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Posted on 07/19/2006 10:59:19 PM PDT by Swordmaker
With a wider range of systems available, consumers have been snapping Macs up, giving them a growth boost that outpaced the rest of the market.
Macintosh shipments were up 12 percent compared with last year, Apple Computer said Wednesday during its third-quarter earnings call. That's in contrast to a shipment increase in the second quarter of only 4 percent year over year--something that Apple described as a "pause" in buying activity.
In announcing its switch to Intel's processors months before systems became available, Apple set itself up for a little pain: Consumers hesitated to buy PowerPC-based systems, with new Macs on the way. But now that MacBook Pro and iMac systems have been available for several months, and because of the strong demand for MacBook systems released in mid-May, any signs of hesitation among home users appear to have been erased.
"I believe the key take-away is that the Mac business is starting to accelerate," Shaw Wu, an analyst at American Technology Research, said in an e-mail interview after Apple's earnings announcement.
Macs accounted for 55 percent of Apple's revenue during the third quarter, ended July 1, said Peter Oppenheimer, the company's chief financial officer. Notebook shipments and revenue both increased by 61 percent, and Apple believes it doubled its share of the notebook market in retail channels, he said, citing data from research firm NPD.
About half the Macs sold at Apple's own retail stores during the quarter were bought by people who had never owned a Mac before, Oppenheimer said. That is roughly the same percentage that Apple has seen in recent quarters.
Educational customers also helped Apple's Mac sales during the quarter, Oppenheimer said. The new notebooks were well-received by the educational community, which likes to make purchasing decisions by the end of the last quarter, analyst Tim Bajarin of Creative Strategies said.
One downside of the Mac results was the performance of the desktop segment, which is tied to Apple's professional customers. The Power Mac desktop, used by creative professionals who need the most performance Apple can provide, has not been refreshed as of yet with Intel's newest chips. As a result, desktop shipments and revenue declined compared with last year.
However, Apple is expected to fix that pretty soon, with the launch of Intel's new Core 2 Duo processor coming in a few weeks and Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference scheduled to visit San Francisco in August. Apple hasn't said whether it will use the Core 2 Duo or the Xeon 5100 processor in the new professional desktops, but it's likely to let its developers know before or during that conference.
Another reason why developers have continued to wait for the Intel systems is the transition to universal applications that run natively on Intel's chips, Oppenheimer said. Applications that have not been ported to Apple's "universal binaries" run on Intel's systems in an emulation mode, which run noticeably slower than applications that have been written specifically for Intel's x86 chips.
By September, Apple expects that developers will have moved 70 percent of what the company considers the 500 most important Mac applications to the universal binary, Oppenheimer said.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs has said he doesn't worry as much about the fluctuations of the larger PC market because of Apple's relatively small size. Gartner and IDC reported PC market share numbers on Wednesday, and overall shipment growth was only around 10 percent worldwide. Apple's 12 percent shipment growth outpaced the market during what is considered the slowest quarter of the year.
The upcoming release of Mac OS X 10.5 could provide a boost to Mac shipments when it is released later this year or early next year. Apple is expected to provide more details about the operating system, code-named Leopard, at the developer's conference.
New iPods expected in the second half of the year might also give a shot to Mac shipments. Apple hasn't said what it has up its sleeve for the portable media players, but bloggers and analysts expect new video-capable iPods and a refresh of the iPod Nano design. Despite worries from analysts that iPod sales were stagnating, shipments grew by 32 percent, and revenue grew by 39 percent compared with last year, Apple said.
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Way to go, Apple! Macs rock.
So much for "Apple only survives on iPod sales."
Thank you, Echo
well it might 4.29% whatever the bottom one is supposed to be... now we can compare it(June) when the July data comes out...
Check out this article:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1668993/posts
apple seen 15% growth but the PC market together seen a 40-something% growth..
No. Industry year-over-yeat growth was only 10%... Apple had a 12% growth. It is ahead of the market, which means it is growing faster than the industry.
Sort of like being the best yodeler in Compton.
Table 2
Preliminary U.S. PC Vendor Unit Shipment Estimates for 2Q06
(Thousands of Units)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
2Q06 2Q06 Market 2Q05 2Q05 Market 2Q06-2Q05
Company Shipments Share (%) Shipments Share (%) Growth (%)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Dell 5,302 32.0 4,988 32.0 6.3
Hewlett-Packard 3,127 18.9 2,713 17.4 15.2
Gateway 1,035 6.2 890 5.7 16.3
Apple Computer 766 4.6 663 4.3 15.4
Lenovo 639 3.9 607 3.9 5.3
Others 5,717 34.5 5,724 36.7 -0.1
Total 16,587 100.00 15,585 100.0 6.4
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Note: Data includes deskbased PCs, mobile PCs and X86 servers.
Source: Gartner Dataquest (July 2006)
Dell 6.3% + HP 15.2% + Gateway 16.3% + Lenvo 5.3 + others -0.1 = 43%
Apple 15.4%
Apple 15.4%
That's not the way you calculate growth of several components... you have to average them:
6.3% + 15.2% + 16.3% + 5.3% = 10.775% Top 4 PC maker Growth rate
4 The others at -0.1% cannot be included because we do not have a number for how many computer makers comprise the catch-all term "others".
So we CAN compare the average growth rate (10.775%) of the top 4 PC makers to Apple's growth rate (15.4%)... and see that Apple's is greater. Look at the bottom line, it shows the growth rate for the overall industry :
----------------------------------------------------------------------
2Q06 2Q06 Market 2Q05 2Q05 Market 2Q06-2Q05
Company Shipments Share (%) Shipments Share (%) Growth (%)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
. . . (individual company and "other" data omitted) . . .
Total 16,587 100.00 15,585 100.0 6.4
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Note: Data includes deskbased PCs, mobile PCs and X86 servers.
Source: Gartner Dataquest (July 2006)My calculations show that there must be 53 computer makers that have an average growth loss of -0.1% included in that "other" listing to drop the average 11.7% growth rate of the five leading companies (including Apple) to the 6.4% growth rate for the industry shown on the bottom line.
6.3% + 15.2% + 16.3% + 15.4% + 5.3% + (53 x -0.1%) = 6.4% Computer Industry Growth rate
58 Remember also these figures were Gartner's best guesses... and it turns out that Gartner was wrong and that Apple's growth rate was NOT 15.4% but actually only 12%... and the rest of the PC makers were not 6.4% but actually 9.7% for the 2nd Quarter of 2006.
My stocks see a growth spurt as well :-)
You're adding up individual growth percentages. That doesn't make sense.
Another thing is that this includes servers. I'd like to see that broken out, since a big chunk of Dell and HP sales is servers to entrenched IT departments.
But this chart does show that Apple is the fourth largest computer vendor, and that the king of the hill Dell is relatively slipping.
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