News
Wall Street Finds AT&T, Apple Numbers Uninteresting
Wednesday, July 25th, 2007 at 2:15 PM - by
Wall Street was left unimpressed and uninterested in the recent financial results from AT&T. AT&T picked up a lot of new customers according to its recent financial report and earnings are up. The sales of actual iPhones over a 30 hour period after launch amounted to 4,867 activations per hour. Even so, it was described as a non-event, according to Forbes on Tuesday.
With AT&T having logged a 60 percent increase in second quarter profits, earnings year over year jumping from US$1.81B to $2.7B, and 40 percent of their iPhone customers being new customers, the reaction was tepid. "It was a non-event," according to Stifel Nicolaus analyst Christopher King.
In the first day and a half that the iPhone went on sale, AT&T activated 146,000 phones. That figure was below Mr. King's estimate, however, he said that it was difficult to read too much into the numbers.
"While some have suggested disappointment with the iPhone number, we note that there were significant activation problems for the first couple of days post-launch, which may have held the number down artificially through quarter-end," Mr. King said.
Moreover, the number of iPhones sold in the first day and a half is probably not a good indicator of future sales. Sales could fall off now that the early adopters have jumped in. However, in the long run Mr. King expects Apple to sell three million phones this year.
Despite the good numbers from AT&T, analysts are worried about how much AT&T must pay for each iPhone sold. On the other hand, AT&T's CEO Randall Stephenson pointed out, "Wireless revenue growth accelerated for the fourth consecutive quarter. Our U-verse video service has begun to ramp aggressively. And we took a major step up toward revenue growth in enterprise services, where AT&T has tremendous assets and great potential."
On the Apple side, the iPhone activations didn't match the hype, so Apple's stock slid dramatically on Tuesday. However, Apple has yet to reveal how much money they've made on the iPhone, and Wednesday's earnings report may not shed much light on the final days of last quarter.
In time, as each company reveals more interesting financials with the iPhone, analysts may recover from the Blahs this week.




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