bullish

As Apple (AAPL) rares up for it’s Wednesday Q4 earnings report, many investors are weary. In the past few weeks, the economy has stayed sluggish, Steve Jobss has left on medical leave and the usually exciting product debuts at MacWorld from Apple showed little to get excited about.What to look at against Wall Street expectations.

• Expect 20 million+ iPods shipped during the December quarter for the holiday season, beating the 18.6 million expectation.
• Expect a standard 2.5-2.6 million Macs shipped or even with the Street’s 2.5 million expectation.
• Wall Street is expecting 5 million iPhones to have shipped. Keep in mind September numbers showed Apple shipped 6.9 million phones, and that wasn’t even the holidays.
• Wall Street expects $9.7 billion in revenue and $1.32 in EPS. I couldn’t find an Apple store that wasn’t overcrowded this holiday season. People are excited about the iPhone, the new Mac computers are light years ahead of the competition and margins are consistently solid through the whole family of products. The 6 month old iTunes App store on the iPhone has already surpassed 500 million downloads, on its way to being the billion dollar marketplace it was projected to be when it debuted this summer. I expect Apple to be north of $10 billion in revenue this quarter, adding to that $20 billion in cash flow the company is sitting on. Why so bullish? Investors looking to the wrong reasons why Apple will slow down. Things like the popularity of netbooks this winter compared to the pricing of Mac, as well as lack of attention to the app store’s success will offset earnings predictions.

Official Numbers Are In: The Company posted record revenue of $10.17 billion and record net quarterly profit of $1.61 billion, or $1.78 per diluted share. Apple sold 2,524,000 Macintosh® computers during the quarter, representing nine percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter. The Company sold a record 22,727,000 iPods during the quarter, representing three percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter. Quarterly iPhone units sold were 4,363,000 representing 88 percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter.

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