Yassin Sona 1
As competition in China’s smartphone market becomes increasingly fierce, Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) attempts to defend its market share by cutting prices.
Wedbush Securities said the measure appears to be working.
Wedbush Securities analysts say recent supply chain checks show signs of iPhone stabilization Dan Ives said. This is especially important given Apple’s plans to launch its newest iPhone, expected to be called the iPhone 16, in September.
“An examination of Taiwan by our Wedbush technical team last week indicated that Apple’s supply chain performance in April was 2% above historical linear performance, while the consensus remained unchanged,” Ives wrote in an investor note. The outperformance in April was likely aided by inventory build-ups in China ahead of the May and June holidays, although we also saw a slight uptick in Chinese handset production forecasts for the June quarter and healthy expectations for third-quarter production.
Ives rates Apple an outperform and raised his price target to $275 from $250.
The much-anticipated WWDC
Apple Stock Increased by more than 10% Over the past month, the company reported fiscal second-quarter results that beat expectations and announced a massive $110B in buybacks.
Despite optimism that “the worst is behind us” for the tech giant due to slowing iPhone sales, investor sentiment rose at next month’s developer conference. Expectations are high that Apple will make several announcements related to generating artificial intelligence and introducing the technology into its ecosystem.
For Ives, the upcoming developer conference is Apple’s most important event in a decade.
“We expect the officially announced OpenAI flagship partnership to include an OpenAI chatbot with exclusive features based on Apple’s on-device [large language models]”In our view, cloud-driven Apple LLM and Apple supporting artificial intelligence on its own high-end chips,” Ives explained.
Ives added that Apple could also start laying the foundation for an AI app store, allowing developers to build consumer apps on top of the AI technology stack.
With the iPhone 16 set to be released in the near future, Ives predicts that smartphones will usher in a “super cycle” of upgrades, driven by the introduction of numerous artificial intelligence features. Ives said that after the release of iPhone 16, a total of up to 270 million iPhones can be updated.
