Looks like Apple's got another home-run quarter
Posted
Jan 02 2008, 06:48 AM
by
Kim Peterson
Rating:
Silly me. I doubted in a previous blog post whether Apple would really be able to make its fourth-quarter sales numbers. After all, the company said it would nab a record $9.2 billion in sales. That's up from $7.1 billion in the prior year quarter. In this economy, I wondered, could Apple really score that big?
If this past year has taught me anything, it should be not to underestimate Apple. I think the company may beat its own forecast. There are some little clues that point to a rock-solid holiday season. Consider:
Numbers out by Net Applications this week suggest that Macs were a hot gift this Christmas. The market share in December for Mac was 7.31%, but for the last two days in December it was 8.01%. Sounds like more Macs were being used after Christmas than before. By the way, the Mac market share in November was 6.8%.
Net Applications collects operating system data form 160 million visitors a month to a network of Web sites. So while the data isn't conclusive enough to say that 8% of all PC users are on Macs, it does say that Mac market share is growing steadily and had a jump at the end of December.
Then check out Amazon's Most Gifted List for notebook computers. Apple MacBooks rank No. 1 and No. 3. Over on Amazon's "Best of 2007" lists, the Nokia Internet tablet PC wins the bestselling computer title but the 4GB iPod nano was the most popular electronic gift sold last year.
Then there's the iPhone. Apple sold nearly 1.4 million of them by Sept. 29, and that was before the company started selling them in France, the U.K. and Germany. Some analysts expected as many as 500,000 iPhones to be sold in Europe by Dec. 31. In Q3, the iPhone outsold all other smartphones in North America except for the Blackberry.
Every time I walked by an Apple store in December, it was packed. One analyst has noted that Apple stores seemed to have a bizarre magnetic pull on people And Apple likely benefited from its aggressive advertising campaign over the last few months that slammed Windows Vista.
All signs point to a killer holiday quarter. We won't get the official numbers for a while, obviously, but I expect that Apple shares, which hit $200 last week, will continue to ramp up in anticipation of good news.
