Year 2013 will be a very important and eventful one in the land of Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) as the company is expected to move from an annual product upgrade cycle to a six-monthly one, giving Apple’s stock a big boost, market experts told CNBC on Monday.
“We’re on the cusp of an enormous product upgrade cycle and we think Apple’s earnings are going to be dynamite in the 4th quarter,” said Channing Smith, co-manager of the Capital Advisors Growth Fund, on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street”.
Smith said he expects Apple’s stock to grow 20% over the next few years and retest its all time highs of $705.07, achieved just ahead of Apple’s iPhone 5 launch in September, 2012.
“If you think Apple’s franchise is in trouble, then you sell the stock. We don’t think that’s the case,” Smith said, adding that Apple earnings are going to surprise on the upside come January.
Meanwhile, Eric Jackson, founder of Ironfire Capital LLC, said besides speeding up the product upgrade cycle for the iPhone series to a six month cycle instead of a 12 month cycle, Apple is expected to introduce some new products in FY 2013, including the much-anticipated “iTV” slated for November, and possibly even an iCar system, which would control navigation and entertainment in automobiles.
“I think Apple always vacillates between the two extremes of fear and greed, and right now I think we are kind of hitting that max fear point, with people all worried about margins and what the future products will be,” Jackson said, adding that “what only kind of shatters that fear and gets people greedy again – what led to the big run up this year [2012] – is when people realize that the current product portfolio is going to be much bigger than expected.”
Apple shares closed at $532.17 on Monday, up more than $22, or 4.43%, to $532.17.
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What makes Apple hard to gauge for people who don’t understand the technology is that the products are so far ahead of their competition, they appear to be different kinds of products:
• the Mac is not a PC like an HP or Dell aystem, it is the last remaining Unix workstation, that is why it represents 90% of the computer sales at $999 and up — key technology is Unix and the Mac content creation platform
• iPad is not a media player or book reader like Kindle Fire, it is a next-generation PC, that is why it killed the PC netbook and took 30% of the PC market in only 2 years — key technology is real native C/C++ PC apps, which Kindle Fire and other Android-based tablets do not have
• iPhone is not a phone, it is a pocket-sized PC, it runs the same real native C/C++ PC apps as iPad — other phones do not have that
Other makers try to make their products look like Apple products to piggyback on Apple’s very high consumer desirability, but it is just a paint job — skin deep. Investors should not be fooled by this. Apple has the only Unix/content-creation platform, the only next-generation PC, and the only pocket-sized PC. That is why they continue to grow. They have totally unique technology that you can’t get anywhere else. The way the products look is a free extra. The service and support is a free extra. You are buying an iPad or iPhone for real PC apps and a Mac for workstation apps. There is no other workstation vendor anymore, and the only other PC app platform (Windows) is welded to giant Intel chips, and cannot run on iPad and iPhone -type devices, and has almost no support for touch or App Store -type app installs. There is a next-generation Windows PC platform brewing, but it is not even room temperature yet. They chose a slow transition approach with multiple hardware vendors that is going to take many years to implement, by which time iPad will be outselling Windows PC’s.
In short, you are crazy to sell APPL. Everybody else is many years behind them, and nobody is even really trying to compete with them. Nobody else has the mission statement to just build great computing devices. Others are building ad platforms or hardware platforms or content platforms that may or may not result in a good device, and never result in a great one. Apple will be even more dominant in 2020 than now. They will have 3rd party factories in dozens of countries instead of the current 3 or 4.