Today at 2 pm Pacific (that’s 5 pm Eastern), Cupertino will be holding its fourth quarter financial conference call with investors, analysts, and journalists alike.
Wanna listen in yourself? The audio feed will be here.
So what’s the vibe?
As Macworld’s own Philip Michaels wrote yesterday:
Analysts are looking for Apple to report earnings of $1.11 per share for the fourth quarter on $8.05 billion in revenue, according to online collections of analyst estimates. Those numbers would improve upon the 2007 fourth-quarter tallies of $1.01 earnings per share and $6.22 billion in revenue by 10 percent and 29 percent, respectively. It would also top Apple’s own projections—in July, [chief financial officer Peter] Oppenheimer said the company expected to earn $1 per share on sales of $7.8 billion for the fourth quarter.
However, as Forbes.com’s Brian Caulfield points out, Apple consistently—gloomy economic times or not—usually underestimates its earnings anyway.
Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster has done the math. Over the last eight quarters, on average, Munster figures Apple has guided its earnings per share 9% below the consensus analyst estimate and its sales 4% below estimates.Apple then goes on to beat the original earnings estimate by 27% and sales estimates by 4%.
“In other words,” Munster wrote in a note to investors Monday. “Apple guides conservatively.”
Caulfield concludes:
How will Apple do going forward? Investors betting that Apple will report earnings of $1.5 billion, or $1.65 per share, on sales of $10.6 billion for the quarter ending in December. Don’t panic unless Oppenheimer serves up numbers well below those marks.
Either way, we’ll have liveblog coverage at the mothership, same bat-time, same bat-RSS-feed.
Hmm...
How can you usually be consistent? You either are or you aren't, surely?