Friday, March 13, 2020

Skipping Detailed Quarterly Estimates for Rest of FY 2020


In memory of Turley Muller. You got this one pal.

As of Friday's close of $277.97, AAPL is trading at a 18.0x multiple on my FY21 EPS estimate (16.9x when excluding FY21 net cash and dividends).

I have no way of figuring out the impact to global demand from various COVID-19 containment and mitigation policies in over 130 countries, neither today nor in a month when I would normally publish these estimates. In fact, I don't think even Apple itself can, so I'm not expecting them to provide guidance for next quarter.

I don't think Chinese manufacturing was significantly affected beyond a month or so, but the worldwide network of component supply dependencies and the demand uncertainty probably means Apple should be cautious in ramping production of existing and new products until most of the world has gone through this disruption. The flip side is a likely boost to Services revenue and possibly overall margins so long as HW product margins are not affected too much. Also, since demand is not destroyed but postponed, the rebound next year should be quite impressive, even spilling into 2022.