Apple's profits to be highest ever for public company, analyst says

James Martin/CNET

(CNET) Analyst Brian White remains ever bullish on Apple.

White is the Topeka Capital Markets analyst who in April boldly declared that Apple's stock would eventually be worth $1,001 a share. A few weeks later, he pushed that up to the singular price target of $1,111 "over the next year." That would amount to Apple's stock roughly doubling in value.

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Monday morning, the supremely optimistic Mr. White has focused in on Apple's profits, in a tabulation relayed by Boy Genius Report. In a note to clients, White writes that, as he reckons it, Apple is on pace in calendar 2012 "to generate the highest annual net income of any publicly traded company ever." Ever!

Last month, Apple turned up in third place on Fortune's list of most profitable companies, just behind Chevron and several lengths in back of Exxon Mobile.

Barron's draws out another dramatic declamation from White: "Investors," he said, "should think of Apple's market cap potential in terms of trillions, not billions."

What's driving the current round of enthusiasm? White - like many observers - is fired up about the possibility of Apple unleashing the long-awaited iPhone 5 and a hotly anticipated iPad Mini. The Topeka Capital Markets analyst is apparently basing his gung-ho go-to-market expectations for an "exciting September" for Apple on discussions he's had with "local contacts" in Apple's supply chain in Taipei.

Apple is also coming off a heck of a week in which it played emcee to a bevy of product announcements at its Worldwide Developers Conference, most notably iOS 6, a MacBook Pro with Retina display, and an upgraded Siri.

Shares in the maker of Macs, iPads, and iPhones have traded as high as $644 apiece in recent months. This morning, they're up slightly to just over $581 a share.

We've reached out to Apple for comment on White's predictions and will update this story when we hear back.

This article first appeared at CNET.

[hypnotoad72]

With iPhone profit margins at 60% and MacBook margins at 55% or higher, nobody will be shocked.

Even the 2010 Mac Pro tower... nearly 50% profit margin there as well.

Driving down costs via slave labor helps... until everybody else does the same thing, which means nobody can afford it.

Macs look nice but they certainly are NOT well built in the hardware department. Otherwise they would not approach 100C when under full load, and Apple is clearly migrating toward ditching their desktop lines, starting with the aforementioned Mac Pro. 3D rendering, movie editing, etc, for sustained periods of time, will vastly shorten the lifespan of a CPU getting so hot. Especially as the chassis, which does NOT conduct heat flow, traps in hot air (simply physics - only a heat sink, directly attached to the CPU, with thermal grease bridging microscopic gaps between both metals, will help dissipate heat faster. Anything else is merely an enclosure to trap heated air in. Now google 'plastic vs aluminum as insulation' and wince. Given HOW the machines are built, they do not dissipate heat. They are more inclined to trap it. Otherwise a comparable Windows laptop costing 50% less would not achieve low CPU load temps of 75C.

So please don't tell me Apple is like BMW. That is just another myth people are meant to swallow. Otherwise nobody in productive fields would be using them...