It’s like the “London Bridge is falling down” song sounds perfect for Apple condition today, as the company saw the worst trading day in four years, bringing its total wealth to half of trillion. Apple’s share fall more than 6% Wednesday loses $34.9 billion in market cap bringing the condition to near to halt, over which Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster put some key views, saying:
Digitimes Article Appears To Be Misinterpreted. A Digitimes article from today suggests that iPhone 5 is selling well based on comments from wireless chipset providers and seems to suggest upside to the Street’s 43-45 million estimate for December. In the same article, Digitimes is suggesting a 20% q/q decline in Apple’s demand for parts and components in March. We believe this 20% decline is to be expected coming off of a launch quarter and do not believe it is an indication of how units might trend in March. As an example, if Apple ordered 52 million iPhones from the channel in December and 48 million are sold, that implies a 4 million unit channel fill and 41.5 million units ordered from Apple in March. That would mean 44.5 million units would be available for sale in March, which would mean our 43 million iPhone estimate for March is well within the range of probability.
Other key views:
- [W]e believe that for this technical indication, most of the damage has been done to AAPL, but there could be a worst case additional 10% move to the downside.
- We also note that CNBC is reporting that COR Clearing is raising margin requirements on Apple from 30% to 60%. […] we do not believe the requirement change has anything to do with the fundamental health of AAPL.
- We believe some investors have speculated that China Mobile will carry the Lumia instead of the iPhone. We do not believe this is true.
