“With Apple Inc.’s stock suffering, investors are hoping for relief from the expected launch of a new iPhone in September,” Therese Poletti reports for MarketWatch. “Don’t count on it.”
“Earlier this week, Pacific Crest Securities analyst Andy Hargreaves wrote a note titled, ‘iPhone units are likely to decline in F2016 and That’s OK,’ describing his expectation for a decline as a ‘transitory issue,'” Poletti reports. “But it’s unlikely that a drop in annual unit sales — which would be the first for Apple since the iPhone was introduced in 2007 — is going to be OK for most investors.”
“Hargreaves wrote that he expects iPhone sales to decline about 8% in fiscal 2016, mostly due to a tough comparison with those big sales gains in 2015, which were fueled in large part by China,” Poletti reports. Hargreaves is more pessimistic than the consensus analyst estimate, but big gains are not expected: FactSet reports that 31 analysts expect an average of 235 million iPhone unit sales in the 2016 fiscal year, which would be less than 2% growth from this year’s expected sales.”
“The expected iPhone 6s so far sounds mostly like an incremental update, which could lead fewer users to upgrade. Jordan Edelson, founder and chief executive of Appetizer Mobile, believes iPhone sales ‘will be strong regardless, it will not be a flop by any means,'” Poletti reports. “A true flop isn’t necessary to freak out Apple investors, though. They are already in a nervous state, with the failure to disclose Apple Watch sales data leading many to believe it is underperforming Wall Street’s initial expectations… Piling on are some scary predictions from technical analysts, who analyze stocks based on trends and repeated patterns in trading charts.This week, some technical analysts noticed a bearish chart and predicted a pattern of a so-called “death cross” in Apple’s stock.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The 2015 Festival of Nonsense continues unabated.