In a note to clients — as reported by “Business Insider” (http://macte.ch/lB0q0) — Goldman Sachs analyst Bill Shope has raised his target price on Apple from US$700 to $750, saying the company’s latest earnings report next week will be incredibly good.
He also says recent concerns about Apple’s stock don’t make sense. Among them reports that carriers are going to cut their iPhone subsidies.
“We believe this concern is overblown. While some carriers will attempt to reduce the subsidy burden and tighten upgrade policies, many more will likely hold steady to capture share from the latter camp,” Shope says. ” In the end, all carriers are attempting to migrate their installed bases from feature phones to data-centric smartphones, and amid this transition, we think the risk of losing market share in the iPhone sub-segment is likely to be too great to ignore. On a shorter-term basis, we believe the building rhetoric for lower subsidies and tighter upgrade policies is likely to fade to a whimper, as vendors prepare their marketing strategies for the iPhone 5 refresh later this year.”
When it comes to Macs, the analyst says growth will be fairly lackluster this quarter, as both sell-in and sell-through pull back ahead of a broad Mac refresh. Shope thinks that annual unit growth will come in at 14%, versus last quarter’s 26% growth.
