AAPL Investment Analysis Report & Stock Research, Apple, Inc.

Ockham's Rating/Recommendation Summary

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AAPL Revenue

Cash earnings is the most important factor in our analysis, but it goes without saying that if a company cannot produce sales then there is no ability to generate cash flow. By that logic we look very closely at revenue numbers as our second most important factor in valuing a company's stock. We have established reasonable Price to Sales per share ranges based on historical data of the last 10 years. For, AAPL the high and low end of the Price to Sales per share ratios are 4.33x and 2.02x respectively.

Notice that AAPL's current Price to Sales per share ratio is 4.21x, which is well above its historical average. This means that AAPL looks relatively expensive compared to its historical Price to Sales average, and thus it is more difficult to believe that there is significant price appreciation potential. In order for the stock to become more attractive, we would like to see a decline in the Price to Sales ratio of 32% just to return AAPL to its historical average.

AAPL Cash Earnings

As the old saying goes, "Cash is King!" We look at reported Cash Earnings, but the main emphasis of our analysis involves stripping out non-cash events such as depreciation from our cash earnings analysis. This helps us view the cash flows more clearly. Nevertheless, an analysis of Cash Earnings (both reported and otherwise) is absolutely pivotal to assessing a company's value, and currently AAPL is significantly below its historical average multiple of cash earnings as calculated by Ockham. Similar to our analysis of sales per share, Ockham looks at the last 10 years of cash earnings levels for AAPL to identify where the current high and low price levels have been historically in relation to profit per share. Again, we utilize a weighted average methodology which relies more heavily on recent years of data. This weighted average framework provides us with an average high Price to Cash Earnings ratio per share of 38.02 and a 18.53 low over the same period.

So what does "significantly below" mean when we talk about Price to Cash Earnings numbers for AAPL? From the Ockham perspective, we are looking specifically at AAPL to see if the market is recognizing the huge disparity between AAPL's past stock price to Cash Earnings ratio to today's levels. At a difference of 24% below the average historical Price to Cash Earnings ratio, our view would be quite positive at this point. However, as with all metrics, we need to also take other factors into account when looking at AAPL. While we view better Cash Earnings metrics as very important, if the market is slow to identify this value, or if Cash Earnings were to fall from these levels, we would become more neutral in our stance.

AAPL Dividends

A positive Ockham rating does not require a company to pay out an inviting dividend or a dividend at all. However, we believe dividends provide a useful measure of a company's inherent expectations. AAPL may pay a dividend at this time; however, there is an insufficient amount of history to incorporate it into our analysis. Therefore, we are not utilizing the dividends or lack thereof in our study. As AAPL more consistent dividend history is made available, we will begin to factor this into the Ockham approach.