Tech titan Apple is announcing its earnings Monday afternoon after the market closes. Despite a number of other high-profile earnings—including U.S. Steel and Caterpillar—Apple’s are likely to make the most news. Not only will the company be revealing what kind of holiday it had, activist investor Carl Icahn has shined the spotlight on the form by relentlessly pressuring it to boost its stock value.
Icahn has been nagging Apple to reshape its finances, most recently on Twitter. Despite resistance from the company, he has been aggressively pushing for a bigger stock repurchase program. His most recent entreaties:
Bought another $500mil of $AAPL tday, bringing our total to $3.6 billion. If board doesn’t see AAPL’s ‘no brainer’ value we sure do.
— Carl Icahn (@Carl_C_Icahn) January 23, 2014
Today we have put out a seven page letter to $AAPL shareholders discussing why buyback should be markedly increased: http://t.co/O7F8S7BzWg
— Carl Icahn (@Carl_C_Icahn) January 23, 2014
The billionaire’s letter to Apple shareholders explains why he believes the firm is undervalued and outlines steps the board can take to remedy the situation. Icahn recently told TIME, he thinks Apple may also one day make an ideal suitor for PayPal, the payments division of eBay which he is trying to force the online auctions company to jettison.
Apple CEO Tim Cook will likely be asked about Icahn, but it remains to be seem if he will say anything of note. (The two have, by all appearances, a cordial rapport; for more read TIME’s recent cover story on Icahn.)
Analysts, meanwhile, expect Apple to report fiscal first-quarter earnings of $14.09 a share, according to a consensus survey by FactSet. Piper Jaffray senior research analyst Gene Munster, who polled 20 investors, believes the company will announce sales of about 56 million iPhones, 24 million iPads, and 4.6 million Macs. Revenue estimates from most analysts hover around $46 billion.