The Market’s anticipation of big sales of new iPhones drove Apple shares in better positions this year, but one Wall Street firm says that the smartphone maker’s stock may have risen too far.
Deutsche Bank restated its hold rating on Apple Shares, saying that the Wall Street’s consensus estimates for future iPhone sakes are too high. Apple shares fell by 0.7 percent in early trading hours after the reports.
The stock has lost about $50 billion in market value so far this month, which dropped by 6 percent. Despite performing weakly for the past few sessions, Apple is still one of the market’s best-performing large-cap stocks, rallying 33 percent this year versus the S&P 500’s 12 percent gain.
Analysts restated their $140 price target for Apple shares, which is 9 percent lower than the previous session’s closing price.
Scribner, Wall Street Analysts, states that investors are expecting fiscal 2018 to be a repeat of the big iPhone 6 upgrade cycle in fiscal 2015, when the company generated sales $31 billion above expections.
To beat expectations by a similar magnitude ($30B) this cycle would require that AAPL ship 45M more iPhone units in FY-18 than current expectations, or nearly 290M iPhones in total. We view this as highly unlikely,” she wrote.
Scribner is more pessimistic for the following year and predicts that Apple’s fiscal 2019 sales is expected to drop.