Apple Stock can double over 3 years – The Motley Fool
Despite a strong start of the year, Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) ends in 2018 on some of a silly note. The company struck a $ 1 billion market price in August, becoming the first American company in history to achieve this benchmark portfolio. But since the iPhone manufacturer has turned a full time in early October, they have lost more than 25% of their value due to fear of reducing iPhone sales and a possible trade war with China.
While these issues may be worth looking at, a four-time think that shareholders lack the big picture. He believes that Apple takes a breath before a massive race that can see stocks more than double from today's price over the next three years. Let's look at his dissertation to see if it contains water.
Image Source: Apple.
The analyst
Gene Munster should not be foreign for long Apple investors who have covered the company since 2004. As research analyst for investment bank Piper Jaffray, Munster wrote hundreds of opinions about the company and became one of the most famous Wall Street- analysts in the process. Munster left Wall Street to launch research and venture capital firm Loup Ventures, and has continued to cover Apple since he knocked out on his own.
This gives Münster some credibility to the Cupertino company, and he has a bold prediction. As investors fully understand Apple's switch from being a hardware-centric company to being a service focused, Munster believes that the Apple share will reach $ 350 ̵[ads1]1; more than doubled its Friday closing price of $ 165.48 – thus adding almost 1 billion dollars in market coverage from its current level.
The Big Picture
In an interview at CNBC, Munster said investors must "review some of the noise" that has recently surrounded Apple. An overview of the latest events will help put the sentence in context.
During the conference call to discuss its fourth quarterly results, Apple revealed that from the beginning of the quarter, it will no longer provide device sales data for its products: a carefully monitored metric among Apple followers. At that time, Apple CFO Luca Maestri explained that "the number of units sold in a 90-day period is not necessarily representative of the underlying strength of our business. Furthermore, a sales unit is less relevant to us today than it was in the past given the width to our portfolio … "Maestri continued to point out that Apple's top competitors also do not deliver unit sales data.
Apple's business is one that investors do not have to sweat every quarter, "according to Munster.
Legendary investor Warren Buffett shares a similar view. In an interview earlier this year, Oracle told Omaha to invest in Apple: [19659014] No one buys a farm based on whether they think it's going to rain next year or not. They buy it because they think it's a good investment in 10 or 20 years …. The idea of spending a lot of time try to guess how many iPhone X … will be sold in a given three month period … for me it totally misses the point.
Munster also points out that investors place too much emphasis on the latest change while they Instead, Apple should focus on Apple's transition to being a service-centric company. An important metric carries it. While Apple has enviable hardware margins of about 30%, margins for services are much more lucrative, "close to 70% gross margins," according to Munster.
