Analyst confident on Apple’s September quarter finances—and an upcoming laptop refresh
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Oct 7, 2008 at 1:19pm
With Apple’s September quarter having come and gone with the only major product transition consisting of slightly cheaper iPods, investment bank Piper Jaffray believes the company is once again in a position to outperform its own margin guidance despite widespread concern (as noted by AppleInsider.
Analyst Gene Munster tells clients in a note that the quarter has since ended and none of the company’s actions seem to warrant such a drop-off in margins. “Apple cited new, lower-margin products, but the only new products announced in the September quarter were new iPod nanos with higher capacities at the same prices and a 23 percent price cut on the iPod touch,” he wrote. “Considering the decline in NAND Flash pricing has been at least in-line with typical seasonality, it is unlikely that these changes will result in a greater than average sequential GM decline.”
Munster said he remains confident in his September quarter gross margin estimate of 32 percent, arguing that the conservative margin guidance offered by Apple management was simply a base case used to rein in Wall Street’s ballooning expectations, and not an indication of how it expected the company to perform. He thinks that Apple will release new Mac soon, including a MacBook for under US$1,000.
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Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
