Come Oct. 17, I will purchase shares of Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL).
Why not sooner, or today, when a global sell-off has the iEmpire trading down by more than 4%? The Motley Fool's disclosure policy requires that I wait 10 days to buy stock in a company I've written about.
And yet the delay doesn't bother me. Barring an announcement from CEO Steve Jobs that the iEmpire has built a gold-smelting plant in outer Freedonia to hedge against exposure to the U.S. dollar and outfit a new limited-edition series of gold-plated MacBooks -- first customers: Donald Trump and Kanye West -- I expect the irrational selling to continue for weeks, perhaps months.
You call this Apple rotten?
Investors have a recent history of ignoring good news. Two of the more notable happenings from the past week:
1. Copyright regulators handed Apple an important victory in its fight to keep iTunes tracks priced at $0.99 each.
2. The rising Mac market share eats into Microsoft's (Nasdaq: MSFT) lead.
To be fair, analyst downgrades have investors skittish, but, if you're a long-termer like me, Apple's valuation has rarely looked better. Doing the math, Mr. Market valued the iEmpire's earnings power -- its market cap after subtracting cash on hand -- at just $74.69 per share, or 14.6 times trailing earnings, as of Monday's close.
For perspective, here's a look at companies that trade for similar multiples but lack Apple's extraordinary cash position:
|
Company
|
Trailing P/E
|
Expected 5-Year Growth Rate
|
|
DreamWorks Animation (NYSE: DWA)
|
13.04
|
9.92%
|
|
Pfizer (NYSE: PFE)
|
14.24
|
3.85%
|
|
Affiliated Computer Services (NYSE: ACS)
|
14.04
|
12.71%
|
Sources: Motley Fool CAPS, Yahoo! Finance as of Oct. 6, 2008.
Apple's peers don't do much better:
|
Company
|
Trailing P/E
|
Expected 5-Year Growth Rate
|
|
Dell (Nasdaq: DELL)
|
11.11
|
11.68%
|
|
Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ)
|
12.69
|
12.8%
|
Sources: Motley Fool CAPS, Yahoo! Finance.
Let's complete the equation. After accounting for cash, Dell fetches 8.4 times earnings. Hewlett-Packard gets 12.1 times its per-share income. And Apple gets ... 14.6, a 21% premium to what HP commands? How is that fair?
Answer: It isn't. High growers deserve high multiples. Apple isn't getting one now, but I'm betting a portion of my retirement savings that, over the long haul, it will. Do you agree? Disagree? Use the comments box below to share your view.
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