Everyone is talking about Steve Jobs’ medical leave today and quite a lot of analysts are trying to figure out ‘the Jobs premium’ on Apple’s stock value. As of the end of today, it turned out that Steve Jobs’ medical leave message only had a minor -2.3% impact on the stock price, despite the fact Jobs is considered the soul of the tech powerhouse. Investors are pretty confident that Jobs will be back very soon, and the public now has stronger faith in the team Jobs has built to run Apple in the future. On top of these, I believe Apple has already done major product planning works for the year, so Jobs can to take some time to rest at this point. At the CES two weeks ago in Las Vegas, we heard that an Asian company has already received Apple’s plan to manufacture iPhone 5. It is certain that the new iPhone 5 will come out sometime this year. We also guess that iPad 2 is in similar situation and the two new product releases could help Apple maintain its lead in the smartphone and tablet space for quite some time until Jobs comes back. But certainly we don’t have any doubts on Tim Cook’s team to run the company which has been proven by Jobs’ last medical leave.

Jia Wu, published on Jan 19th.