Apple's Q1 Earnings Results

1 Infinite Loop: The Mothership

Apple's upcoming Q1 earnings results, ending December 2017, have my attention. There is no shortage of pessimistic speculation that the iPhone X is selling worse than expected. That has driven down the stock price from its all time high of $180/share to the mid-$160s. That represents about a $75B reduction in Apple's market cap.

Some of the headlines sound alarming mentioning that Apple is cutting iPhone X production. Regardless of how well the iPhone X sold over the Holidays, Apple would still cut production for this quarter since it's not Christmas. But, at this point, that's speculative rationalization on my part. 

I read this article comparing one naysayer's prediction to previous articles forecasting doom and gloom.

Today, I saw a series of tweets from Ryan Jones who seemed to put iPhone X estimates in perspective (prefaced with my own notes).

Dec 2017 EPS Avg:3.78 High:3.88 Low:3.68

Currently, the Street is expecting Apple to sell 61 million iPhones in the second quarter, but Piecyk believes it will be closer to be 53 million.

I miss talking about iPhone units sales. :) It used to be my jam.

My Q1 2018 guess is 83M units (up 7%) at $825 ASP (up 19%).

= Total $68.5 BIIIILLION. Just from iPhone. Previous record $54.5B.

🔥 Up 26% on the biggest product ever. Oh and it's 10 years old. 🔥

Weak iPhone X demand:

WSJ says iPhone X Q2 cut was from 40M planned to 20M.

History: Q2 sales for the last two years were 51.1M and 50.8M. So 40M seems idiotic for just iPhone X.

80% of sales (40M) for the most expensive iPhone? No way.

40% of sales (20M)? Sounds bout right.

Let's just us our brains...iPhone X is probably 33-50% of all iPhone sales.

Recent Q2 sales were 61M, 51M, 50M.

If Apple forecasted 40M iPhone X, that would be 65-80% of sales to the highest end model. In Q2

Nope.

20M would be 33-40% iPhone X.

Yep. Sounds bout right.

Personally, I think the new UI, with no home button, is great. I found it simple to get used to and I love having a screen that's bigger than the iPhone 7+/8+, in the same form factor as the iPhone 7/8. Face ID works much better than I expected, too. There's no doubt that Apple will incorporate these two key features into all iPhones if the component costs are reasonable.

Here's Wall Street's earning forecast: