Apple Inc. (AAPL) Faces iPhone Sales Slump in China—Analyst Warns of More Trouble Ahead
We recently published a list of 11 AI Stocks Shaking Up Wall Street Today. In this article, we are going to take a look at where Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) stands against other AI stocks shaking up Wall Street today.
It hasn't been long since DeepSeek released its efficient yet low-cost models, causing a frenzy in the tech world. The AI startup has returned to the spotlight today, releasing a major upgrade to its V3 large language model in a quest to intensify competition with its Western counterparts.
The new model, called DeepSeek-V3-0324, has been made available through the AI development platform Hugging Face. The move marks the startup's continued push to gain a foothold in the rapidly intensifying tech landscape.
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The updated model includes added parameters and improvements in coding and mathematical problem-solving. The company's website has used the terms 'enhanced reasoning capabilities, optimised front-end web development and upgraded Chinese writing proficiency', to define its updates.
According to the South China Morning Post, this new version and DeepSeek V3 are both foundation models trained on vast data sets. These can be applied in different use cases, such as that of a chatbot.
DeepSeek data has shown that the updated model demonstrates notable benchmark improvements on tests such as the American Invitational Mathematics Examination (AIME). The new version scored 59.4 compared with 39.6 for its predecessor on the test, while it achieved a 49.2 on LiveCodeBench, an increase of 10 points.
According to Häme University of Applied Sciences lecturer Kuittinen Petri, 'Anthropic and OpenAI are in trouble.' He noted this when he tested out the new version and asked it to 'create a great-looking responsive front page for AI company.' In response, the new version produced a mobile-friendly, accurately functioning website after coding 958 lines.
Petri further noted that 'DeepSeek is doing all this with just [roughly] 2 per cent [of the] money resources of OpenAI'.
Another tester, Jasper Zhang, a Math Olympiad gold medalist from the University of California, Berkeley, checked the model with an AIME 2025 problem. According to him, 'it solved it smoothly'.
'More confident open-source AI models will win in the end.' -Jasper Zhang.
For this article, we selected AI stocks by going through news articles, stock analysis, and press releases. These stocks are also popular among hedge funds. The hedge fund data is as of Q4 2024.
Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds pile into? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter's strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 373.4% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 218 percentage points ().
Pixabay/Public DomainApple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) is a technology company. On March 24, Jefferies analyst Edison Lee reiterated an 'Underperform' rating and $202.33 price target on the stock. According to Lee, iPhone sales have been falling far faster than their Android-based rivals.
"That indicates the launch of iPhone 16e (shipment started on February 28) has not been able to support overall iPhone sales in China, even though 16e is covered by the government subsidy program."
In contrast, Apple bull Wedbush analyst Dan Ives maintains a $325 price target and an Outperform rating on the stock. The analyst has estimated that Apple's AI delays will remove around 10 million iPhone handset sales from its fiscal 2025 tally. That said, further delays in Apple Intelligence rollout may discourage users from buying the next round of upgrades.
Overall, AAPL ranks 6th on our list of AI stocks that are shaking up Wall Street today. While we acknowledge the potential of AAPL as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that some AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and doing so within a shorter time frame. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than AAPL but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the .
READ NEXT: 20 Best AI Stocks To Buy Now and 30 Best Stocks to Buy Now According to Billionaires
Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
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