Shares of Apple barely budged on Monday following a story in The Wall Street Journal that Apple would delay the production of its latest iPhones by roughly a month.
Brian Sozzi for Yahoo Finance:
If you’re Apple, it pays to have gobs of cash and a gazillion plugged in sell-side analysts obsessively covering your stock.
At first blush, one would think news of a delay of any kind for fresh iPhones would be negative to Apple’s stock price. Not necessarily for a few reasons, strategists say.
First, a delay in the production ramp has been discussed at length on Wall Street and factored into a good chunk of profit estimates on Apple and the stock… More important is that Apple is still — apparently — planning to have its new iPhones in the market before the critical holiday shopping season. By then, many would agree the U.S. economy will be in far better shape than it is today and interest in buying a new iPhone higher.
MacDailyNews Take: In the light of recent events, a month or so is nothing. As long as Apple makes the Christmas 2020 shopping season with 5G-capable iPhones, everything will be fine.
Yeah, sure. It’s not as though anyone was actually expecting an “iPhone super-cycle” to happen. Anyway, the iPhone SE is more like icing on the cake with the big cake being the multiple 2020 iPhones later this year. It doesn’t matter if the analysts want to beat the stock down as it just makes it easier for Apple to buy back more shares. As long as the stock dividend is increased, I’m fine with that. Despite the CoViD-19 crisis, I think Apple will do OK later in the year. Not spectacular, but OK. I don’t think Apple shareholders can rightly expect more than that under the current circumstances.