See allLatest Trade Alerts

Brokerage Partners

All Eyes on AT&T Ahead of Apple Earnings

Written by: Jason Schwarz 04/23/12 - 2:11 PM EDT
Tickers in this article: T VZ AAPL
The following commentary comes from an independent investor or market observer as part of TheStreet's guest contributor program, which is separate from the company's news coverage.

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Everything changes after a $90 selloff. Apple(AAPL) hit $556 on Monday morning and all of a sudden it looks like the 50/50 odds of iPhone weakness is already priced in. Two weeks ago, we figured the stock would rise $100 if Apple beat iPhone estimates and it would drop $100 if it missed.

Investors, including us, have given the majority of their attention to the negative 50% odds, but what about the positive 50%? We know that Verizon iPhone sales declined by 1 million units from the holiday quarter and we will find out what happened at AT&T(T) when it releases results on Tuesday morning. Verizon and AT&T are both important pieces to the puzzle but 63% of iPhone activations occurred outside of the U.S. last quarter.

More Headlines

The March quarter is the monster quarter for international iPhone sales because it includes the Jan. 13 launch of the iPhone 4S in China and the March 9 launch of the iPhone with China's newest carrier, China Telecom. China has become Apple's second most important market in terms of revenue and this is the launch quarter for them. Can Chinese iPhone sales compensate for the 1 million Verizon drop and maybe another 1 million drop from AT&T? Easily.

The Street is now expecting sales of 31 to 32 million iPhones in the quarter. What do we expect? If you take the 24% Verizon sequential decline across the board from the holiday 37.04 million iPhone number it gives you 28.15 million units. However, there are two important numbers to factor in. iPhone sales grew 117% sequentially because of the iPhone 4S launch. With 20% of revenue coming from China, it's rational to assume that a 117% rise in Chinese demand could result in an extra 7 million iPhone's sold (especially considering there were 21 additional launch countries on January 13th) which gets Apple to 35 million units in the quarter.