Apple iPhone margins 55 pct, shares rise: ISuppli
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The most expensive iPhone model could deliver profit margins of more than 55 percent for Apple Inc. , according to iSuppli, which examined the components of the widely anticipated device.
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(InfoWorld) - When Apple launches the iPhone on Friday, it is set to get a jump on its competitors and spark a flurry of new phone designs, regardless of how well the device actually sells. By introducing a combined smartphone, mobile e-mail platform, and MP3 music player with a touchscreen interface, Apple has sent other hardware vendors running back to their drawing boards. And the company has enjoyed positive press coverage since CEO Steve Jobs announced the iPhone in January, analysts said. Apple is feeding the fire with strong advertising in its retail stores. On Monday, staffers at the Apple store in the Cambridgeside Galleria mall in Cambridge, Massachusetts, wore black T-shirts with the logo "the wait is almost over," printed above an image of a calendar page for Friday, June 29. iPhone anticipation has already created a "halo effect" of increased sales for Apple's notebook and desktop PCs, an impact that is likely to increase after the launch, according to a report from ChangeWave Research. Apple posted a strong profit for the last period despite struggling with a U.S. federal investigation into executives backdating their stock options. In April,Â Apple beat Wall Street expectations by posting a profit of $770 million for the second quarter, an 88 percent rise from that period last year. Because the company has already garnered media attention and a sales boost from iPhone demand, Apple will suffer little damage even if the device is a flop in retail sales, one analyst said. "No way Apple will seriously impact Nokia or Motorola or Samsung, who combined sell over a billion phones a year. But if Apple manages to sell several million, then that is probably pretty good for their overall business," said analyst Jack Gold, founder of the research firm J. Gold Associates. "I think the potential gold mine is in the services, not the phone hardware." The iPhone will bring new subscribers to Apple's iTunes online music store, and Apple could make more money if it decides to launch future wireless mobile products like navigation, location-based services, VoIP telephony, and video streaming, Gold said. In the meantime, Apple has already given a headache to competitors scurrying to catch up, such as Motorola, Samsung, and LG Electronics. Even vendors with comparable products -- like Nokia's N Series and High Tech Computer's HTC Touch phones -- lack Apple's cachet and will have trouble competing on store shelves, he said. In fact, some experts are warning that iPhone sales could fall short of Apple's high expectations. Their criticism includes potential user confusion about Apple's "virtual keyboard," a battery that may fade too fast and is not user-replaceable, andÂ resistance by some corporate IT departmentsÂ to the added expense and security risk of supporting mobile e-mail networks in addition to the servers they use to support Research in Motion's BlackBerry device. Those drawbacks could limit the iPhone's success in the business market, said Shaw Wu, an analyst with American Technology Research. Still, the iPhone will be popular with those who tend to use smartphones more by scrolling through menus than typing long messages and who have made Apple's iPod music player a huge hit despite similar concerns about its battery, Wu said. Likewise, consumers will likely shrug off corporate security concerns and use mobile e-mail systems from GoogleÂ and Yahoo. In the long run, Apple will use the iPhone to beat its competitors in creating an end-to-end channel for digital media, spanning from Mac PCs to the mobile iPod music player, iTunes online store, and Apple TV set-top box for sharing Internet and television video content. The only thing Apple could do to spread that net even wider would be to offer iPhone models at less than the current $499 for a 4GB version and $599 for the 8GB, Wu said.
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Apple announced on Wednesday that its quarterly profit more than doubled because of continued strong sales of iPod music players, beating Wall Street estimates by a wide margin
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(InfoWorld) - Each 8GB iPhone sold by Apple Inc. puts $333 more in the till than the device cost to build, a market research company said Tuesday after tearing apart the new phone. iSuppli calculated the bill of materials and manufacturing costs of the $599 8GB iPhone as $263.83, giving Apple a profit margin of nearly 56 percent on the device. The tear-down analysis only spells out what's inside the iPhone, component prices, and estimated cost to make; it doesn't take into account research and development or marketing costs. Earlier this year and before iPhones were actually available, iSuppli had pegged the cost at $264.85. As other tear-down artists have done, iSuppli named the suppliers of iPhone components. Infineon Technologies, a German semiconductor supplier, provided much of the core communications capabilities of the device, including the digital baseband, radio frequency transceiver, and power management chips, said iSuppli. Infineon's parts accounted for $15.25 of the iPhone's bill of materials, or 6.1 percent of the total. Samsung, however, was the biggest winner, said iSuppli, with $76.25 in bill of materials, or 30.5 percent of the phone's total. Samsung contributed the applications processor -- which includes an ARM RISC core -- as well as the iPhone's NAND flash memory and dynamic RAM. The exact same NAND flash is also used in the 8GB iPod nano, said rival tear-down research company Semiconductor Insights on Monday (watch YouTube video), just one of several common components that let Apple apply some of its existing design expertise to the new gizmo. Among iSuppli's other findings: * Balda, a German firm, gets credit for the iPhone's touchscreen module. iSuppli priced the module at $27, or 10.8 percent of the total. * The display itself costs an estimated $24.50 and comes from multiple sources, including Epson, Sharp, and Toshiba Matsushita Display Technology. * National Semiconductor contributed one chip, a $1.50 serial display interface, but it was still singled out by iSuppli because National Semiconductor has never had a part inside an iPod. The only difference between the $499 4GB iPhone and its more expensive 8GB sibling is the amount of NAND flash memory and the $24 cost increase from 4GB to 8GB. By that accounting, the total bill of materials of the 4GB iPhone is $239.83, putting Apple's margin at almost 52 percent for the cheaper model. Most buyers, however, want the 8GB iPhone, said analysts Monday. ISuppli conducts tear downs on most Apple gear, but it doesn't always find such high margins over bill-of-materials costs. Last month, for example, iSuppli estimated the $299 Apple TV's bill of materials at $237, a margin of 20 percent.
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AT&T Inc.  sold almost all  its initial stock of Apple Inc.&#39;s  iPhone within hours  of the device going on sale, an AT&T spokesman said on  Saturday.
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Apple Computer Inc. AAPL.O shares  jumped as much as 16 percent on Monday, to their highest level  in more than 4 years, after a Wall Street analyst nearly  doubled his price target on the stock.
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Apple Inc  beat Wall Street targets with a 67 percent rise in quarterly profit on Monday, led by strong sales of its Macintosh computers and a big first full quarter from the iPhone, sending its shares up more than 5 percent.
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Apple Inc  beat Wall  Street targets with a 67 percent rise in quarterly profit on  Monday, led by strong sales of its Macintosh computers and a  big first full quarter from the iPhone, sending its shares up  nearly 6 percent.
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Shares of Apple Inc.  rose  more than 4 percent to an all-time high on Thursday as  investors bet on strong demand for its media-playing iPhone and  speculation mounted over plans to sell the device in Europe.
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Investors appeared to second the optimistic views on Apple Computer's (AAPL) sales expressed by Wall Street analysts on Dec. 13. Apple's shares climbed 3.4% to $89.05 per share in late trading on the Nasdaq.
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The telephone company solidly beat Wall Streetâs forecasts as wireless data use soared, but its initial report on iPhone signups sent Appleâs shares down sharply.
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Apple's iPhone became the biggest selling smartphone in the U.S. in July, according to iSuppli.
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Deutsche Telekom's  mobile  phone division, T-Mobile, said on Wednesday it won a deal to  sell Apple's  iPhone and said the price would be 399  euros ($558), as reported last week by Reuters.
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SAN JOSE, Calif.  -- Shares of Apple Inc. hit a new all-time trading high Tuesday after an analyst speculated that the company would come out with a less expensive, smaller iPhone later this year.
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Can St. Steve move up a plane? Scepticism about the launch of the Apple iPhone is growing, and it isn't helping the Apple share price. What a coincidence that exactly as things get tougher in the stock market, rumours start appearing that will "cause a 40 per cent premium on the Apple share price"!â¦
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Blog: A quantitative estimate of Apple's weekend iPhone sales has been released, surpassing some of the more optimistic analysts last week.
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Apple Inc. reported Tuesday its best quarter ever as profits soared to 1.58 billion dollars in the last three months of 2007 on demand for its Macintosh computers, iPhones and iPods.