Is Apple Watch a Needle Mover?

By Adam J. Crawford, Analyst

The investment community has been up in arms over a lack of innovation from Apple. After all, the company hasn’t launched a new product line in quite some time… that is, until now. Meet the company’s brand new smart device: Apple Watch. Investors hope the product will send Apple’s stock to new heights. Is that wishful thinking?

Apple brings its new product into a hotly contested space, with the likes of Sony, Nike, and Samsung all offering a competing smartwatch. But there’s a common theme with reviews for these gadgets: not enough features, not enough style. Apple aims to fill this void… and will charge a premium for doing so, of course.

Apple Watch will retail for $349, notably higher than most competing watches. Since Apple is notorious for putting the squeeze on retail margins (it reportedly allows retail as little as 3% on tablets), retailers would likely make 10% on the Apple Watch, placing Apple’s revenue per watch at around $315.

In 2013, Apple sold 150 million iPhones. It would be an extremely tall order to sell that many watches, especially at $350 a pop. So for a base-case scenario, let’s say that 30% of iPhone buyers will purchase an Apple Watch. For a bullish scenario, 50%. And for a bearish scenario, 10%. Using these adoption rates yields the following annual unit sales.

	Bear	Base	Bull
Percent of iPhone Sales	10%	30%	50%
Apple Watch Annual Units Opportunity (Millions)	15	45	75

At a projected price of $315, we get the following projected revenues.

	Bear	Base	Bull
Apple Watch Sales as a percent of iPhone Sales	10%	20%	50%
Annual Units Opportunity (Millions)	15	45	75
Price per Watch	$315	$315	$315
Revenue (Billions)	$4.7	$14.1	$23.6

Over the past four years, Apple’s profit margin has ranged from 19.2% to 26.7%. Let’s assume a 23% profit margin on the Apple Watch. With shares outstanding of 6 billion and at Apple’s current multiple of 15, here’s our calculation of the impact on share price for each volume scenario.

	Bear	Base	Bull
Revenue(Billions)	$4.7	$14.1	$23.6
Profit Margin	23%	23%	23%
Profit (Billions)	$1.1	$3.2	$5.4
Shares Outstanding (Billions)	6	6	6
EPS	$0.18	$0.53	$0.90
Multiple	15	15	15
Apple Watch Share Price	$2.70	$7.95	$13.50

Smartwatches will be a nice addition to Apple’s product line in that they will further institutionalize an already iconic brand. However, in looking at just the annual hardware sales, our projections suggest anywhere from a 3% to a 13% impact on share price. At the low end of the projections, the impact is anemic. At the high end, the impact is significant, but hardly seismic. There may be a host of reasons to buy Apple stock, but the Apple Watch by itself isn’t one of them.

The better investment option is to look at companies that supply Apple; this is one of the things we track at BIG TECH. One Apple chip supplier, Avago Technologies, yielded our subscribers over 100% return in just over 12 months, piggybacking on the rise of the iPhone.

For access to our unparalleled investment advice, simply sign up for a 90-day risk-free trial of BIG TECH. If you decide to keep your subscription, it will only cost $99 a year. If for any reason you’re unsatisfied, simply cancel for a full refund. No questions asked.

The article Is Apple Watch a Needle Mover? was originally published at caseyresearch.com.

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Jim Cramer Actually Got It Right… Only, Three Months Later?

From Adam Hewison....

It’s no secret that we’ve been socked with snow this past week. During that time, I was flipping through channels and came across Jim Cramer’s show Mad Money. I’ve said this before, Jim is a great entertainer. I am not so sure how good he is at picking stocks.

He mentioned shorting one stock, Garmin (symbol GRMN). What he said about Garmin sort of made sense to me both from a technical and fundamental viewpoint.

So here is the fundamental viewpoint....Many of the new phones that are coming to market are referred to as “smart phones” and have the same capabilities as a standalone, turn by turn GPS. In my own case, I have an Apple iPhone. I was looking for a navigational application in the App Store and found exactly what I needed and the good news was, it was free, that’s right free. So the question is, why would anyone pay $150, $200, or even $300 to Garmin to have one of their systems? Fundamentally, I think his case is very sound.

Then, I looked at the technical picture for Garmin and noticed that we had a red monthly “Trade Triangle” sell signal some time ago (November 4th to be exact at the price point $27.06). So here we are some three to four months later having Jim Cramer tell us that Garmin may be a short.

For my money, I want to be trading the “Trade Triangles” and not listening to Jim Cramer and getting old news.

In this short video on Garmin, you will see exactly what were looking at and where the signals kick in. I also point out where one very important technical indicator is at a tipping point.

As always our videos are free to watch and there are no registration requirements.

I hope you enjoy the video and please feel free to leave a comment here about how you feel about this market.

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Steve Jobs, Apple, the iPad, and King Gillette

On Wednesday, after much hype and drama, Steve Jobs walked onstage and unveiled Apple’s latest creation - the iPad. Having watched almost every key address for Apple for many years we, like many others, were disappointed that the product didn’t live up to the hype. Nonetheless, Apple will sell a boatload of these products, but not as many as the iPhone.

Upon reflection, it occurred to me that Steve Jobs is changing the whole business model of Apple and we don’t believe anyone has caught on to this yet.

In all the reports we’ve read after the launch of the iPad, we think every writer /analyst missed this key point: Steve Jobs wants to be like King Gillette.

If you don’t know who King Gillette was, you may not old enough to shave. King Gillette started his business at the beginning of the century. His business model is what I believe Apple’s business model will be in the future.

Long ago, King Gillette decided to practically give the razor away at or below cost, but sell the razor blades separately.

So here’s what we think, we think Apple wants to give the iPhone and the iPad to as many people as possible at cost or with a small profit. Remember now, AT&T subsidized the iPhone and Apple gets a slice of the pie from every AT&T customer that has an iPhone. Now why would they do that you might ask?

The key reason, we would argue, is that Apple wants the magic of recurring revenues. This is the dream of many companies - to have millions of folks paying a small amount of money every month for using a service. What makes Apple stand out is the fact that they have an army of developers who are writing code for some very cool apps. Yes, there is an app for that. In fact, there is an app for almost every idea ever thought of.

Not only has the app store been widely successful, but Apple also has iTunes, and iBooks along with iTV coming down the road. So this is what we believe Apple’s business model is going to be: with 125 million people who have giving Apple their contact and credit card information, Apple has a huge base of customers much like the newspapers and magazines did in the ’60s and ’70s, but on a much smaller scale. Now Apple can upsell products to those customers at will. The genius part about all of this is the fact that other people are creating products to be sold through the Apple store. Apple just reinvented the King Gillette model in a thoroughly modern way. Hat’s off to you Steve.

That’s my take on Apple’s stealth business model.

Now let’s take a look at the stock.

In our short video, we explain to you some key factors we are watching that we think will make the difference in this market. If you have a few minutes, please take the time to watch this juggernaut of a stock and what I think is ahead for the market in the next 2 months.

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New Video: Apple VS RIMM....Who’s on Top?

A little over six weeks ago we released a video on the relationship between Apple and RIMM.

We called it the “Battle Of The Tech Titans,” and in that short video we explained that we felt the relationship was changing between Apple, Inc. (NASDAQ_AAPL) and Research In Motion, Ldt (NASDAQ_RIMM). I detailed a strategy of approaching this market using a trading strategy that I call “pair trading” or “trading pairs.”

What trading pairs means is that you buy one market while going short the other market in the same sector. Now Apple and RIMM are battling it out right now in the smart phone sector. It remains to be seen who is going to be triumphant in this battle but it would appear as though Apple may have the upper hand based on its very successful “APP” store.

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Trading pairs is what many professionals do when they are unsure as to the direction of the general market but feel pretty comfortable in their analysis of the relationship between two stocks. I hope you find the video both informative and educational.

The video is free to watch and there is no need to register. Please feel free to leave a comment and let us know what you think about Apple VS RIMM....who’s on top?.

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