Product pricing will be all-important for Apple’s stock price following its expected announcement of a new iPad, a leading tech analyst said Wednesday.
“What we’ve seen over the last year, it’s less about features,” Piper Jaffrey analyst Gene Munster said. “If we were going to do a feature analysis, we’d’ve said that the iPhone 4S was going to be a total failure. In return, they absolutely blew the numbers out.”
Munster added that the iPad 2, which critics had expected would meet with slow sales, was sold out for two months.
The reason?
“There’s fundamentally a growth in the tablet space, and Apple iPad tends to have a pole position,” he said.
Munster estimated Apple will sell 60 million iPads in 2012, with 80 percent of those sales will come from the iPad HD. He held an “overweight” rating on the stock and a price target of $670 per share.
However, a chart analysis suggested that a disappointing set of features could hurt the stock price, which was at $534.79 midday.
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“I think that the drop could be pretty big,” Abigail Doolittle of Peak Theories Research said on “Fast Money.”
“There’s a huge gap at $477, another one at $430,” she said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some sort of initial excitement spike up to about $550, but I think ultimately that this could turn out to be some sort of disappointment, and that would indicated that it’s going to be a similar product with just a new name.”
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Trader disclosure: On March 7, 2012, the following stocks and commodities mentioned or intended to be mentioned on CNBC’s "Fast Money" were owned by the "Fast Money" traders: Terranova is short GOOG; Terranova is short April gold futures; Terranova is short May silver futures; Terranova is long VRTUS; Terranova is long NXPI; Terranova is long IBM; Terranova is long MCD; Terranova is long LQD; Terranova is long EMC; Terranova is long MSFT; Terranova is long GS; Terranova is long JOY; Terranova is long OXY; Cortes is long SO; Cortes is short Aussie dollar; Cortes is short XHB vs. S&P long; Cortes is short SOXX; Cortes is short FXI; Kelly is long IWM; Kelly is long KRE; Kelly is long SMH; Kelly is long SPY; Kelly is long TLT; Kelly is long USG; Kelly is long QQQ calls; Kelly is long FTSE 100; Kelly is long Eurostoxx50; Kelly is short Yen; Kelly is short EWA; Kelly is short EWC ; Kelly is short EWY; Doolittle is long TYP; Doolittle is long GLL; Doolittle is long ZSL; Doolittle is long FAZ; Grasso is long LVS
For Gene Munster
Piper Jaffray makes a market in the securities of the following companies, and will buy and sell the securities of these companies on a principal basis: AAPL
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SFG and/or its affiliates beneficially own 1% or more of the securities of Netflix, Inc. (NFLX).
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