Apple's GS Symposium Presentation Dispels Doubts - Will Google Follow?

Apple's (AAPL) COO Tim Cook made a presentation at the Goldman Sachs Technology Investment Symposium on Wednesday. The call was very bullish and tore to shred all the doubts that had been raised by different analysts about Apple's business prospects. MacDailyNews has live notes about the call.

Some highlights:

· iPhone sales target of 10 million affirmed

· Mac has huge headroom and has immense mind-share. Apple passed Dell as the largest provider of portable computers to higher education.

· iPod revenues grew 17% year over year. 40% of all iPods sold to consumers who did not own one.

· iPhone contracts may not be exclusive in other countries; a lot of carriers are interested in the phone since it is driving data-plan usage with web-usage orders of magnitude higher than other smart phones.

The stock is reacting positively and is up about 4% from its 4:00PM close of $122.96.

AAPL also announced a special event on March 6 to discuss the plans for the long awaited SDK for the iPhone. The announcement emphasized 'Some exciting enterprise feature'; perhaps referring to the long awaited integration with the Exchange server and the catalyst for the corporate adoption of the iPhone.

Google (GOOG), the other Silicon Valley darling under cloud, will also be presenting at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference in Dana Point, CA. The session is scheduled for 9:30 a.m. Pacific Time on Monday, March 3, 2008. If the response to AAPL's conference call is any indication, it would be prudent to anyone short Google to cover!

Comments

[User 158469]

Damn good advice, Vikram. I hate claiming certainty on anything in the market, especially *this* market today, but these big caps with solid fundamentals (ORCL, AAPL, GOOG, etc) have been getting slaughtered on what amounts to, in reality, little more than speculation. All it takes is some newsworthy event (such as the GS conference) to give them an opp to disclaim all bad rumors and watch the stock price fly. I don't know if the companies have been allowing their prices to fall as much as they have fallen, just so they can buy it up on the cheap and then issue a positive news statement, but it sure is suspect. Either way, it's a tough play to stay short on Google through this conference.