Apple CEO Tim Cook spoke today at the Goldman Sachs Technology conference, discussing Apple’s turn around over the last 5 years. Of particular interest was that Apple’s sales overseas have increased nearly 15x in emerging markets, from $1.4 billion to $22 billion in revenues.
Another particularly interesting piece was that Cook expects that Apple’s tablet business will eclipse their PC business by the end of the year. This is not surprising, as Macs have not been able to gain much traction due to their extremely high price point for lack of return. However, Cook and I think the same thing in that tablet sales cannibalize all PC sales, including Windows sales. It is future generations of iPad which will allow Apple to take huge bites out of the Windows market, not Macs.
You can read more of the story over at Barrons.
My First “Trade”
While the other stocks in my portfolio have been made with long-term gains in mind, I picked up my first stock today that I plan to only hold for a short amount of time, Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN).
The reason I picked up this stock now is because I think it is going to move up at least 5% by the end of the month. The reasoning behind this is that earlier this month, AMZN reported that they were actually going to lose a few hundred million dollars on the quarter and the stock barely budged; it dropped 5% then immediately recovered. I like AMZN in the long term, just not in the short term, until they report earnings for Q1 of FY2012.
I actually want to invest in AMZN after they report for the quarter, but I think their stock will pull back after they announce their losses, and I am definitely a buyer on a pull-back. I think Amazon now is much better than the $240 a share Amazon of years past. Now they have Audible, the premiere membership service for Audible (which I subscribe to), cloud hosting services (which I use for my online business), and an affiliate program which allows website owners to make profits by referring customers to Amazon (my business makes money from this).
The fact is there is more to Amazon than its retail and kindle branches, and I think the high profit margin audiobook/eBook/cloud hosting services will begin to generate real earnings and improved margins for Amazon in the coming years. However, I would rather buy cheap, and am hoping I can get a few percentage point run before Q2 announcements. We will see if it pans out!
Disclosure: I am long AAPL and long AMZN.