Thursday, February 21, 2008

Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL): Troubling news from iSuppli (edited at 06:57 AM)

Some troubling news for Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) and Sandisk (NASDAQ:SNDK) from iSuppli this morning:

"..In an early warning sign of consumer weakness, Apple Inc. has slashed its 2008 NAND order forecast significantly and has informed suppliers that its demand growth will slow in 2008 compared to 2007, according to iSuppli sources. This is expected to have a huge impact on the NAND market..."

Link: http://www.isuppli.com/news/default.asp?id=8805

Notablecalls: Note that most of AAPL's NAND comes from SNDK. Expect to see weakness in both.

NAND weakness most likely stems from iPod's. This is not a complete surprise but the situation looks somewhat more troubling than I previously thought.

PS (edit): Forget what I said about shorting AAPL/SNDK. Given RIMM's guidance, CSCO upgrade from Citi and GRMN upgrade from Baird, just fugghedaboutit!

4 comments:

Tommo_UK said...

Dollar value of NAND is dropping, not unit sales. There is no "slashing of demand from Apple. There is a plunging in prices paid for NAND chips, and a glut resulting from Apple not upgrading the capacity of their flash-based products as quickly as the NAND industry expeted.

This is a NAND overproduction problem, not an Apple demand problem.

notablecalls said...

Oh boy, look what the cat dragged in.

:)

mea culpa, mea culpa.

papita said...

sandisk is not an apple supplier.

InvestorGater said...

CNET News cited a fact that iSuppli did not:

"Apple's still planning to purchase 27 percent more flash memory this year than last year, but iSuppli and Apple's suppliers had expected an increase of more like 32 percent."

http://www.news.com/8301-13579_3-9875391-37.html

How differently AAPL could trade if all the facts were in the open.