Still unknown: Whether the softening demand for computers that Dell warned about last week is spilling over to Apple, HP, and the rest of the tech industry.
Maybe not for Apple (AAPL), says Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster, who jacked his estimates for Apple's September quarter this morning. Munster thinks Apple will post $1.17 of EPS on $8.37 billion of sales this quarter, higher than the Street's $1.11 EPS, $8.07 billion revenue consensus. He's basing this on solid growth rates in Mac and iPod sales as reported by NPD Group; Munster thinks Apple will sell 2.8 million Macs this quarter, 11 million iPods, and 5 million iPhones.
Meanwhile, Morgan Stanley is taking a more cautious view. The bank whacked price targets and estimates for nine tech hardware companies this morning, including Apple, Dell (DELL), EMC (EMC), HP (HPQ), and IBM, citing "economic realities" including a "fragile consumer," slower commercial, enterprise, and government spending -- and a stronger U.S. dollar.
Expect to hear more about a stronger dollar having a negative impact on U.S. companies that do a lot of business overseas. Citi's Mark Mahaney estimates that positive foreign exchange trends -- a weak U.S. dollar -- contributed a significant amount of revenue growth to Internet companies. For Google and eBay, that could be as much as 7% year-over-year revenue growth, he notes.
But now that the dollar has been getting stronger - it bottomed out this summer and has been creeping back up -- it will erase some of those trends. That's led Mahaney to trim second-half and 2009 revenue and EPS estimates by 4% to 5% for eBay, Amazon, Google, Yahoo, Priceline, and Expedia.
See Also:
Dell CFO: August 'Very Weak', September Awful, Too
Hey, Dell, Does Your Business Just Suck, Or Is Everyone Else Lying?
Apple Mac Sales Growth Dives In August. Hope Those New MacBooks Show Up In October
