Wall Street to scrutinize Apple over China struggles and slow AI progress
Despite the gloomy outlook, the company is still worth more than $3tn, and Wall Street appears optimistic it will deliver on earnings. Analysts are expecting Apple to report a 4% rise in revenue over the last quarter to $89.3bn, according to S&P Global.
'Apple has grown accustomed to having revenue growth in this high-margin services business, which masks other areas of the business not performing as well,' said Dipanjan Chatterjee, a vice-president and principal analyst for Forrester.
Chatterjee points to several issues that have led to Apple's less-than-stellar performance of late. He says Apple has lagged on hardware innovation, causing 'consumer apathy' and its AI rollout has been glitchy. Apple Intelligence, Apple's AI product, has been limited to incremental features and rather than transformational upgrades. And it's been more than a year since Apple announced a suite of AI upgrades to its voice assistant Siri – many of which have yet to be released.
'This work [on Siri] needed more time to reach our high-quality bar,' said Craig Federighi, Apple's vice-president of software engineering, during the company's developer conference in June.
Donald Trump's sweeping tariffs have also been a pain point for the company as the US president pushes his desire for manufacturing to boom in the US. The vast majority of Apple's products are made in China, with about 90% of iPhones assembled there, in spite of recent efforts to shift production elsewhere. Apple chief Tim Cook said during the company's last quarterly earnings call that he expected the China tariffs to add $900m to its costs this quarter.
Apple has attempted to pivot, moving more of its manufacturing to other countries such as India and Vietnam. However, this week, Trump announced a rise in tariffs on India, too, up to 25% starting on 1 August.
Because of the external and internal pressures, Apple has seen its share price plummet this year. Once the industry leader of the 'Magnificent Seven' – the most valuable publicly traded companies in the world, all American technology giants – Apple boasted the highest-performing stock and biggest market capitalization on the US stock market.
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Now its share price is the second-worst performing after Tesla in percentage decline among the seven. Since January, Apple's stock has fallen roughly 15%.
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