsoft or Yahoo to complain? (Both?) When Microsoft licenses Bing to Ask or AOL, will Yahoo’s salespeople sell premium search for those companies, too? What if Ask and AOL are unhappy? Who will they call to complain?
In our opinion, sales and technology are way too tightly linked in this business to split responsibilities between two huge companies that each have other things to worry about. We think the execution of the deal will be a nightmare.
See Also: First Take On
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Tags: Advertising, Big Tech, media, Microsoft, Microsoft-Yahoo!, MSFT, Online, Search, Video, Yahoo!, YHOO
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by ilene - July 8th, 2009 11:10 am
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Google Launching OS, Firing Torpedo Into Microsoft (And Apple) Hold (MSFT, GOOG, AAPL)
Courtesy of Henry Blodget at ClusterStock
Google will launch its own operating system in the second half of next year, finally launching a direct assault on Microsoft’s crown jewel.
(It has been headed here in all but name for the past two years. But last night it finally declared war.)
The OS will initially be targeted to netbooks, then broadened to all PCs. It will be a combination of a Google Chrome browser and a Linux kernel. It will be a different project than Android. It will be designed to be simple and fast. It will also, presumably, be free.
Google’s blog post announcing the browser is below. A few points:
A year of development is a long time, and it shows how complex an undertaking this will be. Announcing the product a year early is also a major break with Google tradition and shows how much Google needs help from partners in this endeavor to be successful. (An OS that is distributed only by downloads won’t work. It needs to come loaded on the machine. This has been the big problem with Chrome so far, and Google needs to address it.)
Success is far from guaranteed. Google’s browser initiative, Chrome, has been a fun little science project, but as a product it has been a flop. The same can be said for almost all of Google’s non-search products. If Google wants to have a chance at success in this business, it needs to focus on it with the same intensity it once put into search. This will be challenging for Google, which, for the last several years, has had the luxury of dabbling in whatever it pleases.
Assuming the OS is free to both users and OEM PC makers, Microsoft will need to soup up the free version of its own Windows 7 OS for netbooks (right now, Microsoft’s plan is to ship a crappy free version of 7 and try to get users to upgrade. Eventually, if Google starts to gain traction, Microsoft may need to panic.)
This is classic disruption. Disruptive technologies do not immediately replace existing technologies because they are better. In fact, in the beginning, they are worse. They’re just…
Tags: Android, Apple, Big Tech, Google, IPhone, Microsoft, Online, Windows 7
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW.