ADD this: Apple's P/E punishment

Apple’s continuing valuation struggle continues to fascinate. While underperforming on a multiple basis both the S&P 500 and its own historic value, Apple is nearing bargain bin pricing.

To illustrate this further, get the new Asymco Data Download for the iPhone.

You can now use an iPhone to visualize how the owners of the company that created it are being punished.

Apple devices take 41% of mobile traffic in Finland

In first half of 2010, iPhone and iPod touch traffic increased from 33.9% to 41% in Finland. Apple’s devices account for a very small percent of the total phones in use in Nokia’s home country.[1] The analysis was performed by QAim on a sample of 64 million “mobile downloads”.

Google Translate.

Original article in Finnish.

“A wave of iPhone and iPod owners behave differently than others.”

Weird bunch, those iPhone owners…

[1] Installed base of iPhone is small but share of smartphones in recent quarters is above 20%.  See: YLE: Nokia’s smartphone share crumbles in Finland

Apple trading at a discount to the S&P 500

Flush with $45 billion in cash and investments ($50 per share) and no debt, Apple sports an enterprise value of about $190 per share. Compare that to $15 of earnings this year and enough catalysts to make next year’s estimate of $18 seem easily attainable, and you have a stock that actually trades at a discount to the S&P 500.

via Why Apple’s Stock Actually Looks Cheap — Seeking Alpha.

This is not news around here

Breaking Android: How Google's lack of control affects their value chain

A few years ago I read a book called “Breaking Windows” which was the story of the DOJ investigation into Microsoft’s abuse of monopoly. The book was written by a journalist who tried to summarize some of the findings from the published internal emails.

One of the takeaways was the logic of Microsoft’s entry into the Office market. The main internal justification was not that it would be a hugely lucrative new business, but that it was a necessity to the maintenance of the Windows business.

The story was that Lotus, having a huge installed base, could (and did) arbitrarily refuse to upgrade their software to the latest Windows version and in so doing, could kill the franchise. Lotus owned the “killer app” and Continue reading “Breaking Android: How Google's lack of control affects their value chain”

HTC: How Taiwan Compares

Taiwanese operators Chunghwa Telecom and Taiwan Mobile have reported much interest in iPhone 4 pre-orders. Both operators announced at 9pm on 26 August they would open pre-ordering at 10am on 27 August and both operators saw their websites crash, the China Post reports. By noon, some 10,000 users had signed up with Chunghwa Telecom and by 11am Taiwan Mobile had sold out all of its 3,000 iPhone 4 handsets available for pre-ordering. Rival Far EasTone said between 30,000 and 40,000 people signed up for a phone on its website and the operator will notify people that will be able to get the handset.

Taiwan Mobile sells out of iPhone 4 pre-orders – Telecompaper.

The next 100 million iOS devices part II

Brian Marshall, an analyst with investment firm Gleacher & Co., predicts that Apple will have sold 200 million iOS devices by this time next year. He expects the iPhone and iPad to represent 68 percent of gross margins for 2010.

via Apple’s mobile OS could move to more devices.

My expectations for the next 100 million were made in June:

My expectation is that well over 100 million iOS devices will sell during 2011, but even during the next 12 months (2H ’10 and 1H ’11) the total may well reach 100 million, making 200 million installed by June 2011 very likely.

The next 100 million iOS devices

My current expectation is that iPhone and iPad will account for 70 million additional iOS units for the twelve months following this June quarter. This excludes any Apple TV units moving to iOS.

As iOS moves to more of the iPod line-up it’s quite possible that another 30 million iPads with iOS will ship in the same time frame making Marshall’s forecast sound reasonable.

Dogfooding Asymco stats

Frequent readers of this blog know they’re in good company. There have been over 1000 comments in but a few months and, without any qualification, they have all been valuable.

I’ve been delighted that contributing readers are not only civil and polite, but that they almost always move the intellectual level of the blog higher. That’s very gratifying because although one major consideration when publishing is creating a large audience, a high quality audience is much more important. Especially to a site dedicated to elevating analytical discourse.

So, being analytical, I wanted to find out how to characterize the audience and understand the attributes of the readers. Naturally, where appropriate I would like to share that information. I hope to share some stats, perhaps with some interesting highlight, every month.

To kick off, here is a snapshot of one month’s worth of visits to www.asymco.com ranked by operating system.

What is perhaps unexpected is that mobile platforms (iPhone, iPad, Android etc.) generated more views than Windows. When comparing browsers, I also observed that Internet Explorer makes up only about 5% of views. (If that’s not a leading indicator of the intellect of the readers, I don’t know what is.)

Time will tell whether these ratios persist, but so far, it seems that Asymco readers are at least eating their own dogfood.

ADD this: Apple's Balance Sheet

Only on Asymco…

Let your fingers do the walking through Apple’s income statements since FQ1 2005. Glide effortlessly through juicy bits of assets and liabilities. Slide your finger through nineteen quarters of financial goodness.

A special bonus: included is a separate visualization of Apple’s liquid assets: cash, cash equivalents, Short-term marketable securities and Long-term marketable securities. $$$$$!

Brilliant to use and look at on both iPhone, iPad and iPod touch:


Continue reading “ADD this: Apple's Balance Sheet”

All the new screens

There is a rush to market a whole new batch of tablets. Here’s another one.

Yet another tablet

They all bear an outward resemblance to another tablet that was widely panned.

So what strikes me about all of these designs is that they’re basically just shiny rectangular things. There is very little you can do as a vendor to stand out with any particular rendition of a rectangle.

This is also becoming obvious with the mechanical design of smartphones. They are all smaller rectangles with shiny black screens.

Which begs the question: as they are all just screens, shouldn’t what’s on the screen matter more than the screen itself?

It seems only one vendor shows what’s on their screen.