Does iPad2 Make Apple Stock Worth $555 (AAPL, DELL, HPQ)

Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) is still the darling of Wall Street and Main Street.  While Dell Inc. (NASDAQ:DELL) gets rolling with its Streak tablet and while Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ) gets its Slate launched, a surprise showing of Steve Jobs is already getting the Fanboys ready for version two of the iPad.  Now Apple gets to upsell its existing customers who have owned the iPad just a few short months.  This is generating higher estimates from Wall Street research.

One such call this morning comes from Gabelli & Co.  Gabelli sees the expanded base driving average revenue per user higher from $6.25 up to $6.45 for the second quarter alone.  Based on shares around $352, a ‘private market value’ target was put at $555.00.  This much higher than Wall Street’s consensus target from Thomson Reuters of $425.

While this is on top of what has already been a huge move, the price at yesterday’s close was only at about 7.5-times EBITDA and only about 10.8-times Gabelli’s ex-cash earnings projections for 2012.  Another driver for this call was strong shipments of the CDMA iPhone with shipments being revised higher from 12.3 million units to 13.6 million units.

Apple shares are trading up 1.8% at $358.49 today and within striking distance of the $364.90 all-time high.

Jon C. Ogg