UPDATE: Societe Generale Upgrades Apple to Buy

Societe Generale has published a research report on Apple

and has upgraded the company from Hold to Buy after excellent Q1 earnings results. In the report, Societe Generale writes, "We had become concerned that Apple could struggle to find high sales in markets traditionally dominated by low-end handsets. We believe that the results from China demonstrate that our concerns were misplaced, especially as we only saw sales from China Telecom and China Unicom for part of the quarter. Additionally, we calculate that the gross margin achieved by Apple on the iPhone is now approaching 60%, much higher than our previous forecasts. We have therefore increased our iPhone unit forecasts for 2012 to 150m units (previous132m) and our iPhone margin assumption to 57% up from 53%. The net impact is to increase our EPS forecast by over 20% for 2012 and 2013." Societe Generale has also raised the price target from $600 to $750 on Apple, which closed yesterday at $560.30.