An analyst for Morgan Stanley said today that expectations for Apple’s Q1 2019 earnings are already set so low, that now marks perhaps the most ideal time to invest in the company.
Basically, the “bad news” regarding weak iPhone sales has already seen such a heavy response from the most fickle investors, that whatever Apple announces on Tuesday will most likely not tank the stock any more volatile than usual.
New data from CIRP, Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, shows that iPhone XR was the best selling iPhone model in the United States over the past fiscal quarter, accounting for nearly 40% of total sales. Interestingly, the iPhone XS and XS Max combined accounted for just over 25%.
New data from market research firm Counterpoint shows iPhone sales are down 20% YoY based upon November 2018 numbers versus 2017. Further, the firm shows that last November, the $999+ iPhone X was the best selling phone in November, while this year it is the iPhone XR, which starts at $749.
New Q2 data from both Strategy Analytics and Kantar shows that the iPhone 6s is the best-selling smartphone in both the USA and worldwide. The 6s accounted for 4.2% of global smartphone sales, says SA, with the iPhone 6 taking second place at 2.5%, just ahead of Samsung’s Galaxy S7 at 2.4%.
“Apple’s iPhone 6s is currently the world’s most popular smartphone,” said Neil Mawston, Executive Director at Strategy Analytics. “The iPhone 6s is wildly popular in dozens of countries globally, due to its attractive hardware design blended with rich features such as 4K video, large multi-touch display and fingerprint security.”
Kantar’s U.S. data concurs, the company noting that iOS market share was also up …
It’s been mostly doom and gloom where iPhone sales and forecasts are concerned, but one analyst believes that the iPhone 7 could see record sales in September, reports Business Insider. BMO Capital Markets analyst Tim Long says the reason is because such a high proportion of existing iPhone owners currently have a model two or more years old.
Twenty-five percent of the “installed user base” is poised for an upgrade, Long believes — an audience of 120 million phones. BMO’s Long went back through the history of all iPhone sales and calculated that on average, 17% of users upgrade as soon as the next year’s model comes out; 58% upgrade a year after that; and 22% the year after that. Only 2% of users hang on longer.
While he’s predicting a huge number, the underlying figures would seem to support his contention that we can expect a marked uptake in sales even if this year’s model is less visually distinctive than we’d usually expect from a brand new model …
Apple’s decline in iPhone sales is unsurprisingly having a knock-on effect on its key suppliers, with the WSJ reporting that Foxconn, Pegatron, Sharp, Japan Display and Sony have all reported falling profits or losses as a result.
Apple isn’t the only smartphone manufacturer seeing falling sales. New figures from Strategy Analytics show what the global smartphone market saw its first-ever year-on-year drop on sales, down 3%.
Linda Sui, Director at Strategy Analytics, said, “Global smartphone shipments fell 3 percent annually from 345.0 million units in Q1 2015 to 334.6 million in Q1 2016. It is the first time ever since the modern smartphone market began in 1996 that global shipments have shrunk on an annualized basis. Smartphone growth is slowing due to increasing penetration maturity in major markets like China and consumer caution about the future of the world economy.”
Apple’s fall was of course far more dramatic, iPhone sales down 18% year-on-year, with CEO Tim Cook blaming economic ‘headwinds’ – and Strategy Analytics’ numbers show that strong competition from Chinese brands forms a large part of those …
Later today, at about 4.30 PM ET, Apple will announce its financial earnings results for fiscal Q2, including the latest three-month sales numbers for iPhone, iPad and Mac.
Although Apple is still going to post profits in the billions, still one of the most successful companies the world by all metrics, investor expectations are low as the company guidance indicates it will report its first decline in year-over-year quarterly revenue since 2003. The primary cause? Falling iPhone sales …
A new motion signed into law in India will require all phones, including iPhones, to feature a ‘panic button’ to call emergency services and GPS for location pings from January 1st, 2017. The provisions are being brought in to aid the ‘security of women’, via the Indian Express.
Obviously, GPS has existed in iPhones since the iPhone 3G but it seems that Apple will have to make some software modifications to iOS to comply with the panic button request.
KGI’s Ming-Chi Kuo – an analyst with an excellent track-record on AAPL – has forecast that year-on-year iPhone shipments will continue to fall this year, and end up well below market expectations. In an investment note seen by 9to5Mac, KGI says that total 2016 iPhone shipments will likely fall below 200M units, and that the iPhone 7 will see lower sales than the iPhone 6s/Plus.
Kuo says that lower-than-expected iPhone 6s/Plus sales showed that replacement demand was falling in developed markets, while new demand from emerging markets has not yet picked up the slack. KGI does not believe that the launch of the iPhone 7 later this year will be sufficiently appealing to see the iPhone return to growth …
Supply-chain sources cited by the variably-reliable Digitimes claim that Apple’s Q2 chip orders are down on previous years, and that demand for the iPhone SE is not high enough to offset declining demand for the iPhone 6s/Plus.
Shipments for the new iPhone SE will be unable to offset the fall in shipments for the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus devices in the second quarter, the sources continued. The shipment target for the SE in the second quarter is four to five million units, the sources said.
Apple did caution that the current quarter’s revenue would see its first year-on-year fall in 13 years, the company predicting a drop of around 11%, which will be in large part due to (probably temporary) ‘peak iPhone.’ This latest report suggests that the slump may continue into the following quarter …
IDC’s latest quarterly mobile phone tracker contains a mix of good news and bad for Apple. It starts by noting that 2015 was a fantastic year for the company in terms of both sales numbers and average selling price.
2015 was a tremendous year for Apple and the iPhone as shipments hit a new record of 231.5 million for growth of 20.2% over 2014, which was nearly double that of the overall smartphone market. More importantly, Apple was able to grow its ASP from $663 in 2014 to $713 in 2015.
Things get tougher this year, it suggests, forecasting flat sales for the year (or a drop of 0.1% if we wanted to pretend that forecasts could ever be that accurate) …
As if Apple’s management wasn’t under enough pressure from the stock falling below $100 yesterday, two firms of analysts have said that the company was either over-optimistic in its iPhone sales expectations or has even been guilty of “deliberately overstating underlying trends.”
Business Insider quotes excerpts from investor notes from Pacific Crest and UBS, each suggesting that Apple has over-estimated iPhone demand. Both point to apparent contradictions between Apple’s predictions of continued growth and supply-chain reports of reduced orders.
UBS says that it believes Apple has been taken by surprise with the relatively low numbers of people upgrading from older iPhones.
We think the most likely reason for a shortfall is that the upgrader portion of unit demand has stalled significantly in recent months and is failing to meet Apple’s own expectations.
The note from Pacific Crest goes much further.
Management’s confidence now looks highly likely to be misplaced, which suggests that it was either ignorant of the challenges it faced or deliberately overstating underlying trends. The former seems unlikely, which suggests that management has taken a much more aggressive tone as growth in the high-end smartphone market has slowed. This reduces our confidence in Apple’s commentary going forward.
Business Insider notes that the Wall Street consensus is for significant year-on-year fall in the current quarter, ranging from Stifel, Aaron Rakers and team forecasting an 8% drop in sales through to Pacific Crest at 18%. Even noted Apple bull Katy Huberty at Morgan Stanley is predicting a 15% fall this quarter.
As we noted earlier, Apple’s guidance for the current quarter will be issued when it reports its holiday quarter numbers on January 26th.
Apple shares yesterday closed below $100 for the first time in 15 months, the WSJ noting that the value of the company has dropped by $100B in a little over a month, losing 7% this week alone.
The Cupertino company’s 4.2% drop on the day was greater than the overall market’s slide and the 3% slump in the Nasdaq Composite, which closed down 10% from its May peak. Since early December, Apple has shed $100 billion in market value.
The slide is being attributed to two factors: one (semi-)factual, one speculative …
[Update 2: Reuters reports that Foxconn has published an earnings report showing a 20% fall in December revenues. However, the company says that its December earnings were “as expected,” and its full-year earnings are up 6.42% on the previous year, only marginally short of analyst expectations of 7%.]
[Update 1: StreetInsiderreports that Foxconn has denied reports that workers started their lunar new year holiday early, and says that the government payout relates to ‘an insurance premium,’ but makes no reference to any response to the claim that it has been laying off workers.]
The WSJ is today suggesting that Apple is scaling back iPhone orders, noting that iPhone manufacturer Foxconn has been laying off workers and has received a $12.6M subsidy from the Chinese government through a program designed to minimize unemployment.
The piece notes that the subsidy is for Foxconn’s Zhengzhou plant, which is mostly devoted to iPhone production, and says that Apple has also reduced order forecasts for iPhone component makers.
Chinese iPhone factories had some idle capacity in the final two months of the calendar year, when they would typically be racing to chongliang, or “rush quantity,” for Apple, in factory-speak. Some workers at Foxconn’s Zhengzhou factory in inland China were let go on early holiday last month, one of the people involved in the supply said, although the typical new-year holiday season doesn’t start until February.
Update: Fortune reports that in a conference call, Huberty said her forecast was in part based on an estimated 10% drop in component orders. She noted that this could be due to robust inventories rather than weak demand, and that the numbers in the note were a ‘worst-case’ scenario. Huberty emphasized that she remains upbeat on Apple, citing a strong brand, loyal customers, R&D investment and other revenue streams compensating for weaker predicted iPhone sales.
The brand is strong. Customers are loyal. Gross margins are stable. R&D is going full tilt. And revenue streams from new products (Watch, Apple TV), apps, and media could start to make up for slowing iPhone growth.
An investment note by Morgan Stanley Katy Huberty predicts that Apple will see its iPhone sales fall by 5.7% in Apple’s 2016 financial year, reports Business Insider. The prediction is significant for two reasons: if realised, it would be the first time since the launch of the iPhone that sales have fallen year-on-year – and the forecast is made by a noted Apple bull.
Morgan Stanley thinks that Financial Year 2016 iPhones sales will be 218 million – a 5.7% drop — while Calendar Year 2016 sales will be 224,000 — a 2.9% drop. These predictions are significantly below Huberty’s previous estimates, of 247 million for FY2016 and 252 CY2016.
One of the reasons given isn’t new – high smartphone penetration in developed markets – but Huberty says there is a second reason …
A Goldman Sachs investment note argues that Apple has huge potential for generating more recurring revenue, suggesting an opportunity to generate an additional $7.6B a month, reports Business Insider. The company points to the rumored Apple TV subscription service as one future source of monthly revenue.
In a recurring revenue framework, we have constructed an average revenue per user (ARPU) metric that captures the installment plan pricing of the iPhone ($32/month), assumed installment plans for the other hardware products, and services (e.g. Music at $10/mo, TV at $40/mo) …
We’ll learn on Tuesday just how many iPhones in total Apple sold last quarter, but before then we’re continuing to gauge analysts’ best educated guesses ahead of time. Just as it did with Apple Watch — although with a comical range in that case — Fortunehas published an interesting roundup of iPhone sales predictions from analysts for the last and current quarters, respectively.
What we do know is that Apple sold 13 million iPhone 6s and 6s Plus models over the new models’ launch weekend late last month, although only sales completed during the first half of that weekend are included in the upcoming quarter being reported. What are the analysts saying about the rest of the last quarter? Expand Expanding Close
An investment note by KGI predicts that Apple will next week report year-on-year iPhone sales up 23.6% to 48.5M, but says that that holiday quarter sales will be down on last year, and that the decline will continue into the first quarter of next year.
KGI says that China is the big factor, included as a launch country this year, and hence contributing to calendar Q3/fiscal Q4 sales, while last year’s China sales fell into the holiday quarter. It estimates that 22M of the iPhones sold last quarter were the new iPhone 6s/Plus. Apple sold 47M iPhones in the previous quarter.
Despite the launch of the iPad Pro next month, both iPad and Mac sales will fall across all three quarters, predicts the report … Expand Expanding Close
With Apple having announced all-time record iPhone sales, you might have expected analysts and investors to be impressed, and to see the AAPL share price rise as a result. Instead, the stock is actually down a little – so what gives?
The answer, like the one to so many questions today, is: China. This is the first iPhone launch where mainland China, and not just Hong Kong, has been included from day one. This means the opening weekend sales of 13M versus 10M last year aren’t like-for-like.
Apple hasn’t revealed what percentage of iPhone sales were made in China, but we can do some back-of-an-envelope sums to get a rough idea … Expand Expanding Close
A day before the announcement of the new iPhones, analytics company Localytics has provided a picture of the iPhone market today. It shows that the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus between them account for a full 40% of all iPhones in use, with the iPhone 5s trailing behind at 23.7%.
The same data also backs our report that the iPhone 5c is being discontinued, showing that it accounts for just 8.5% of active iPhones, putting it below the iPhone 4S. This can only add to doubts about whether the often rumored and debunked iPhone 6c (beautiful concept images below) could succeed … Expand Expanding Close
A report from the usually-reliable KGI has repeated many of the details from our exclusives on the iPhone 6S, but additionally offered support for an earlier rumor that the front camera will be upgraded to 5MP. Surprisingly, it also suggests that the rear camera lens may not be sapphire, as it has apparently failed drop tests.
Aside from upgrading rear camera module to 12MP, Apple will upgrade front camera module to 5MP […] The new iPhone may not be equipped with sapphire cover lens, as it still has quality issues on the drop test.
Although sapphire is much more scratch-resistant than Gorilla Glass, it is more brittle, and thus at greater risk of shattering when dropped.
The company also repeated its concerns that limited appeal of the new features, together with external economic factors, is likely to result in flat or negative sales growth … Expand Expanding Close
Kantar has refuted gloomy suggestions that record sales of the iPhone 6/Plus may make it tougher for Apple to persuade customers to upgrade, saying that its data “suggests Apple has ample opportunity for upgrades in Q4 2015 and 2016.”
The pessimistic view put forward in some quarters goes like this. There was a lot of pent-up demand for larger-screened iPhones. Everyone who wanted one has now bought one, so upgrade rates will now tail off significantly.
Kantar says that this view ignores the fact that people will continue to upgrade from older models. It points out that the average U.S. iPhone user upgrades every 25 months – and 31% of owners bought their current iPhone more than two years ago … Expand Expanding Close
Tech investment company Pacific Crest has echoed KGI’s prediction that year-on-year iPhone sales are likely to decline following the launch of the iPhone 6S, but says that investors shouldn’t be concerned.
We believe iPhone 6/+ models drove abnormally high share gains and upgrade rates that are likely to moderate somewhat in the 6s cycle, which is likely to drive total iPhone units down year-on-year in the first part of financial year 2016 (Q4 of calendar 2015) …
