“The bearish view that Apple’s next iPhone (7) will lack innovation has found support in the predictions of highly regarded analyst Ming-Chi Kuo,” Mark Hibben writes for Seeking Alpha. “However, a survey of Kuo’s predictions over the past couple of years reveals he is far from perfect, even if he is the best of the Apple analysts. Moreover, his longer term predictions, such as for the 2017 iPhone (8), tend to be the least accurate.”
“Lacking the ability to assess the current crop of iP7 and iP8 predictions from Kuo, I decided to do the next best thing, which is look systematically at his predictions over the past couple of years,” Hibben writes. “The overall average I arrived at was 2.63, which would amount to a B- letter grade. Not particularly good in absolute terms, but probably better than anyone else.”
“My point in grading Kuo is not to diminish his accomplishments,” Hibben writes. “He is still the best of Apple analysts. My point is to show the difficulty of making accurate predictions in light of Apple’s secrecy and the overall lack of reliable information regarding future products.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote over a year ago in June 2015:
Ming-Chi Kuo is solid on predicting Apple product moves… but we’re not convinced on the accuracy his unit sales estimates, which require a completely different set of tools, methods, and talents than those used to, for example, discover Apple’s choice of case material or display sizes for the next-gen iPhone.
They’ve been off quite a lot. The analysts have lowered PT estimates and Apple doesn’t even come close to reaching them. Apple is the Yankees of Wall Street. Highly paid staff with a losing record. Just keep sitting on the $200B, while waiting for a rainy day.
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I’ve been arguing for many years that when analysts are being quoted, the article should also include a summary of previous predictions from that analyst over the last few years so that the reader can make a judgement about how much credibility to give to their predictions.
Some analysts are consistently very wide of the mark and yet are still widely quoted as though they have some amazing insight.