A day after Apple’s iPad Pro and MacBook Air event, and one day ahead of AAPL earnings for fiscal Q4, both investors and analysts seem pretty optimistic …
I noted earlier that the new MacBook Air should help further boost Apple’s average selling price for the Mac lineup, with the new iPad Pro models doing the same there. It seems investors have taken the same message from the event: at the time of writing, AAPL stock is up more than 2.5% on the day.
Analysts share that optimism. A Yahoo! Finance round-up of 34 analysts shows an average revenue forecast of $61.57B – toward the upper end of Apple’s $60-62B guidance. That would represent an impressive-sounding year-on-year growth of 17.1%, but the delay in the iPhone X going on sale last year means it isn’t a like-for-like comparison. The delay to the iPhone XR this year further complicates matters.
Unsurprisingly, none of the analysts are forecasting that Apple is going to miss its guidance, the lowest prediction coming in at $60.B. The highest estimate is $63.29B.
Philip Elmer-DeWitt also got iPhone sales estimates from 14 analysts. Only three have left their predictions unchanged from the summer. Four have downgraded their expectations, but half have upgraded theirs by between 1M and 11.9M. The overall average is a 1.4% increase in anticipated sales.
Looking further ahead, analysts predict a bumper holiday quarter, the average revenue estimate coming in at $92.91B. Comparisons are again messed up by the staggered iPhone launches, but that would represent year-on-year growth of 5.2%.
