AppleInsider is today reporting on a note sent by investment firm Piper Jaffray to clients based on Apple’s outlook for the rest of 2008 and 2009.
During yesterdays financial conference call Apple stated that it expects gross margins to be down from 34.8% to 31.5% in the current quarter (Q408) with a further decline to 30% for fiscal 2009.
While Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray acknowledges that Apple is always conservative in its outlook, he also expects Apple to cut prices of existing products to maintain sales.
“We believe there is an 80% chance Apple will introduce redesigned MacBooks and possibly new MacBook Pros at lower price points,” the analyst wrote. “Specifically, Apple may re-enter the $999 price point (currently $1099) with the MacBook, or test the $1,799 price point with the MacBook Pro (currently $1999).”
Munster also spoke about iPods, he expects a “slightly redesigned iPods” that will include “lower-cost touch-based iPods” just in time for the holiday shopping season.
Piper Jaffray maintains a buy rating on Apple with a price target of $250.
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JimH
23rd July 2008, 04.26 am
Price points have to drop…there’s no question about it. While many will point to the economy one just needs to look at the competition’s price points which has steadily been going down as always. Check out Apple’s refurb store from time to time and you might note that they play with the pricing there from time to time which makes me think that they use it to test future price points in their research.
Sadly lets hope that Apple doesn’t cripple their products to do this. I love my 12″ Powerbook I’ve used for years but it sure would have been nice to be able to expand the memory beyond the 1.25GB ram. Remember that they soldered 256MB to the motherboard to cut costs and did the same with the ibook as well. Hopefully their new found love to be more of a consumer company will help them see the way that crippling is a bad idea.
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