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Wall Street is staying bullish on Apple after a better-than expected quarter

Rob Price   

Wall Street is staying bullish on Apple after a better-than expected quarter
Tech1 min read

iPhone 6 Gold camera

George Frey/Stringer/Getty Images

Apple beat expectations in its most recent quarter, and its stock is jumping.

Objectively, the quarter wasn't fantastic: Revenues were down 14.5% year-on-year. But they're still higher than analysts expected - with iPhone and iPad sales also both beating expectations.

Wall Street has responded pretty positively to the quarterly earnings.

In more than a dozen analyst notes surveyed by Business Insider, analysts are maintaining their almost uniformly bullish outlooks for the Cupertino tech company - with at least one even raising their price target for the stock.

Mizhu says that "we believe current valuation reflects a great deal of pessimism around the story."

Citi loo oks further ahead, to the "longer term to realize Apple can still gain share especially in large markets such as India." And Macquarie believes Apple's increasingly lucrative services business is still under appreciated by investors."

Only Deutsche Bank dissents, writing that it was "generally a good quarter for Apple, given very low expectations. However, we continue to worry about slowing smartphone growth and elongating refresh cycles in mature markets. Given these long-term challenges, we continue to view future growth as more challenged, and see current valuations as fair."

Read on to see a full round-up of what analysts are saying about Apple's quarter. But first up, here are the key numbers, courtesy of my colleague Kif Leswing:

  • Q3 EPS (GAAP): $1.42, down 23.2% year-over-year versus analyst expectations of $1.36.
  • Q3 revenue: $42.4 billion, down 14.5% year-over-year versus expectations of $42.059 billion.
  • Gross margin: 38% versus expectations of 37.9%.
  • iPhone unit sales: 40.4 million, down 14.9% year-over-year versus 39.9 million.
  • iPhone ASP: $595.26 versus expectations of $606.
  • iPad unit sales: 9.95 million iPads, down 8.7% year-over-year versus expectations of 9.1 million.
  • Mac unit sales: 4.25 million, down 11.5% year-over-year versus expectations of 4.4 million.
  • Q4 revenue guidance: $45.5 billion to $47.5 billion, slightly higher than analyst estimates of $45.6 billion, averaged from projections ranging from $42.4 billion to $49.4 billion.

And here's how the stock performed in after-hours trading:

apple stock 2016 quarterly earnings

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