Transcripts For CNBC Squawk Box 20130424 : vimarsana.com

CNBC Squawk Box April 24, 2013



more cash for investors. listen to this. raising quarterly dividend and increasing stock buyback program to $60 billion from $10 billion. the new capital plan includes issuing debt for the first time because they have that money sitting overseas but can't bring it back because policy at this point. analysts point to comments from ceo tim cook on the conference call he said some really great stuff was coming in the fall and 2014. they say that suggests that apple would have no new products in the market for the next few months. cook acknowledged apple's growth tempered but stressed the company's position remains strong. revenue forecast falls short. the june quarter is the weakest quarter every year. joining us right now is senior communication technologyanaly analyst. this seemed to be everything that investors had been hoping for, no? >> yes but i think the gross margin was a concern for many investors not only for the quarter but for the guidance. the questions people are going to ask are when are gross margins going to stabilize? demand was healthy. apple will need to innovate. we're in that you got to believe me phase and now we're talking about a time line of the fall. we got support on the dividend and buyback but gross margins and innovation will be key. >> you thought that you would hear about new products even sooner than the fall? >> it was possible that you might hear particularly about a low cost to approach the emerging markets and to offer something for the smartphone user who is more price sensitive. >> hold on a second. if you think of low cost phones, they talked about strength in china. you can't have strength with low cost phones or strengths in emerging markets and not have it impact gross margins. what's more important to you? >> a low cost phone that maintains a margin. they'll need to move some of the product mix out, innovate and i think tvs. i think i radio. something along the lines of i payments. that's what will move the sentiment and move the needle financially. >> i kind of feel this company's pain. after watching the stock be down more than 40% heading into this earnings, 44% from september to before the earnings call yesterday, it seems that investor base at this point is so demanding. i don't know how they can possibly please everyone. honestly i thought by what they said yesterday that would give some sort of relief to the investor base. why not? >> i upgraded shares on monday for the first time ahead of the quarter because it has been oversold. you have a changeover in investor base. you have growth investors moving to a value investor base. i think you'll see support in the stock with yield. support in the stock because of buyback. people will give them a pass candidly and you'll see the stock trade up over the next three months or so. >> what's your price target? >> $600. >> so you think it should be well above where it is right now. what do you think will happen? do you think it will change over the investor base? >> change over investor base and gross margins. you have had a fast follower in samsung take a significant amount of market share and we haven't seen innovation yet. >> what was old price base before you got to 600? >> didn't change it. >> it was always 600? >> initiated the stock around 575 or so. >> you weren't following it until it came all of the way down? >> correct. i picked it up in november time frame when the market perform. >> why do you have any open that all of a sudden end of 2013, 2014, we're going to see products that will break through? between now and then a lot can happen? there's a lot of people out there trying to innovate and the stuff we've seen apple come up with in the last two years has not been mind-blowing or the kind of stuff that's been as revolutionary as things they were doing before. >> agreed. form factor was biggest change they made on the smartphone front. i said tvs is the biggest issue. a lot of people have talked about that. i think the market in the tv market is ripe for change. people want three things. they want a la carte pricing, ease of use for content browsing and they want the capability to have access to the internet beyond that. >> that's as much about the technology and hardware as it is about the relationships that you have with content providers and steve jobs had a special relationship that probably is hard to replicate if you are tim cook with what was then disney which then was able to open up the floodgates. the question is whether they will be able to do that now. >> they have to be able to make the comcast and time warner's money same way they made the song producers money. if they go with at&t or verizon, that's a strategy they can come around. they already have -- >> they said they wouldn't make boxes. i thought phones were tough too but they had steve jobs to do phones. steve jobs was here to do tv, i might think about it. i like the idea that it's now a value stock with a $380 billion market cap. it's second only to exxon but now a value stock. it's weird. i always called it a gadget maker but people said they qu t quieted fears that its gadgets. it's a gadget maker with the biggest market cap in the country next to exxon. >> this he also have an operating system in place. you see what they are talking about with itunes for on demand. and don't forget icloud. they have stores so if your smartphone has a problem, you see an apple expert, samsung doesn't have that. >> best buy messed that up. that does work i guess. is ron johnson going back? they went let him back. >> john, thank you for joining us today. >> thank you. >> i almost said those two words again. those two words fit to any situation. >> east coast they fit together? >> the first two. when he finished i was going to say -- then i could have said it and it would have typified what i was feeling, right? i wish those words were legal. they're not. >> did you see by the way -- you're a morning money reader. north shore asset management who probably would have liked to use those two words about the apple conference call last night says can we please have someone with guts to become the ceo so tim cook can apologize to him in private and real ceo can tell investors how awesome the company is. i did just say that. >> frustration probably. >> frustration with how they are actually -- not just products but how they are dealing with investors. >> it must be frustrating for people that got in as stock was running 600, 650. the entire way down they've been told compared to this stock it's ten times earnings. compared to that stock it has this growth rate. compared to this. from 800 down to 400, you've been told that it's cheap because of the fundamentals and there's no reason for it to go lower but they don't -- what if samsung and android come along. if you don't sell more gadgets -- you have to feed the beast every quarter for apple. you can't come up with a small ipad or pink ipad. >> you can't go two or three quarters without a new product. >> is it cheap at 400? i have seen people say all of the way down. now on business networks. now. just like the market. we had a couple last week. markets last hurrah. now we're 1% off the highs again on the s&p. >> 1% off. >> remember all those bubble stories. >> right. >> here we are. >> when it comes to apple, all earning season we've been asking you to play along from home. this is armchair analyst poll. how did you do on apple? a close vote. "squawk" viewers were right. 36% of you predicted apple would beat earnings estimates. close vote. you guys were right. >> the other story we are talking about this morning, that fake market moving ap tweet about white house explosions. the fbi and s.e.c. are now investigating and cnbc's eamon javers is in washington with the latest. what's going on with this? >> good morning, andrew. it was a bizarre couple of minutes yesterday in washington and on wall street. it began about 1:07 p.m. here's the fake tweet posted to the ap twitter feed. breaking. two explosions in the white house and barack obama was injured. look at what it did to the dow jones. down 143 points and back up again in the space of just about three minutes. a lot of this attributed to automatic trading augu. a few minutes later the white house briefing was set to begin and by tradition ap reporter gets the first question and in this case she took the opportunity to clear up the situation explaining to the rest of the media folks watching just what had gone on. take a listen. >> i just want to say at the top that it appears as though ap's twitter account has been hacked so anything that was just sent out about any incident at the white house is obviously false and we'll put out something shortly. >> i appreciate that. i can say that the president is fine. i was just with him. >> it's not every day that you see the white house press secretary take to the briefing room to reassure people that the president is safe but that's what happened yesterday as this thing spiraled out of control fairly quickly and then spiraled back into control quickly again. the news cycle nobody else appears to have followed that story. on wall street trading bounced back right back to its initial trading range so no lasting harm done here but a lot of questions now about the role of the media here, role of technology and role of high-speed trading in the markets. >> any new thoughts about whether the white house or anyone else should use twitter as an outlet and more importantly different types of security procedures? for example, my twitter account has one password. i imagine the white house has one password as does cnbc and ap. maybe there's a better way? >> there's a lot of question on whether you need two factor authentication to have more sophisticated password system for twitter accounts with more than 1 million followers. they can do a lot of damage if bad information goes out. the white house uses twitter all the time and just within the past couple of weeks we've seen the s.e.c. make a decision that companies will now be allowed to use twitter to put out some of their financial and market moving information. so a lot of traders on wall street need to follow twitter in real time to get that information from companies now coming off their twitter and other social media feeds. there's a question here about security and you can imagine that a lot of people are going to question exactly how twitter secures some of these accounts and maybe twitter will have to offer up new security services as a result of this. >> maybe for the overall market this is a wash because the dow came right back to where it was. somebody was trading on this billions and billions and billions of dollars changed hands and you got to wonder who lost money? fbi is investigating. s.e.c. is investigating to find out if this was intentionally set out but they are looking at all of the trades made and the difference. there are still going to be a lot that comes from this. i don't know who lost money on this but somebody did. >> i think the calculation on s&p was that about $136 billion worth of value vanished and then reappeared magically a couple minutes later and if you had timed that bottom just exactly right, you could make a colossal amount of money buying on the dip. >> it's a zero sum. someone sold at the bottom. someone was forced out for no reason. it's 200 billion. it's top story if you do the math. 200 billion came off and then came right back on. >> it isn't human beings. >> maybe not. >> somebody sold and somebody bought. >> the other point here, guys, if i could jump in is computers are trading very fast automatically in milliseconds but a human being reading that tweet for me as a professional journalist -- >> i was sitting in a chair and you knew it was wrong immediately. >> it doesn't have the feel of something that the ap would put out. in context i look at my twitter feed and i can see there's no other tweets about this. i follow a lot of wall street people. a lot of washington people. if there had been an incident at the white house, my twitter feed would have exploded. you're a human being. that's where wall street is. trading happens faster than speed of human thought. that's what people are concerned about. >> what did we learned about last week? whatever we're in with twitter and facebook, you can't believe anything. any blogger can write whatever he wants and sooner or later all of this information might be valued at what it is actually worth which a lot of it is valued at zero. >> you bring up last week and you think about the bombing that happened last week. and the explosion. >> someone is under arrest. they're not under arrest. this is happening. here's two bad men we need to get on the cover of a newspaper that actually people read. they don't believe "the post" normally but they read it. i don't believe -- and cnn, what is it? what did james earl jones do? the ultimate in imparting accurate and timely information with a huge mess up. who do you believe nowadays? >> there's an argument to be made which is clearly the digital world can hurt in these types of examples. can justice quickly help in a way we didn't have before. that's in fact -- when you think about the boston bombings and what happened there, the fact that we actually caught these guys was in large part because of the digital world. >> a lot of cameras around. >> but there's -- there are two sides to this. >> just to offer up a thought here on behalf of those people who did for an instant believe this when they saw this, it comes in context of a terrible week. a bombing. an explosion. people are sort of a little on edge already. they see a thing like this and it comes within a week of very bad news, a lot of people's human emotions take advantage and they say maybe this thing is real. >> someone actually did it. nice work, idiot. that's funny. real funny. all right. >> we were dealing with a fake press release last week too. it didn't make sense either. a lot of crazy people out there. we go to east coast or do you want to go -- >> i'm trying to think of other words i can use. be careful. >> we're talking about the north dakota anchor. the local nbc station. >> wasn't it a small town in north dakota? >> you can google it if you would like to know the inside on this. it's time for global markets report. let's get to kelly evans standing by in london. good morning to you, kelly. >> good morning. i'll try not to start out with profanity. it's extraordinary to look at what's happening across europe. after session yesterday where we saw gains in the range of 2% to 3% for some of these indexes, not really on any major news, in fact the news was negative for pmi figures, more negative news this morning as germany's main business sentiment comes in soft and more green arrows nevertheless. this is the theme we've seen play out across europe. it's liquidity and it's hard to fight. italian stocks selling off about 0.7 of 1% but they have been rallying quite strongly over the last couple sessions. let's look at the peripheral debt markets. we've seen extraordinary new lows here. italy now moving back up toward 4% level. we were as low as 3.91. extraordinary if you think about it. in spain over here, 4.3%. we saw flows into the periphery this morning. we're seeing a bit of a move back out. it's the same story for bunds. we were green yesterday across the periphery and today it's back to all red. keeping a very close eye overnight as well on 4x rates. a lot to do with japanese yen. 99.65. we may try to hit that triple digit mark. up a tenth of 1%. look for it to boost stocks across europe, across the u.s. the japan impact if you want to call it that is that powerful. we'll keep a close eye on this as well. euro/dollar higher. sterling/dollar higher. next thursday is an important date to watch. it's when european central bank meets. speculation they'll cut rates to explain even though data is weaker, european stocks are hanging in there and they'll have to deliver. back over to you. >> are you going to cut the corporate tax rate in portugal? did you see where it is right now? >> that's right. they're going to cut it from 25%. >> 24 right now. sorkin, 24. they're going to cut it from 24. >> to what? >> i don't know. it's already 24. even in europe, my god, kelly, you had a great week. finally this nasty austerity where people actually have to spend the amount that they actually bring in. that kills you, doesn't it? you've hated it all along. >> i think the term doom loop has been appropriate here. i think unfortunately when you have highly indebted economies if you decide you're going to hurt growth, that decreases. you know a little bit about math, joe. i know that. if you hurt the denominator you'll increase debt to gdp ratio. >> ouausterity over there they didn't cut spending, they raised taxes. that's not the kind of austerity that will help things. you have to take lumps just temporarily to get back on track. >> i'm not sure there's austerity that helps things unless you talk about anything that's structural reform and these loosy goosy terms is necessary and making markets flexible is important but what happens is we get no need eed changes and no changes to entitlement programs. i love the idea but reality of how this is implemented is terrible. >> it wasn't cuts near term. it was tax increases. >> if you structure it one way or another it will hit household spending power. yes. >> all right. a big 180, joe. >> send your credit card back. with what you have been spending over there, i got to put you on a monthly -- you just can't keep paying your old bills with no credit card bills. send it back. >> you know that people and governments are not the same thing. come on. >> okay. i'm not talking about government. i'm talking about you. send it back. >> okay. all right. let's just end it there. bye, guys. see you tomorrow. >> bye, kelly evans. we'll see you tomorrow. >> traveling to paris. rome. >> coming up, another guy we need to talk to this morning. a veteran leader in the tech industry. former amd boston hector ruiz is joining us on the set to talk rivalries, partnerships and much, much more. >> announcer: before you hit the road, here's your travelers check. travel i.t. company is out with top global routes. here are four of the top five. melbourne sydney. beijing, shanghai. rio de janeiro and sau paulo. which one tops the list? 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