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Saturday, October 23, 2010

A quick word on AAPL

Any metric you look at AAPL, one can see it is not in a bubble. In relation to EPS growth, throw any metric you want, they are all very reasonable, and when backing out the unproductive cash, very inexpensive.

A recent article in www.seekalpha.com used free-cash-flow (FCF) and market cap as a means to justify a bubble status.

FCF is defined by 'net income+amort/depreciation-working cap.- capital expenditures'. AAPL's trailing 12 FCF is (14.013B+1.027-1.212-2.121) 11.707B.

AAPL currently has a market cap of $280.89B. They have about $51B in cash total. So basically, their market cap, as a business and excluding unproductive cash, is worth $229.65B.

They are generating a 5.1% FCF on the worth of the business (11.7/229.6). With treasuries well below 3%. That sounds pretty good. Especially when you compare it to IBM. IBM's FCF/market cap is 7.9%. (I did not back out the cash for IBM because they have a very heavy cash allocation scheme, and does not sit unproductively for them like AAPL.)

Point being, even on a FCF basis, in relation to AAPL's Market Cap, AAPL is very reasonable. Especially considering the type of product mix and demand they have. And just looking out a few years, their product cycles and respective demand can last at least 3 years, with the enterprise space and Verizon entering as their customer base.

(Albeit, this metric proves IBM is a disgusting and substantial value here.)

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