Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

So today I am depressed by the general state of affairs in the US stock market. It just wasn’t a happy day, with all the slightly less than shining Q2 reports coming out, and investors dumping stock and tanking the market. I think the following chart, from my Facebook Stock Quotes application, says it all:

There’s only 1 stock that actually went up today in my list of 12, and it’s Phantom! Phantom is the game console company which doesn’t have a product and is described by Wikipedia as:

On February 21, 2006, it was revealed that the Phantom gaming console was put on hold indefinitely. It was also revealed in an SEC filing that Infinium had lost over $62.7 million in 3 years, over half of which was spent on marketing the company and its products which have not yet made it to market. Over $24 million was spent on salaries and consultants with only $2.5 million going towards development. Infinium claimed that they still intended to release their “Lapboard” if their financial situation improved.[13] The “Lapboard” repeatedly missed release dates of the second quarter of 2006, October 2006 and November 2006.

What a world we live in! Maybe next week will be more “green” for America.

I just got the following error from Chase Bank:

We were unable to process your change. General MQ error (2007)

On the one hand, the errors are scary. On the other hand, I’m thrilled that JP Morgan Chase Bank One and Co. are using IBM’s Websphere MQ for reliable transmission of my account information!

You can go read about their 2006 Q4 earnings from their release–the highlights:

The Company posted record revenue of $7.1 billion and record net quarterly profit of $1.0 billion, or $1.14 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $5.7 billion and net quarterly profit of $565 million, or $.65 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 31.2 percent, up from 27.2 percent in the year-ago quarter.

Apple shipped 1,606,000 Macintosh® computers and 21,066,000 iPods during the quarter, representing 28 percent growth in Macs and 50 percent growth in iPods over the year-ago quarter.

At work there was a vibrant discussion about whether iPod sales were growing or shrinking, so I decided to produce a graph of iPod sales:

The yellow line denotes the moving average across four quarters, so we can factor-out Christmas and seasonal disruption. Oh yes, iPods are a growing product line! I attribute this to the innovation in the low end with shuffles and nanos.

If that isn’t decisive enough, take a look at this graph of ipod $ value sales v.s. Apple’s desktop/notebook combined $ value sales. The moving yearly average is in yellow, again:

You can see that for the last year, Apple has been making more money on their iPod hardware alone than on all their computer hardware. Wow. You’ll note that they’re hoving around the 1:1 ratio, but that for the least year they’ve been above the line. It stands to reason, then, that this Spring they’ll fall behind on iPod sales, but make it up with the release of the iPhone this summer, and possibly a new iPod later this year.

For all you fact checkers, I’ve put my data into a Apple Q4 2006 on Google spreadsheets. Update: I missed Q4 2006 but it doesn’t change the results.