Category Archives: Wireless

AAPL’s 2Q13–some answers, still some questions

April 24, 2013 By in earnings conference calls, Industry Analysis, internet, Stock ideas, Technology, Wireless Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

the report

After the New York close yesterday AAPL reported its 2Q13 earnings results (AAPL’s fiscal year ends in September).  Revenues were $43.6 billion, up 9% year-on-year.  EPS, however, were down 18% yoy, at $10.09.   The latter figure was slightly ahead of the Wall Street analyst consensus of $9.97, a number that been ratcheting down in recent weeks.

The company guided to flattish sales in 3Q13, with mild margin contraction.

It announced a 15% increase in the quarterly dividend to $3.05 a share, meaning a current dividend yield of just over 3%.

APPL also intends to buy back $60 billion in stock before the end of calendar 2015.  That would be 15% of the company at current prices.  AAPL now has $147 billion in cash, of which $104 billion is held outside the US.  It won’t touch the foreign holdings for the buyback.  Instead, it will issue bonds in the US to get the money it needs.

This piece of financial engineering will have two impacts.  It will boost the growth rate of EPS by at least an additional 5 percentage points per year.    And the financial leverage will increase AAPL’s return on equity from its already heady 25%+.

The stock was initially up about 5% on this news.  Then, during the conference call, AAPL management said it won’t have its next new product launch until fall.  The gains evaporated and were replaced by a slight loss.

what’s going on

Two factors:

margin erosion

1. smartphones

As I see it (remember, AAPL is pretty opaque), the emergence of Samsung as a competitor in the high end of the smartphone market,where AAPL makes its biggest profits, has caused that segment to mature faster than AAPL had expected.  Unit volume growth is now coming mainly from emerging markets, where the price of AAPL’s cutting-edge phones is too high.  The company is selling older models (iPhone4s) there, at discount prices–and therefore reduced margins.

2. tablets

A year ago, it looked to me like 2/3 of AAPL’s tablet volume was from its newest model iPads.  Today, unit volumes are much higher, but less than a quarter are the newest 10″ iPads.  The rest is a combination of iPad minis (a runaway success) and bulk sales of iPad2s to institutions.   Both of the latter are at lower margins.

My guess is that we’re at or near a gross margin low point now.

continuing PE multiple contraction

The maturing of the smartphone market has been actively discussed in the financial community for a couple of years.  In my view, worry about this possibility is the main reason that, despite booming sales and earnings, the price earnings multiple on AAPL’s stock had contracted from the high teens to around 12 by the second half of last year.  Relative to the market, the multiple went from a premium of 25% to a discount of 25% over the same time period.

Unpleasant for holders, maybe, but understandable.

Over the past 6-8 months, however, the multiple has contracted further, both in absolute terms (to under 10) and relative (to a discount of more than 40%).  In fact, yesterday’s Wall Street Journal had an article comparing AAPL with HWP and DELL.  That’s kind of like comparing night and day–the single thing I can see that ties AAPL to these two truly terrible companies is the similarity of their price earnings multiples.

Yes, when fast growers begin to slow down, the PE contracts, often violently.  And because a good portion of the contraction is an emotional thing, the multiple shrinkage is usually greater than one would expect.  But even seeing this process over and over, I didn’t imagine that a fundamentally sound company like AAPL could be trading at 9x in a market trading at 15x.

where to from here?

Note, first, that I’ve been wrong about the stock for a while.

I think the stock buyback makes economic sense, and it will probably at least stabilize the AAPL stock price.  I don’t think the addition of debt to the capital structure will have any effect.

It may be a big stretch, but to me the 15% dividend increase says that’s what AAPL’s board expects its earnings growth rate over the next few years to be, financial engineering aside.  I think that’s a reasonable assumption, and could be conservative.

AAPL management would do the most for its stock by being more forthright with investors about current business challenges and how it plans to deal with them.  That’s not likely, however, if the 2Q13 earnings call is any indication.

That leaves holders waiting for new product announcements–and subsequent earnings acceleration–at summer’s end.

 

what do gold and AAPL have in common?

April 22, 2013 By in Gold, hedge funds, Recent Market Action, Stock ideas, Technology, Wireless Tags: , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

common factors

–they’re both large positive bets (large holdings) of hedge funds–and of many retail investors

–both have delivered weak performance over the past year, after extended periods of substantial gains.  And the losses have occurred during a time of generally stable conditions for the world economy, with ample liquidity and strong inflows of money into financial products

–recent trading in both seems to me to be giving signs of forced or distressed selling

are these factors connected?  

It’s hard to know, since global hedge fund disclosure is incomplete–and there’s ample evidence that what disclosure there is can’t be relied on.  However, I think it’s reasonable to assume they are.

if so, what does this imply?

In my experience, a professional investor goes through a three-step process as he realizes he’s made a mistake–or that his previously good idea is no longer working.  He:

–stops adding to the position when new money comes in, effectively shrinking its relative size,

–begins to sell, to further lessen the negative effect of the position on performance, and

–accelerates the selling when the position is small enough the extra visibility and extra downward pressure on price make little difference.

A professional investor can go through these states in the blink of an eye, or it can take a long period of time. A lot depends on style, self-awareness and how ugly the underperformance is.  Anyone who operates on margin may also get additional feedback from his lenders.

Many retail investors, in my experience, just panic–very close to the bottom.

Recent price action in gold and in AAPL strike me as Stage-Three end-game activity–some combination of panic, response to margin calls and/or dumping of the remainders of positions being sold over long periods.

is this an opportunity to buy?

gold: 

For me, the answer here is easy.  It’s “No.”  The key supply-demand issue is whether central banks in emerging markets will continue to buy gold in the aggressive way they have done over the past several years.  I have no idea.  So I’m clearly the “dumb money” in this arena–the strongest reason there is to stay away.

AAPL:

We’ll have more information tomorrow, after AAPL reports its latest quarterly earnings.

The stock is now trading at less than 9x historic earnings and yielding 2.7%.  The shares have underperformed the S&P 500 by more than 50 percentage points since last September.

The company has no debt and its cash holdings are approaching almost half the market cap.

If there’s anything “wrong” with the stock, it’s that its fall from grace has been so extreme.  That prompts the question, “What must sellers know that I don’t?”

How do you overcome aversion, based on an extended decline, to a stock that looks like a $100 bill lying on the street?  The first step, I think, is to look for signs that the waves of selling that have pummeled AAPL are over.   This means having AAPL announce bad news and have the stock go up, rather than sell of further.  That’s why tomorrow’s earnings report may be important.

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David Einhorn and Apple (AAPL)

February 7, 2013 By in Industry Analysis, Recent Market Action, Stock ideas, Technology, Wireless Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

It’s been a long day and I’ve gotten off to a late start.

the proposal

Hedge fund manager David Einhorn, who owns on behalf of his clients (so the internet tells me) over a million AAPL shares, has proposed to the company that it issue a perpetual (meaning it never comes due, and is therefore never redeemed) preferred stock with a total face value of $50 billion, paying a dividend of $2 per year.  The stock would be distributed for free to existing AAPL shareholders.

He’s apparently been discussing this idea with AAPL management since last May.

The proposal is a clever, novel twist on a finance truism   …namely, that if a security is a composite of disparate elements, like growth businesses and value ones, separating the two will increase the valuation of each.

The idea is that if a firm is composed of, say, mobile semiconductor design and cement mixing, growth investors will love the first and hate the second.  The opposite with value investors.  So either group will demand payment, in the form of a lower price earnings multiple, for being forced to take the part they don’t like or want.  Therefore, if you split the two parts up, the multiple on both will rise.

In the AAPL case, the potential split is between a security with earnings growth potential and one solely dependent on income/cash flow generation.

AAPL’s reaction to Einhorn

AAPL’s reaction has been to ask shareholders to vote at the next general meeting to change the company charter to explicitly ban the kind of preferred Einhorn wants.

…Einhorn’s

Einhorn’s reaction to that has been to sue, to seek publicity and to take his own case to shareholders.

my take

The story is nowhere as simple as this.  There’s lots of stuff going on behind the scenes.  Details tomorrow.

Apple(AAPL)’s 1Q13 earnings

January 24, 2013 By in earnings conference calls, Stock ideas, Technology, Wireless Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

the report

After the close yesterday AAPL announced its 1Q13 earnings results (the company’s fiscal year ends in October).  AAPL earned $13.81 per share on revenues of $54.5 billion, both all-time records.  Sales were up 18% year on year, EPS were down by $.06.  EPS exceeded the Wall Street consensus by a little.  Revenues were a tiny bit lower.

Note that 1Q13 had 13 weeks in it, 1Q12 had 14.  On an apples to apples basis, sales would have been up by about 25% and eps would have shown a gain of 10%+, I think.

new guidance

AAPL also announced it was changing the way it would give forward-looking earnings guidance–and provided the first figures using the new method.  Under Steve Jobs, the company gave what inevitably proved ludicrously low single-number suggestions about what its sales, margins and EPS for the following quarter would be.  I’m not positive AAPL intended its “guidance” to be funny, but the process ended up being almost a parody of the way most other companies proceed.  My strong impression is that AAPL knew the figures it suggested were wildly inaccurate.

Under Tim Cook, AAPL has decided to become a bit more conventional.  During the conference call the CFO said that 2Q13 revenue will likely be $41 billion – $43 billion.  Gross margin will be between 37.5% and 38.5%, operating expenses $3.8 billion – $3.9 billion.  Other income will be about $350 million and the tax rate will be around 26%.  Unlike the past, no EPS figure was given.

All that would imply EPS of around $10 for 2Q13–a figure substantially below the brokerage house consensus of $11.50.  Of course, until we have actuals to compare with we won’t know whether the new company guidance protocol is intended to be any more accurate than the old.

Nothing on the call thrilled Wall Street.  As I’m writing this in mid-afternoon, AAPL shares are down about 12% in an otherwise flat market.

details

The iPhone is fine.  Units were up 29% yoy (30%+, apples to apples), revenues up 28%.   iPhone 5 was capacity constrained for most of the quarter, iPhone 4 for the entire period.  So sales could have been higher.  Despite this, sales were in line with the growth of the smartphone industry. Remember, too, that smartphones are AAPL’s main business, comprising 60% of revenues and more than 2/3 of operating profit.  So this is the business that counts.

two points of weakness

Macs (10% of sales)

AAPL was capacity constrained with new iMacs.  AAPL’s PC unit volume was down 22% yoy (-15% is probably a better apples to apples number), in a market that declined by 6%, however. So having more iMacs on the shelves would have affected the degree of market underperformance, not the fact.   Higher unit selling prices meant that revenue declined by about 10% ata.

iPads (20% of sales)

Units were up 48% yoy (60% ata). That’s good.   But revenues were up only 22% (30%? ata).  That’s bad.

Yoy the average selling price of iPads in total (minis, iPad 2s and the newest models) dropped from $568 in 1Q12 to $467 during 1Q13.  In other words, during the year AAPL saw a massive move away from its flagship tablet offering toward cheaper models.  My back of the envelope guess is that the company sold around 13 million newest model iPads during the 2011 holiday season   …and only about half as many this time around.

Significance?

A while ago, AAPL decided to move its computer line upmarket.  My guess is that it’s now suffering from a cyclical falloff in demand caused by macroeconomic weakness–and made somewhat worse by the high price points.

The iPad numbers say to me that the tablet market is already quickly evolving away from the original high profit margin format of the original iPad, either toward a $400 price point for corporate/ education use and a $200-$300 price for consumers.  If I’m correct, the tablet market may end up being much bigger than previously thought, but it won’t follow anything like the high profit trajectory of the smartphone.  Note, too, that mini production was capacity constrained during the quarter.  The average unit price might have even been lower if AAPL had been able to satisfy all its potential mini customers.

my take

The tablet numbers are the only disturbing thing I found in the APPL quarterly information.  From what I’ve read, I’m not sure anyone else has noticed, however.  But both in tablets and Macs, AAPL has given the first hints that even it can be subject to business cycle forces.  That’s another way of saying that the company’s peak earnings acceleration phase may be behind it.

From a stock market point of view, however, investors have been discounting the arrival of this day (incorrectly, until now) for a half-decade.  AAPL has $137 billion in cash, about a third of its market capitalization, and no debt.  If we assume the company can earn $50 a share this year, it’s trading a 9x earnings, while growing at a bit less than 15% in weak economic times.  Better economic times should move that growth rate north.  Ex cash, AAPL shares are trading at 6x.  That’s crazy low.

where will the buyers come from?

I’ve read somewhere recently that over 3/4 of all equity mutual funds in the US have AAPL as one of their top few positions.  Equity oriented hedge funds have been up to their ears in the stock for a long time.

Two reasons why:

–it’s been a great stock to own for almost ten years, and

–at its peak, AAPL represented 10% of the IT sector’s market cap and 5% of the S&P 500′s.  Therefore, any professional concerned with outperforming an index would be forced to establish at least a market weighting in the stock in his portfolio, if for no other reason than to protect himself from losing ground to a surging AAPL stock price.

So, who’s left to buy?  No one.

What I’ve just written sounds pretty stupid, but it’s a situation that occurs often in smaller markets where one or two stocks dominate the index.  We just haven’t seen it in the US during my lifetime.

A common strategy in these markets is to neutralize the whales (have a market weighting) and try to achieve outperformance elsewhere. So virtually everyone already owns all the stock he ever intends to own.   The result is that surprisingly small amounts of buying and selling can move the giants a long way.

This may be happening with AAPL.  Certainly, in my opinion, the fundamentals don’t warrant the current low price.  But it’s anyone’s guess how long the current malaise may last.

Intel’s 4Q12–waiting for the upturn

January 18, 2013 By in earnings conference calls, Industry Analysis, internet, Recent Market Action, semiconductor manufacturing, Stock ideas, Technology, Wireless Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

the report

Yesterday afternoon, INTC reported earnings results for 4Q and full year 2012.  For the quarter, INTC made $.51 per share on revenue of $13.5 billion.  Revenues were down 3% year-on-year, and flat sequentially during a normally seasonally strong quarter.   EPS were off 24% vs. 4Q11.  The profit figures were considerably better, however, than the Wall Street analysts’ consensus of $.45.

For the full year 2012, INTC’s revenues were down by 1% yoy, at $53.3 billion.  EPS were down by 10%, at $2.24.

INTC also gave initial guidance for 2013 yesterday–basically for a not much more than flattish year, with considerably better performance during the second half than in the first.

The stock rose initially as traders saw the better than expected quarterly EPS, only to fall by 5% then they read down the page to the 2013 guidance.  As I’m writing this on Friday morning, INTC shares are down more than 6%.

the details

INTC’s overall business began to decelerate in the second half.  Weakness continued through 4Q.

As worldwide economic growth slowed, corporations responded by cutting spending on servers and PCs.  PC demand from individuals in emerging markets, who had been pillars of strength through the first half, began to sag as well.  Cloud computing everywhere and servers in China were exceptions to this trend.  Weakness was especially acute at the bottom of the PC market.

INTC’s customers spent 4Q working down the inventories of PCs, especially Windows 7 machines, that they already had on hand, rather than buying lots more chips from INTC and making new ones.  Knowing this was likely to happen, INTC shuttered some older production lines earlier than expected and using many of the machines to accelerate development of state-of-the-art 14 nm chips.  These moves (which I think were the right things to do) created one-time changes that whacked 5.5 percentage points from INTC’s gross margin during the quarter (plant writeoffs + startup expenses), clipping about $.10 a share from EPS.

where to from here?

INTC expects an improving world economy to give a boost to its general corporate server business and to its burgeoning PC business in emerging economies as 2013 progresses.

The company also thinks that the personal computing market among affluent individual customers will bifurcate into a large smartphone/7″ tablet market and a second one, consisting of 10″ and larger devices.  It thinks the latter market–ultrabooks, convertibles, tablets–will demand the full speed and computing power of traditional PCs, but in increasingly lighter, thinner, less power-hungry forms   …and that INTC chips will be the only ones able to satisfy these needs.  The first proof of this thesis will likely come late this year.

Significant cellphone market penetration will be a 2014 story, at the earliest.

paid to wait?

That’s the Wall Street cliché about poor-performing high-dividend stocks–that you’re being “paid to wait” for good things to happen.  In the INTC case, I’m content for now to do so.

I must admit, though, that I had expected the good news to be, if not knocking at the door, at least to be walking up the street toward my house, by now.  I don’t think INTC management did much to disabuse me of that view, either.  I don’t mean to say that they misled me;  rather, I suspect this is turning out to be a much longer haul than they expected, too.

Having said that, INTC shares are for me becoming the kind of uncomfortable question that every professional portfolio manager has to deal with sooner or later.  On the one hand, every time you trade you think you know more than the people on the other side of the bargain.  This is somewhat delusional because, on the other hand, experience shows that even Hall of Fame players are wrong at least four times out of ten.

One thing I’ve learned over the years is that if my brain is telling me one thing and the charts are telling me another, the worst decision I can make is to add to a full position (which is what INTC is for me).  The next worst would be to have INTC be one of my two or three largest positions (it isn’t).  So I’m going to sit on my hands for now.

 

 

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