January 20th, 2009
By Tom Krazit
The sales performance of Apple's new MacBooks, such as this MacBook Air, will be one of the key factora in Apple's fist-quarter results.
(Credit: James Martin/CNET News)
After a week spent worrying about the health of CEO Steve Jobs, Apple will look forward to getting back to business Wednesday when it reports its fisical first-quarter earnings.
The last three months were not kind to computer and consumer electronics companies, but Apple is expected to have weathered the storm better than others. Analysts are predicting the company will report revenue and earnings per share at the high end of the guidance it provided in October, with expectations of $9.76 billion in revenue and earnings per share of $1.38.
The three-month period between October and December is usually one of Apple's best quarters of the calendar year, but this was anything but a typical holiday season. Overall retail sales fell 2.7 percent in December as compared with November, as the full emotional impact of the late-2008 stock market swoon took hold.
We got a bit of an earnings preview last week, when IDC and Gartner reported their PC market share estimates for the fourth calendar quarter. Apple's Mac shipment growth slowed from the strong pace it set throughout 2008, but the company is still growing faster than the market itself. Measured against a U.S. PC market that fell 3.5 percent compared with last ear, Apple's shipments grew 7.5 percent. That suggests that Apple is still enjoying momentum in its Mac division, which no doubt got a boost from the inroduction of new notebooks in October.
Still, the economic climate is having some sort of impact on the Mac, which is almost exactly what analysts felt would happen ging into this quarter. Most analysts seem to be expecting Apple to have sold around 2.6 million Macs during the quarter, representing decent year-over-year growth at around 13 percent but slower than Apple had been reporting over the last several quarters.
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