Ming-Chi Kuo: Worst may be over for Apple’s iPhone slump

“There has been a lot of investor worry about Apple’s iPhone sales after the company said it would no longer disclose the number of units sold each quarter and then warned that it would miss its own revenue target in the holiday quarter by about 7%,” Kif Leswing reports for Business Insider. “But in a note distributed to clients on Monday, one closely followed analyst predicted that the worst would be over soon.”
“The analyst, TF International Securities’ Ming-Chi Kuo, is known for being tapped into Apple’s Asian supply chain and accurately predicting new Apple products,” Leswing reports. “‘The current market consensus on 2019 iPhone shipments (160-180mn units) is much lower than our estimation and we believe the share prices of Apple and most iPhone suppliers are generally priced in the negative,’ Kuo wrote in the note seen by Business Insider. ‘We maintain our forecast of 188-192mn units for 2019 iPhone shipments.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Anything positive is, of course, great and all, but unit sales don’t matter.
Again, units don’t matter. There are only so many quality users on the planet. Keeping them happy, as every measure of customer satisfaction shows Apple has amazingly well done to date, is what matters. As long as the users buy apps on the App Store, subscribe to Apple Music, add iCloud storage, use Apple Pay, etc., they can replace their hardware with Apple hardware at their own pace.
iPhone has higher customer satisfaction than Android, meaning that Apple gains iPhone users from Android via normal churn as users graduate to real iPhones. — MacDailyNews, January 21, 2019
Yes, the iPhone replacement cycle is lengthening, but with so many iPhone (and iPad) users and with customer satisfaction so high, it really doesn’t matter. The market is mature and there are only so many quality users on the planet. Apple has that market cornered. The types of people who’ve settled for Android aren’t likely to buy as many apps or subscribe to services. They want free. They’re not worth much after the sale. The iPhone knockoff peddlers like Samsung can have them.
This is, of course, Apple’s point with ceasing the reporting of unit sales. It’s the user base, the quality of the user base, and services that matter more now. That’s where the growth is and where it will be for many, many years to come. — MacDailyNews, January 5, 2019