TTD: Apple COO Cook Confirms Forecast For 10 Million iPhone Sales In 2008; Stock Jumps After Hours (Updated)

"Apple (AAPL) shares are making a nice move after hours, apparently in response to a talk COO Tim Cook gave a little while ago at the Goldman Sachs tech conference in Las Vegas. I’m trying to track down a transcript or a playback; no luck so far. However, the talk was covered by live by MacDailyNews, which will have to do for now. (Update: I listened to the call, and can confirm that he said it.)
(A spokesman for Apple tells me that a playback should be on the Apple IR web site soon; I will add a link once they have it live.)
Update: There is a link here; I can’t seem to get it to work through our fire wall, but I’ll try it again from another spot shortly; please let me know if you successfully launch the replay.A few tidbits from the MacDailyNews account:
He was bullish on Mac: “huge headroom,” iPhone: “enormous potential,” iPod: “transforming into first mobile platform” with the Touch, and AppleTV “potential exists for enormous opportunity.”
Lower price on Shuffle should help sales in emerging markets.
To Apple, iPod does not feel like a saturated market.
On track for 10 million iPhones in 2008.
iPhone unlocking shows pent-up worldwide demand.
Did not rule out selling unlocked iPhones; will roll out in more markets.
In after hours trading, Apple is up $4.54, or 3.7%, to $127.50; the stock was up $3.81 in the regular session.
UPDATE: So, the link works fine. And MacDailyNews did a pretty nice summary of the call; the confirmation on the iPhone sales goal is correct.
Here are some additional tidbits:
Cook said they can grow the Mac even if the PC market were flat, since the target is to switch Windows users over. He says the AppleTV market is not is the same realm as its other three businesses, but that “our gut” tells us there is something there.
On exposure to the consumer economy, Cook says he’s “stopped watching TV, totally…except for AppleTV, where I can watch the movie of my choice.”
On possible saturation of the iPod, he notes that units grew 5% year over year in the December quarter, with 17% growth in revenue, the highest in a year. Cook notes that he put energy into the launch of the Touch, to extend brand into being the first mainstream WiFi mobile device. They added to that with new mail and other software. The SDK next week will broaden it further. Shuffle did not do as well last quarter. Shuffle was down 17% globally, and more than that in the U.S. Shuffle pulled units down; Touch pulled ASP up. They, of course, took down the price of the Shuffle recently. Dropping entry price makes it more affordable to more buyers. Last quarter in U.S. 40% of iPods sold were to people who did not own one previously…does not feel like a saturated market, he said. Although units were flat in the U.S. Part could be the economy, part the Shuffle issue; part could be other issues.
The iPhone has the highest customer “sat” of any product ever shipped. They will talk about third party apps for the iPhone at the event next week.
On the difference between the activated phones and the total number sold - the missing iPhones - he says Apple has rolled out iPhone in four markets - U.S., U.K., Germany and France. Then they will apply learnings to future markets. The 4 million units over first 200 units gave confidence they are right on track for 10 million units in 2008 - as noted above. Demand for iPhone is so intense in markets where we are not officially selling, people are shipping them out of the country and using on other carriers. Shows a lot of world wide demand. He also says some phones sold late last year were not immediately registered.
He says they will roll out more European countries this year, and will roll out Asia this year. He also says they could use different business models in different markets. Carriers see it as a way to raise ARPU, a revolutionary device that gets people interested in using data. How many people really browse on a phone if they don’t use an iPhone: not that many, he says.
Apple in 2007 surpassed Dell as the number one supplier of portables PCs to the education market.
Target market for the air Air? Road warriors, professors, student, person on the go. We put the things in there that we think people really desired.
AppleTV: right now it IS a small nichey product. But we believe it is an area that could be big for us. But its not now."

Jimmy Kimmel is Fucking Ben Affleck!

Apple wont sell 10m units

"Before January, 2007, the last time Steve Jobs made a prediction based on hard numbers was June, 2003. The number then was 3Ghz in a Power Mac G5 within a year, but a year later, Jobs was forced to admit failure. A year after that, he fired IBM as Apple's CPU manufacturer. One wonders who will be fired this time if Apple fails to sell 10 million iPhones in 2008. MarketWatch reports on a conference call with Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi, who suggests that Apple may not make its goal.

"Apple's goal of selling 10 million iPhones this year is optimistic, particularly if Apple insists on carrier revenue sharing without significant price cuts or new model introductions," Sacconaghi said.

While there are a lot of 'ifs' in that prediction, there are also some numbers behind it. Sacconaghi asserts that iPhone sales averaged 180,000 per week during the busy holiday quarter. Going by that baseline, he expects Apple to sell just under 8 million iPhones in 2008. If measuring sales of iPhones were a linear process, that might be true, but there are several unknowables to ponder, the most salient being whether iPhone sales are accelerating the way iPod sales once did. iPhone sales more than doubled from the third quarter to the fourth quarter of 2007. Continued growth like that would make 10 million iPhones in 2008 a low-end estimate. However, if iPhone sales spiked like iPod sales do during the holiday quarter, then there might be a problem, as even sales averaging 180,000 per week will fall short of 10 million iPhones in 2008.

Of course, as the chart shows, there are a number of events that might boost sales of iPhones, and there may be one other factor to consider: the ego of Steve Jobs. After all, it's not like he can fire AT&T from the remaining four years of the companies' exclusivity agreement. That leaves new models and/or a price drop as potential boosters of iPhone sales in 2008. With a gross margin as high as 60 percent, there is a lot of room to drop the price. If and when that happens will likely be determined by how well the iPhone does in making the numbers, but you can bet Steve Jobs isn't going to be wrong again. Well, that and the fact that the stock of the company would suffer considerably with the realization that the iPhone was not the Next Great Thing™.