Gassée: Wall Street still doesn’t get Apple

In his Monday Note, Jean-Louis Gassée anticipates an “extraordinary” 2018 holiday season for Apple.

From Apple, Sui Generis:

Wall Street still doesn’t trust Apple’s future. The company is seen as an anomaly, it shuns accepted ways of doing business and defies categorization. Perhaps the categories are wrong…

For my money [Gassée writes], the best analyst of Apple’s business is the technically astute, historically knowledgable, and occasionally poetic Horace Dediu. In a tightly-reasoned post, Dediu forecasts $120B total revenue for this year’s Xmas quarter, a 36% increase from the same period in 2017. My more simplistic analysis looks at Apple’s Manufacturing Purchase Obligations (MPO) for the mid-year, a number that, in the past, has reliably forecast up and down trends in the following Xmas quarter. The company’s MPO for the quarter ended in June shows a 31% increase.

A 30+% increase in revenue would be extraordinary, nearly without precedent, especially at Apple’s $200B+ size. If it happens, it will be interesting to see if it impacts Wall Street’s assessment of the company’s future. Perhaps a hugely successful quarter will convince traders that Apple can’t be compared to other companies. Apple, sui generis.

My take: As an Apple watcher, the man who ran the Macintosh division for nearly a decade after Steve Jobs’ ouster—and whom Jobs never forgave for his part in it—is also sui generis.

Below: Gassée unveils the ill-fated Macintosh Portable (1989 video)

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzlQdWKmPuE&w=840&h=503]

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