|
27 June 2008
Posted in
MyBlog
We had a video presentation the other day at work and it showed some interesting trends of the oil reserves and their relationship to exponential growth. It was fascinating! After the video showed, someone said that not many companies would continue expanding at those sorts of rates for extended periods.
My obvious Apple biases leapt to the fore and I made some extravagant claims about Apple. Well I was challenged (predictably) to show the facts. I trotted out the usual Apple share trends and was told that this was not Apple – its just the share market game. What is happening in the real Apple? A fair comment, so I looked further. This is a statement of what I found.
The Apple share price trend I found on Yahoo. It shows it in a convenient logarithmic form. I added in the line that shows a doubling every year. It is pretty close to the real trend by eye I reckon. Near enough.
Apple Computer Share Price trend over last 5 years (from Yahoo Finance)
The Annual Revenue data was harder to find and I had to go to individual quarterly reports from the Apple website. Adding them together to get annual trends gave me the following graph.
Apple Computer Revenue trends over the last 6 years
It shows exponential growth as well, and it turns out it is advancing at a 38% per annum rate that has been maintained over the last 6 years. I used Excel's Solver to fit this curve. Note that last 2008 figure is plotted as twice the first two quarters, and the other red dots show how well this fits for the last few years.
Now a 38% increase per annum is a doubling every 22 months. Pretty impressive! Not as high as the share price, but what businesses would not like that rate?
But then some unkind person said that this was the iPod effect. It is nothing to do with the computers (an obvious PC bias coming out here?). So I checked out a few more figures and the results are interesting.
So what are the sales figures for Macs and iPods? Again I scoured the quarterly reports.
Numbers of Macintosh computers sold year on year for the last few years
Again a model fitted using an exponential growth pattern shows that the sales volumes are going up 27% per annum. And look at the partial results for 2008 All the other years show that annual Macintosh Sales volumes are about 2.2 times the sum of the first two quarters. If that is true for 2008 then this years final volume will be the first year that Apple sell more than 10 million units. And that's a 43% year on year increase over 2007. Or a doubling every 19 months. And the third quarter Mac sales volume – an all time record of 2,587,000 units sold in a quarter (give or take 30,000 units).
But the point was that the problem is that Apples good fortunes are all iPod – is that true? See the equivalent iPod sales figures below.
Numbers of iPods sold year on year for the last few years
There is something different here. There is no exponential rise for iPods– only a linear one. Each year sees nearly 16 million more iPods in the Sales total. And looking into the data we see that the first two quarters for 2008 are almost identical to those for 2007 – a flattening coming perhaps? I suspect that the iPhone is taking some of the hit but not that much surely? But it is a bit early to predict on iPhones yet after only three Quarters reported for that device.
As an aside, I note that Microsoft reported revenue of $51M for the year to June 2007. Up 15% from 2006. If Microsoft proceeds from that figure at that rate and if we use the above Apple trends, then Apple will pass Microsoft in Revenue terms in about 2011.
I wonder what the corporate 'PC' will look like in 2012? The year I retire (possibly).
Well if I was a betting man I would be saying that it is not the iPods that are bringing such a huge change to Apple – it's the Macs stupid!
Bob Jordan
Devotee!
Subscribe to this comment's feed
Show/hide comments
Show/hide comment form