Recently Apple’s CEO Tim Cook went on record where he admitted that the company was seeing a weak demand for its iPhones, particularly in China. This also resulted in Apple slashing their financial estimates, which unfortunately also resulted in the share prices of Apple falling, causing the company to lose a fair chunk of its market value.
Safe to say that this is not what investors were hoping for and now according to Goldman Sachs’ Rod Hall, it seems that the investment firm thinks that the way Apple is headed, they could end up being the next Nokia. According to Hall, he says that just like Nokia did back in the day, Apple is also relying heavily on customers constantly upgrading their devices.
Unfortunately that is not happening as the iPhones have gotten more expensive with every release, making it too pricey for people to make upgrades at the frequency that they used to. However Hall notes that this isn’t necessarily doom and gloom for Apple, and states that beyond China, Goldman Sachs does not see strong evidence of consumer slowdown in 2019.
Hall writes, “Beyond China, we don’t see strong evidence of a consumer slowdown heading into 2019, but we just flag to investors that we believe Apple’s replacement rates are likely much more sensitive to the macro now that the company is approaching maximum market penetration for the iPhone.”
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