According to a Piper Jaffray report, sales of Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) Mac computers grew 39% during the months of January and February 2010 when measured year over year. If this growth rate were sustained throughout the year, it would be significantly higher than the 10% annual growth in Mac units that we forecast and could translate to a 3% ($7) upside to the $267 Trefis price estimate for Apple’s stock.
The impact of higher Mac sales is limited since Apple’s Macintosh business constitutes only about 18% of the company’s value.
Trefis estimates a 10% increase in Mac unit sales in 2010
Apple sold 11.2 million Mac units in 2009 consisting of 3.7 million Mac desktops and 7.5 million Mac notebooks. We estimate that Mac desktop sales will grow only about 3% in 2010 to 3.8 million desktops sold. In comparison, we expect Mac notebook sales to grow by 15% in 2010 to 8.6 notebooks sold.
The shift from desktop PCs to notebook PCs is a trend impacting the entire PC industry and this is the primary reason for the difference in our growth forecasts for Mac desktops and notebooks.
Based on our total estimate of 12.4 million Mac desktops and notebooks sold in 2010, the implied 2010 unit growth is only 10% which is significantly lower than the 39% growth reported by Piper Jaffray.
What if unit sales of Macs were to increase 30% in 2010?
Consider a scenario in which Apple is able to grow its Mac desktop and notebook unit sales for 2010 at a 30% rate, which is closer to the January and February rates reported by Piper Jaffray. This would mean that Apple will be able to sell 4.8 million Mac desktops and 9.75 million Mac notebooks in 2010.
The higher Mac unit sales imply Mac desktop market share of 3.6% in 2010, up from our original 2.9% estimate, and Mac notebooks market share of 6.2% in 2010, up from 5.4%. You can modify our forecasts below to see the impact of these changes on our estimate for Apple’s stock.
The charts above show you that the higher 2010 desktop and notebook market share result in a combined upside of about $7 (3%) for Apple’s stock.
For additional analysis and forecasts, here is our complete model for Apple’s stock.
