14 DAY TRIAL // A Barron's report has a few new details about Apple's possible upcoming approaches in the portable market, citing Amtech analyst Brian Marshall, who believes Apple will indeed release a netbook later this year.
The analyst's exact words were “despite management’s commentary and investor concerns regarding cannibalization of high-end offerings,” Apple is likely to offer a netbook/tablet product later this year, Barron's reports. The analyst believes that continued expansion of the company’s addressable market is “crucial,” asserting that “the company must” maintain share growth to increase future EPS and “will have to compete in netbooks.”
Marshall also contends that a netbook product won’t necessarily cannibalize Mac sales. “We believe apple [sic] can offer a compelling product which would not be materially cannibalistic to its existing core line-up of notebooks due to a slimmer feature set and less robust functionality,” he told clients in a note on Monday.
Softpedia take: What about iPhone sales? Does Mr. Marshall intend to say that the iPhone will not suffer one bit from the existence of a new and attractive Apple device? In all good faith, the iPhone is quite the tool to surf the web wirelessly, leaving aside eventual hiccups. It's either that, or the Barron's report is missing a few of the analyst's important assertions.
In Marshall's opinion, Apple could well go with a $599 netbook and generate gross margins of 35%-40%, boosting profits by 15 cents a share in calendar 2009 and 40 cents in calendar 2010. The analyst maintains his stance that Apple shares are quite attractive this time around, trading at 12x his pro forma ‘09 EPS estimate of $7.42 a share, with 34% of its market cap in cash, according to the Barron's report.
Softpedia take: How hard is it to see that Apple is 100 times more likely to release a new iPhone, (boasting even more functionality) rather than introduce a netbook, which Steve Jobs himself denied as a priority for the company?
Research firm ChangeWave also claims that demand for netbooks remains firm in a recently released bulletin. According to Changewave, “[Netbooks] are one of the few beneficiaries of this tough spending environment. The latest results reinforce this finding ... Among respondents who have bought a laptop in the past 90 days, 17% say it was a Netbook – better than one in every six laptops purchased during this time period,” Changewave figures have shown. “Looking ahead, 18% say the laptop they plan on buying in the next 90 days will be a Netbook – which is 4-pts higher than in January,” reads the PDF report.
So, the netbook is popular, no doubt about it. BUT, Changewave also notes that, while Acer, ASUS, Hewlett-Packard and Dell are the only ones leading the Netbook market, Apple may have indirectly tapped that market with its iPhone. We're certainly inclined to go by this theory for now. Apple hasn't dropped any netbook / tablet hints whatsoever. In fact, it has done nothing but deny such products.
So, until Apple's next keynote address, who thinks Apple is cooking up a netbook?