Tech Check

Courtesy of Apple IPhone 3G

Gene Munster at Piper Jaffray has been a no-excuses Apple bull for as long as he has covered the company, focusing on the fundamentals, and beating the financial drum with conviction, even in the face of a stock-price collapse and those Steve Jobs health issues. 

So you'd think that he would be taking a kind of victory lap in the wake of yesterday's stellar earnings news from Apple that had the company soar past EPS and revenue expectations, celebrating its first $10 billion quarter, and very strong Mac and iPod sales.

Nah.

Gene Munster instead is disappointed in the company's iPhone sales in December ("No hiding behind that," he tells me) and he has dramatically taken down his fiscal 2010 earnings per share expectations because of what he says he has learned about Apple's iPhone refresh cycle, or when the company plans to introduce new versions of the handset. 

In fact, he has taken down his EPS targets so much that many of you have written to me asking if it's true, that Munster went from $7.73 to $5.46.  That's dramatic when you consider that Apple earned $5.36 in its fiscal 2008. 

And that's led Munster to bring his target on Apple shares

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So what happened?  Well, I just got off the phone with Munster, and while he's disappointed, he's hardly disillusioned. 

"We cut our estimates on iPhone, but it's more of a shift. The expectations of having a March launch of a new form factor looks less likely." He spoke to a manufacturing source in Asia which says new components will be delivered to Apple in late March or early April which means a new phone might not come until June. Gene was expecting that new phone in March. So, "We pulled the plug on our 45 million unit sales estimate for (calendar) 2009. There's just no way without that March release." His new calendar 2009 estimate is 28 million iPhone units. In 2010, he ups the figure by around 15 percent to 32 million.

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So that's the reason for such a significant revision in EPS estimates.  No big recession or depression. Just the reality that the iPhone refresh cycle slid further into 2009 than he originally anticipated.

He also tells me he was "Definitely disappointed with the iPhone December number of 4.4 million" that Apple reported yesterday.

One other thing, he says: "We think they're going to a June refresh cycle on the iPhone, like they do with the September refresh for iPod."

So yeah, for all of you say-it-ain't-so's out there questioning whether Gene Munster really took his estimates down so significantly on Apple for fiscal 2010, it's "so."  And those are the reasons why.

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