“Apple investors should reset their expectations for iPhone 6S sales, which are currently too high, Pacific Crest Securities analyst Andy Hargreaves said in a research note Wednesday,” Patrick Seitz reports for Investor’s Business Daily. “‘Near-term expectations for iPhone sales remain unrealistically high,’ Hargreaves said. ‘Anecdotal evidence suggests demand for iPhone 6S is lower than demand for iPhone 6.'”
“Apple’s statement Monday that first-weekend iPhone 6S sales are on pace to beat last year’s record first-weekend iPhone 6 sales likely is more about supply than demand, he said,” Seitz reports. “‘The preponderance of data points suggests that demand for the iPhone 6S is lower than it was for the iPhone 6, possibly meaningfully so,’ Hargreaves said. ‘This includes Google search data, device shipment times, third-party surveys, a lack of comments from carriers, and a lack of quantitative comment on pre-orders in Apple’s statement.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Anecdotal evidence and Google searches are not reliable indicators of demand.
Last September, Hargreaves advised selling AAPL shares around $100 ahead of Apple’s iPhone event which unveiled the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. Apple then proceeded to sell over 173 million iPhones in the three quarters since Hargreaves issued his advice and currently trades some 14% higher than when he issued his call to sell.
In January 2013, Hargreaves advised that the high-end market for smartphones and tablets was going to be saturated sooner than expected and that would lead to poor growth for Apple. Hargreaves opined, based on what (Google searches? Anecdotal evidence?) we don’t know, that demand for what he termed “incremental” hardware improvements was “waning” or that, basically, he did not believe that people would continue to upgrade to new iPhones.
In short, why anybody listens to anything Andy Hargreaves has to say about Apple, given his history of Apple-related predictions, is beyond comprehension.
How many times are fickle, memory-impaired investors going to scatter when Andy screams “wolf?”