February Expected to Be a Great Month for Mac Sales
February 2009 was not the greatest month for Mac sales. They were down 16 percent year over year and 10 percent from January. And while that may have been unfortunate at the time, it’s good news for Apple (AAPL) and its investors today, because it provides a particularly soft number for comparing with Mac sales in February 2010.
That soft January 2009 growth rate comp helped January 2010 Mac sales grow an astonishing 36 percent year over year, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster observes in a research brief this morning. It’s likely, then, that an even softer February 2009 growth rate comp will do the same for February 2010 (see table below; click to enlarge).
“The month of Feb-09 was -16% y/y, the softest Mac comp we’ve seen since we began tracking the data 5 years ago,” Munster writes. “We expect the strong y/y growth in NPD data that we saw in Jan. to continue in the month of Feb.”
Munster continues to expect Mac sales ranging from 2.6 million to 2.8 million in first quarter of calendar 2010. That’s an 18 percent to 26 percent increase over the same period in 2009, which was down one percent year-over-year.