This week Steve Jobs, who arguably executed the biggest turnaround story in corporate history with Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), died at the age of 56. Incidentally, this week Apple also announced the important launch of iPhone’s new version, iPhone 4S, after a gap of 16 months. Research in Motion’s (NASDAQ:RIMM) stock had a great run-up this week and increased by 20% on continuing speculation that the company may be a takeover target. Nokia’s (NYSE:NOK) stock was volatile throughout this week, which could partly be explained by the announcement of the iPhone 4S.
Here are some of the key updates from last week on these names.
Apple
Steve Jobs was widely recognized as the driving force behind Apple’s culture of innovation that took it from near collapse to become an industry leader and one of the most respected brands globally. The reaction to this on Apple’s stock was muted and the stock declined slightly as was the case when Steve Jobs resigned from the position of CEO in August this year.
The iPhone 4S launch failed to wow users as many were expecting much more with a potential iPhone 5. However, we believe that iPhone 4S has meaningful upgrades such as voice recognition system called Siri, a faster A5 dual core processor, better battery life and an improved camera with 1,080 pixels resolution for high definition video. On the software front, Apple introduced iOS version 5 in iPhone 4S, which has various new features and services such as Twitter integration and iMessage instant messenger service. It will also have iCloud service integrated, which we believe has the potential to become a new model of media consumption that could influence demand for Apple devices.
The iPhone 4S debuts on October 14th with pre-orders beginning today. It will be interesting to see if the excitement around iPhone 4S could match the same level when iPhone 4 was launched in June last year. Apple sold around 1.7 million iPhone 4 during the first three days of its launch.
See Apple’s Culture Challenge with the Loss of Steve Jobs and Forget the iPhone 5, the 4S Has Enough Excitement to Grow Market Share.
RIM
The takeover speculation helped fuel RIM’s shares and it jumped by 12.5% on Wednesday, making it the biggest gain in the last 2.5 years. This is not the first time this has happened, and last week the stock jumped on the speculation that activist investor Carl Icahn has taken a stake in RIM, which will help him push for a board seat and press the company to consider a sale.
See RIM Jumps Again on Takeover Speculation and Rumored Icahn Stake in RIM Fuels Takeover, Asset Sale Speculation
Nokia
Nokia’s stock declined in the first half of the week on the perception that iPhone 4S would further hurt the company’s fortunes. However, the stock rebounded during the latter half of the week as Apple failed to wow users, who were expecting iPhone 5 launch with rich features.
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