Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Analysts are Useless

The Boston Globe has an article today Apple shares fall on report iPhone demand may slow. Shares fell $8.81 on Tuesday, from $143.70 to $134.89. The iPhone went on sale on June 29th at 6pm. The quarter ended on June 30th, so there were only 30 hours of iPhone sales counted. AT&T said it had 146,000 iPhones activations. Analysts apparently expected many more. The Globe article says as many as 500,000. Om Malik says it went as high as 700,000 and points out how moronic this was. The analysts just pulled numbers out of the air and didn't do actual, you know, analysis. He also points out that over 30 hours thats, "4867 iPhone activations per hour or 82 activations per minute"'; not bad for a product that costs $2000 over 2 years.

So today Apple announced they sold 270,000 iPhones in the first two days (that's 150/minute) and that Q3 profits were up 73% as was demand for macs and iPods. Analysts expected $0.72 per share earnings when the reality was $0.92 (Apple was projecting $0.66 and last year it was $0.54). In after-hours trading today, as of 7pm APPL is up $11.40 to $148.52.

So because analysts had crazy numbers for 30 hours of sales, the market made AAPL take a one day 6% dip. The crazy part is that intuitively people should have known better. iPhones are everywhere and the hype hasn't died down. At a movie group 10 days after the launch we had 20% "iPhone penetration". So yesterday was a good buying opportunity. I bought two years ago at $43.74 so I'm happy (except I wish I bought more).

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