Apple is now a must-own stock: Analyst

Tom DiChristopher

Manhattan Venture Partners; and Lou Basenese, Disruptive Tech Research, and Alex Gauna, JPM Securities, dissect Apple's strong earnings beat and shipment of 74.5 million iPhones. </p>

Apple is a must-own stock after its blowout fiscal first-quarter earnings report, Lou Basenese, founder of Disruptive Tech Research, told CNBC on Tuesday.
The tech giant reported record-breaking earnings of $3.06 per share on revenue of $74.6 billion. Analysts had expected Apple to report earnings of about $2.60 a share on $67.69 billion in revenue, according to a consensus estimate from Thomson Reuters.

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Basenese said the earnings would have been hard to predict one year ago, when shares of Apple were trading around $70 and critics were wondering whether CEO Tim Cook was cut out for the job.
"He should just stand up and point to the
scoreboard and sit back down. These are mind-melting numbers," he said in a "Closing Bell" interview.
Sales of iPhones hit 74.5 million units versus a 65.7 million estimate.
"Clearly the iPhone 6 is the record-breaking story here," Max Wolff, Manhattan Venture Partners' chief economist, told "Closing Bell." "It sold much more than people thought, way above a quarter. That jacks up the margin. It also jacks up the average price per unit sold."
Wolff noted that while iPad sales were somewhat weak, they were not as soft as analysts had feared. Sales of the iPad hit 21.4 million units versus a 22.2 million unit estimate.
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JMP Securities has a price target of $150 on Apple shares, which gives the stock a mean market multiple for the S&P 500, said the firm's senior research analyst, Alex Gauna.
"I think you could argue with these kinds of numbers it deserves a premium to the mean market multiple, so you can go higher from there," he said.

Shares of Apple were up about 5 percent in after-hours trading.
Before the earnings release James Ramelli, trader at KeeneOnTheMarket.com, forecast that Apple's stock would hit $120 by the end of the week.
He said after the release that the company's earnings suggest that it has sucked a lot of the air out the tech space for its competitors.
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"I think we're going to have to see a couple more tech names report to see whether or not it really is the space that is going to do well or the specific stocks within the space that have been strong and are reporting stronger earnings," Ramelli said.