Apple is set to report its fiscal second quarter earnings report this Thursday, after the closing bell, but the company may be able to skate by with another weak iPhone quarter due to its beaten down valuation.
Dan Gallagher for The Wall Street Journal:
It has been a pretty bleak year so far for Apple. The federal government is trying to break up the company’s closed-ecosystem for its App Store and—in a separate case—challenge the lucrative payments Apple gets from Google every year to make the popular search engine the default on mobile devices including the iPhone.
The company is also losing ground in China, a market that historically has accounted for about 19% of Apple’s annual revenue.
Such a bum run of news would normally be a poor setup for Apple’s stock ahead of its fiscal-second-quarter report, due Thursday afternoon. But the shares are already in a funk, down around 12% this year. That is the worst performance by far among megacap techs valued at more than $1 trillion. Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, Meta Platforms and Google parent Alphabet have logged a median gain of 23% for the year. More notably, the drop has put Apple’s multiple to around 25 times forward earnings, which is in line with its five-year average and down more than 16% from last summer…
That should help temper any negative reaction to what is expected to be a weak report. Analysts expect iPhone revenue to fall 10% year over year—the worst drop for that key business unit in more than three years. Revenue from all of Apple’s device segments is expected to show a year-over-year decline for the period, which would be the first time that has happened in at least a decade.
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MacDailyNews Take: Apple revealing – and hyping – its new AI features will fuel its stock price soon enough. In fact, if CEO Tim Cook and/or CFO Luca Maestri just mention that the company will discuss more about AI at its “Let Loose” special event on May 7th, they could reveal pretty much anything in regard to disappointing earnings and get away with it.
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