none of this stuff matters right now but it will eventually:
Since December 31st, Appleâs market value has increased by $172 billion, which is roughly the size of Johnson & Johnson, a large, well-established, innovative healthcare and consumer products company with a 125-year history. Johnson & Johnson has enjoyed many successes, has reinvested high levels of profit and is investing to expand its divisions, products and businesses. Apple attracted the same amount of investor capital in two and a half months that Johnson and Johnson attracted in its entire 125-year history.
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Apple launched its first iPad in April 2010 and is now on its 3rd version, so the iPad has about a two-year shelf life for the company (it might milk a few more years out of each version, but the companyâs business model is to continually launch new product iterations and slash prices on the older versions). Though itâs not disclosed in the financials, a guess would be that the new iPad will sell 26 million units its first year and 14 million in its second. If each version of the iPad earns $260 per unit, then Apple investors can expect somewhere in the range of $10 â $15 billion in total pre-tax profit for this newest version of the iPad. Unless investors thought Appleâs stock was way too cheap before the new iPad announcement, they seem to be expecting much more value to be delivered to shareholders from the iPad launch than can be reasonably be delivered by sales of the iPad device itself. The $172 billion increase in the companyâs value far exceeds the approximately $15 billion that will come from the iPad, so it will have to come from something else. We donât know yet what that âsomething elseâ is.
When we look at our cash flow models, assuming Apple can maintain its current operating margins (a heroic assumption in the face of increased competition in the tablet market), to justify the current stock price, it appears to us that Apple will have to sell about $2.6 trillion worth of total products and services over the next ten years. Last yearâs revenues (for the fiscal year ending 9/24/11) totaled $108 billion. If Appleâs margins shrink, it will have to sell a lot more. This level of Apple product sales will make up almost 1.5% of U.S. GDP (of course it also sells products outside of the U.S.). That means that with the average GDP per capita in the United States being around $50,000, each person must spend $750 on Apple products and services annually (since 30% of sales are domestic, this means that about $225 per U.S. citizen would go to Apple every year). Since not all 310 million people in America use Apple, those who do need to spend a lot more and the vast majority of those sales will need to be on devices because iTunes sales do not bring much profitability.