By:
On:
In: Fair company, Stock analysis
Tagged:
With: 0 Comments

Company name Apple Inc.
Stock ticker AAPL
Live stock price [stckqut]AAPL[/stckqut]
P/E compared to competitors Good

MANAGEMENT EXECUTION

Employee productivity Good
Sales growth Fair
EPS growth Fair
P/E growth Fair
EBIT growth Fair

ANALYSIS

Confident Investor Rating Fair
Target stock price (TWCA growth scenario) $191.14
Target stock price (averages with growth) $177.56
Target stock price (averages with no growth) $89.8
Target stock price (manual assumptions) $181.

The following company description is from Google Finance: http://www.google.com/finance?q=aapl

Apple Inc. (Apple) designs, manufactures and markets mobile communication and media devices, personal computers, and portable digital music players, and a variety of related software, services, peripherals, networking solutions, and third-party digital content and applications. The Company’s products and services include iPhone, iPad, Mac, iPod, Apple TV, a portfolio of consumer and professional software applications, the iOS and OS X operating systems, iCloud, and a variety of accessory, service and support offerings. The Company also delivers digital content and applications through the iTunes Store, App StoreSM, iBookstoreSM, and Mac App Store. The Company distributes its products worldwide through its retail stores, online stores, and direct sales force, as well as through third-party cellular network carriers, wholesalers, retailers, and value-added resellers. In February 2012, the Company acquired app-search engine Chomp.

 

Confident Investor comments: At this time, I think that a Confident Investor can cautiously invest in Apple Inc. as long as the price is correct. Most of the fundamentals of this company are good but there are some concerns.

If you would like to understand how to evaluate companies like I do on this site, please read my book, The Confident Investor. You can review the best companies that I have found (and I probably invest my own money in most of these companies) in my Watch List.

How was this analysis of Apple Inc. calculated?

For owners of my book, “The Confident Investor” I offer the following analysis (you must be logged in to this site as a book owner in order to see the following analysis). If you have registered and cannot see the balance of this article, make sure you are logged in and refresh your browser.
[s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level1)]

In order to assist you in using the techniques of this book, the values that I used when calculating the Manual pricing above were:

  • Stock price at the time of the calculation: $157.11
  • Growth: 0.13
  • Current EPS (TTM): $8.79
  • P/E: 18
  • Future EPS Calc: $16.19
  • Future Stock Price Calc: $291.51
  • Target stock price: $181

[/s2If]
I hope that this makes you a Confident Investor.

By:
On:
In: Around the web
Tagged:
With: 0 Comments

Apple Inc. is expected to report Tuesday that its stockpile of cash has topped a quarter of a trillion dollars. This is an unrivaled hoard that is greater than the market value of either Wal-Mart Stores Inc. or Procter & Gamble Co. It also exceeds the foreign-currency reserves held by the U.K. and Canada combined.

The money, more than 90% of which is stockpiled outside of the U.S., has drawn fresh attention as President Donald Trump has proposed slashing business taxes and granting a one-time tax holiday on corporate cash brought home. Those policies could ratchet up pressure on the tech giant to dole out more money to shareholders or make splashy acquisitions.

Apple’s quarterly results will show the company has doubled its cash in just over 4½ years. In the last three months of 2016, it racked up cash at a rate of about $3.6 million an hour.

Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook early this year said he was eager to bring cash home if tax changes enabled it. Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri said such a move would give Apple flexibility to do more capital returns.

When Apple had its 1990s bankruptcy scare, then CEO Steve Jobs arranged an infusion from Microsoft, setting his resolve to keep reserves for emergencies. Mr. Jobs also believed Apple could better boost its stock price by using its money to develop products than through buybacks or dividends.

The cash topic has long been sensitive at Apple. Mr. Jobs, who saw Apple almost run out of cash after he returned to the company in 1996, frequently told colleagues he was against returning cash to shareholders. He was convinced to do a buyback in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks as the stock market fell, according to a person familiar with the matter. After that, several executives thought the company should continue to do buybacks because the stock price seemed very cheap, this person said.

Apple hired bankers to study the impact of a buyback, according to this person, who said Mr. Jobs rejected the idea before it went anywhere.

Apple’s biggest product, the iPhone, has only supercharged the cash machine. Apple has sold more than 1 billion of the devices in the decade since it was introduced, and today claims 91% of all the profits in the smartphone sector.

Source: Apple’s Cash Hoard Set to Top $250 Billion

By:
On:
In: Around the web
Tagged: , , ,
With: 0 Comments

Ten analysts now predict Amazon’s shares will eclipse the $1,000 mark in the next year, and 13 others have price targets within 5% of that goal. Since I follow the company, I will be putting out my price recommendation in the next couple weeks.

Amazon is now the fourth-largest company in the S&P 500 by market cap, ranking behind only Apple, Microsoft and Google parent Alphabet. Its stock price is now setting new all-time highs above the $900 mark. Incidentally, after adjusting for stock splits, that $400 target on Amazon in 1998 equates to about $67 today.

Amazon’s soaring market value—up more than 50% in the past 12 months to more than $430 billion—allows founder and CEO Jeff Bezos to sell about $1 billion of his shares each year to fund his space exploration venture. But that hasn’t stopped Wall Street from seeing the stars. Ten analysts now predict Amazon’s shares will eclipse the $1,000 mark in the next year, and 13 others have price targets within 5% of that goal, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence.

Still, Amazon today isn’t quite the Amazon of old, trying to survive on razor-thin retail margins. Its fast-growing Web-services business has altered the company’s earnings and cash flow dramatically, as have other offerings. Brian Nowak of Morgan Stanley estimates that Amazon’s Prime membership, advertising and credit card programs generated about $9.3 billion in revenue last year and will grow to about $12.7 billion this year—all with a combined operating margin of around 70%. Helpful, as Amazon still needs all the fuel it can get.

Source: Amazon at $1,000, Wall Street’s Not-So-Bold Call

By:
On:
In: Commentary
Tagged: , , , , , , , ,
With: 0 Comments

NVIDIA Corporation [stckqut]NVDA[/stckqut] is driven by “specialized computing,” that is, the transforming of specific software tasks into physical silicon chips instead of depending on an ever-faster do-it-all CPU, or central processing unit. It has existed in some form or another for decades, but it has lately become the driving force behind pretty much everything cool in technology, from artificial intelligence to self-driving cars. Why? Because those CPUs aren’t getting faster at the pace they once were. Moore’s Law is dying.

Moore’s Law is the notion that, every two years or so, the number of transistors in a chip doubles. Its popular conception is that computers keep getting faster, smaller and more power-efficient. That isn’t happening the way it used to. “It’s not like Moore’s Law is going to hit a brick wall — it’s going to kind of sputter to an end,” says Daniel Reed, chair of computational science and bioinformatics at the University of Iowa.

As Intel and the other chip foundries spend fortunes to keep the wheel turning, chip designers across the industry are finding creative ways to continue at the old pace of Moore’s Law, and in many cases increase device performance even more quickly.

“Most of the advances today come from [chip] design and software,” says Nvidia chief scientist William Dally. “For us it’s been a challenge because we feel under a lot of pressure to constantly deliver twice the performance per generation,” he adds. So far, Nvidia has accomplished that cadence even when the size of the elements on the chip doesn’t change, and the only thing that does is its design, or “architecture.”

Here’s a less-than-exhaustive list of all the applications to which the principle of specialized computing has been applied: Artificial intelligence, image recognition, self-driving cars, virtual reality, bitcoin mining, drones, data centers, even photography. Pretty much every technology company that makes hardware or supplies it — including Apple, Samsung, Amazon, Qualcomm, Nvidia, Broadcom, Intel, Huawei and Xiaomi — is exploiting this phenomenon. Even companies that only produce chips for their own use, including Microsoft, Google, and Facebook, are doing it.

Many years ago, almost all computing was done with the CPU, one thing after another in sequence, says Keith Kressin, a senior vice president at Qualcomm. Gradually, often-used but processor-intensive tasks were diverted to specialized chips. Those tasks were processed in parallel, while the CPU did only what was absolutely required.

These task-focused chips come in a wide variety, reflecting the breadth of their uses, and the lines between them can be blurry. One kind, the graphics processing unit — think Nvidia and gamers — found wider use for tasks to which it’s uniquely suited, including artificial intelligence. Later on, the rise of smartphones created a gigantic need for another type, digital signal processing chips, designed to enhance photography, for example.

Source: How Chip Designers Are Breaking Moore’s Law – WSJ