News tagged ‘sales’

Barclays’ analyst Ben Reitzes just visited with Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer and CEO Tim Cook in a meeting where they discussed Amazon’s new low priced Kindle Fire tablet running on Android. According to his research note, (via Business Insider), Apple’s executives welcome the launch of the Kindle Fire on the market as it will contribute to further fragmentation of the Android ecosystem. And the more fragmentation of Android ecosystem, the better for Apple, as more customers will turn to stable Apple platform. The Kindle Fire runs on Android and at the same time it has been modified by Amazon to interact with its services and products.

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Two months has already gone since the moment when Tim Cook was appointed Apple’s CEO. The Wall Street Journal decided to take a look at his management strategy and found out some differences between his style and that of Steve Jobs.

In recent weeks, Mr. Cook has tended to administrative matters that never interested Mr. Jobs, such as promotions and corporate reporting structures, according to people familiar with the matter. The new chief executive, 50 years old, has also been more communicative with employees than his predecessor, sending a variety of company-wide emails while addressing Apple employees as "Team," people close to the company said.

Cook made significant changes in Apple’s education division. As a result the division was divided into marketing and sales divisions and then reintegrated with the company's broader arms focused on those aspects of the business. Another corporate-level change is recently-announced charitable matching program that calls for Apple to match employee donations up to $10,000 per year, a change from the Jobs who was reportedly against giving money away. Cook seems to recognize quickly expertise and achievements of his employees, and ready to promote them, such as with the promotion of Eddy Cue.

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The Next Web reported that South Korea had removed a ban blocking App Store games a week before the iPhone 4S launch. Korea opened up the local App Store earlier today. The Store had been closed for about two years. Of course, such ban cannot but affect Korean game developers. The selection of available games in the Korean App Store is limited for now, but it is expected to improve quickly.

The iPhone 4S is believed to face with tough competition in the region from the local giant Samsung, especially from the latest Galaxy Nexus. But Apple will obviously achieve success, predicting huge demand for their newest smartphone. Moreover, worldwide sales of the iPhone 4S are breaking all records. In the first three days of availability Apple sold four million units.

Nevertheless, Samsung intends to target Apple with new patent suits after iPhone 4S launch in Korea, even despite the fact that all their previous attempts were unsuccessful.

Net Applications have published its latest data on web traffic from mobile devices, which show that Apple’s iOS took advantage of iPhone 4S launch and continuous iPad momentum to reach a 60% share of mobile web traffic. During October iOS has accounted for  61.64% of the web traffic.

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Rumors have it that there are Apple TVs that can run Hulu Plus app inside Apple. The app is full-featured and can be rolled out to Apple TV users. Actually, the app has been completed at least month ago, but there are some political issues standing in the way of launching Hulu Plus for Apple TV. Apple appears to have some consideration that the Hulu Plus could decrease iTunes TV sales.

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Last week, Apple released its annual financial report for fiscal 2011, revealing some interesting facts. Moreover, the report includes some Apple's planned capital expenditures for fiscal 2012

The Company’s capital expenditures were $4.6 billion during 2011, consisting of approximately $614 million for retail store facilities and $4.0 billion for other capital expenditures, including product tooling and manufacturing process equipment, real estate for the future development of the Company’s second corporate campus, and other corporate facilities and infrastructure.

The Company anticipates utilizing approximately $8.0 billion for capital expenditures during 2012, including approximately $900 million for retail store facilities and approximately $7.1 billion for product tooling and manufacturing process equipment, and corporate facilities and infrastructure, including information systems hardware, software and enhancements.

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Last week it was reported that after pricing information on Intel's upcoming Sandy Bridge E processors surfaced, Apple’s potential options for Mac Pro line update in early 2012 began to clear up. Apple has not updated the Mac Pro line since mid-2010, and Intel’s delays in new processors have pushed their update out from this year to first quarter of 2012.

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Chinese customers prefer to buy Apple’s iPhone than Nokia’s smartphones, according a report published by the investment bank Morgan Stanley. As more than a third of 2,050 surveyed urban Chinese mobile phone users express a preference for iPhone, twice that for Nokia's models.

Apple presence on Chinese smartphone market grew significantly in 2011. Not surprisingly that over fiscal 2011 the company managed to earned as many as $13 billion, comparing with $3 billion in fiscal year 2010. Morgan Stanley says it believes "China could surpass the US as Apple's largest market in about three years, adding nearly $30 billion more per year to the top-line along the way." The firm notes that sales of iPhones are also driving purchases of related Apple products, noting that Mac use is nearly four times higher among iPhone users, where Mac user share jumps to 35 percent from the standard 9 percent of the general population.

Morgan Stanley’s survey demonstrates that Apple increased its share by 6 percentage points to reach 34 percent of planned purchases in the region. Nokia dropped 8 percentage points to make up just 16 percent of the nation's planned purchases.

Apple's online store in Sweden

Yesterday Apple launched the iPhone 4S in 22 additional countries, starting the second wave of launches for the new iPhone model. Last week the company began to take pre-orders ahead of the release planned for Austria, Ireland, Spain, Slovenia, Slovakia, Singapore, Norway, Lithuania, Liechtenstein, Denmark, Belgium, Mexico, Luxembourg, Latvia, Italy, Sweden, Netherlands, Czech Republic, Switzerland, Hungary, Estonia and Finland.

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According to a research note released by the investment bank Morgan Stanley on Wednesday, a lower-priced iPhone could generate a nearly three-fold increase in demand for Apple in China. The bank conducted research among Chinese customers who hesitate to but the iPhone. 85 percent of them called price as a key factor that prevents them from buying Apple’s smartphones. The right price point could increase demand for iPhone in three times in China.

The maximum price that Chinese customers are ready to pay is $425. But those who said that they were not going to buy an iPhone could afford to pay $344. Nearly 80% of those who took part in the research marked Apple as the leading brand in China. But in last quarter company's share of mobile phone purchases in the region fell from 12% to 7%.

In the third quarter of 2011, China area became the company's second largest market, behind only the U.S. China is "the fastest growing region by far."  China sales of iPhone were $4.5 billion in the September quarter, 16 percent of Apple’s total revenue, comparing with $3.8 billion Apple earned in the June quarter. Meanwhile, one analyst believes that the mobile market in China poses as much as a $70 billion opportunity for Apple.

In the third quarter of 2011 Samsung gained the lead and China’s ZTE became the fourth-largest cell phone manufacturer moving Apple to fifth place. Cupertino-based company for the first time fell short of expectations and shipped 17.07 million iPhones in the third quarter, a 16 percent quarterly decrease in sales. As you remember, in June quarter Apple sold 20.34 million iPhones, which allowed the company to beat Samsung and Nokia and become the leading smartphone manufacturer in the world.

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According to Forrester research, Mac business users are more productive than their PC counterparts, because MacBook laptops from Apple tend to be more reliable and require less maintenance than PCs. Forrester issued a new report entitled "People are Bringing Macs to Work - It's Time to Repeal Prohibition" in order to encourage companies to support Apple hardware in the workplace.

Although the use of Mac in enterprises is increasing, approximately 41 percent of companies that took part in the research do not officially allow their employees to use Mac. Of course, users find ways how bypass company restrictions and use their Mac at work.

Moreover, Mac sales in the enterprise sector have seen a huge spike in 2011. In May, Apple announced that corporate Mac sales grew by 66 percent. But sales of iOS products are more significant. 93 percent of Fortune 500 companies are deploying or testing the iPhone, while 90 percent are doing the same for the iPad.

Yesterday Apple filled its 2011 annual report with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The report includes several interesting facts about company:

• Apple now has 60,400 employees comparing with 46,600 employees last year. 36,000 employees work in the retail division of the company.
• Apple enlarged number of stores up to 357. In this year the company opened 40 additional stores. The average number of employees per store grew from 83.6 to 100.8.
• The company spent $933 million on advertising, enlarged number of investment into research and development up to $2.4 billion.
• Apple also mentioned some risk factors for investors:  "if [Apple] is found to have infringed on intellectual property rights", "support from third-party software developers", "the Company’s ability to obtain components in sufficient quantities", and numerous more.
• As of September 24, 2011 Apple has 13.2 million square feet of building space, among them about 7.0 million square feet are leased building space.

Reuters suggests that Steve Jobs’ authorized biography by Walter Isaacson may become the best-selling book of 2011 on Amazon. But it is not surprisingly. Apple’s fans and others show extraordinary interest in the late Apple CEO’s life, especially after his death early this month.

The book is the best-selling book on Amazon.com and is also listed as the top-selling electronic book on the company's Kindle eBook store.

"The way things are trending, it could very likely be our top-selling book of the year," Amazon spokeswoman Brittany Turner said in a statement.

But now the book is ranked #13 on Amazon’s list of best sellers. Noteworthy, some analysts predict that the digital version of Steve Jobs’ biography outsell the print version. It is know that digital sales of best sellers are typically coming at 50-70% of total sales. Though, Amazon prefers do not comment the difference between digital and physical version of the book.

Investment bank UBS issued a note to investors where it suggested that Apple would sell about 42.5 million iPhones worldwide in this quarter. But they expect that international adoption of Apple's newest handset could be slow when compared to the U.S. This might be caused the fact that Siri, the 4S-exclusive voice-recognition feature, only supports English, French and German. So in the United States sales of iPhone 4S is likely to top 11.7 million in the upcoming quarter.

"If Apple is able to manufacture and sell the estimated 42.5 million units, earnings per share of the company's stock would drive an incremental $3.09 to the estimated $9.47 for the December quarter.”

Both AT&T and Verizon confirm that the iPhone 4S release slowed sales, causing the company to miss analysts' expectations for the last quarter of the 2011 fiscal year. But despite that fact the bank gives Apple a 12 month buy rating with a price target of $510.