Macenstein

Posted by iGor

Apple is expected to report record profits during its January 17th Earnings Conference Call, and this time it is not its ubiquitous iPod music player that will get the credit. Instead, at least one analyst expects Apple to announce over $900 million in profit from sales of Apple’s “Pages 2” software, nearly doubling last quarter’s $546 million profit.

“Everyone is talking about Pages 2, you really can’t escape the media hype,” says Apple analyst Michael Steveniak. “Pages 2 was the media darling of last year’s Macworld Expo, but it really only caught fire with consumers going into the 2006 holiday shopping season. We’re pretty optimistic we’ll see a Pages 3 in about 11 days at the Moscone Center, and that is why we are setting a target stock price of $740 for Apple, and a “Buy it Now” rating.”

Pages 2 was released as part of the iWork ’06 bundle last January alongside the “PowerPoint-killer” Keynote 2. Steveniak says this bundling may have hurt Pages 2, and be the reason for the slower than expected gain in mindshare. “It took a little while to build momentum, mainly because it wasn’t being marketed correctly. But all that changed starting around September when all the kids went back to school and started talking about this “new killer app” they found over the summer. Now, Pages 2 is pretty much the application most Mac new users are buying their MacBooks and iMacs for. Everyone wants to run Pages, and you need a Mac to do it. It’s a very sexy application. Keynote 2, however, is kind of like Pages‘ “fat friend” that tags along on your date.

Steveniak suggests if Apple sold Pages on its own it could conceivably create an even larger revenue stream for the company. “I have talked to many people who say they would buy an extra copy of Pages right now if Apple sold it separately from the iWork bundle, just for the box. That’s how into Pages Mac users are.”