For Investors Only -- AA, AAPL, And More -- July 8, 2014

From 24/7 Wall Street:

Aluminum company Alcoa Inc. (NYSE: AA) is set to unofficially kick off the second-quarter earnings season when it reports results after the close of trading Tuesday. We have recently looked at how Alcoa is transforming itself, which is taking the company further away from its dependence on emerging markets growth. It also may no longer matter whether the global aluminum market doubles by 2020.

The Thomson Reuters consensus estimates for the second-quarter of 2014 are $0.12 in earnings per share (versus $0.07 per share a year ago) and $5.66 billion in revenue (down 3.3% from a year ago). As a reminder on that revenue decline, the new effort in wheels and truck bodies are still getting underway and the jet engine parts acquisition is still pending — at a time when Alcoa keeps “right-sizing” its core global operations.

Achtung! This is not an investment site. Do not make any investment decisions based on anything you read here or think you may have read here.

AAPL hit a 52-week high yesterday; the underlying numbers are staggering. Business Insider is reporting:

If you told someone in IT in 2004 that in a decade, Apple would be a dominate force in enterprise, you'd be laughed out of the room.

Now, that fact is taken as a given.

On Apple's most recent earnings call, CEO Tim Cook rattled off a list of statistics showing just how badly the company is crushing the competition among business users.
Among Fortune 500 companies, 97% use the iPhone in some capacity and 98% use the iPad.

If you factor in education and government buyers, market research firm IDC says that the iPhone holds 59% of of the enterprise market, while the iPad holds 78%.

The numbers are staggering. A lot of folks are "hung up" on "new" hardware (or lack of "new" hardware). In fact, hardware is but a small piece of Apple's success:

While people were clamoring to use the iPhone at work, Apple was making it easier to do so. As far back as 2007 — the year the iPhone first came out — Apple secretly licensed Exchange ActiveSync technology from Microsoft so that users could sync their email, contacts and calendars between their phone and work. 

This alone was huge for Apple in enterprise. When Microsoft came out with the news that Apple was building Exchange support into the iPhone, Terry Myerson (who was then a corporate VP in charge of Exchange, but now serves as executive VP of operating systems) noted that 81 Fortune 100 companies used Exchange for email and calendaring in 2008.

Secretly.

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The Market On A Down Day 

The market is down 0.53% at the moment. On a day like today, with the market generally down, it's interesting to see which oil companies traded at new highs. COP and HES traded at new highs, but have since dropped back. I assume those highs were near the open and then quickly joined the rest of the gang dropping back a bit. Southern Copper (SCCO) also traded at new highs, and has stayed in the green. I bought SCCO some years ago, but sold fairly soon thereafter. I don't plan to get back into SCCO but it is interesting to follow.