For starters, the earnings report had at least some disappointments. iPad sales were soft, yet Tim Cook said he wasn’t concerned. By our take, international sales were weak as well, with sequential slowing in China, Japan and the rest of Asia being more than expected.
Now consider this. Since Apple’s last earnings report, the stock was already up 27% going into Tuesday’s earnings on a close-to-close basis. It looked as if Apple was priced for perfection and nothing short of that. The stock had peaked just above $97 last week, but even after the seven-for-one split there had hardly been any serious pullbacks. Usually you see some pullback going into or slightly after an effective split date formally enacts a split. Not so here.
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One solid metric was that Apple’s margins continued to rise. This is even after Tim Cook was showing strong R&D spending, and Apple has also become an acquirer. The real focus here seems to be that investors are positioning themselves for a very strong iPhone 6 launch later this year. An order for 80 million units of the larger format phone was reported.
As far as all of those old analyst price target hikes, the consensus price target is almost $101, now that analysts have raised and raised their price targets. The latest news from analysts was that the new street-high price target is now $135 for Apple. This is a significant reversal of a company that was considered partly lost as recently as a few months ago.
One driving force is that Apple shares appear to have been under-owned by institutions. Whether or not that remains the case, it seems hard to believe, but Apple’s share performance after earnings was impressive. A gain of nearly 3% to $97.45 (a new 52-week high to boot) in mid-morning trading on Wednesday should speak for itself when many Apple watchers might have expected the stock to see profit taking.
Stay tuned.
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