Wedbush analyst Dan Ives raised Apple's target price from $285 to $300, with a potential upside of over 36% from the current level; He predicts that the pent-up demand from iPhone users will ultimately drive sales of the iPhone 16 to reach 0.24 billion in 2025.
On Monday of this week, Caixin News Agency held its autumn product launch event and unveiled the highly anticipated iPhone 16 series - Apple's first artificial intelligence (AI) smartphone. $Apple (AAPL.US)$ On Monday of this week, Caixin News Agency held its autumn product launch event and unveiled the highly anticipated iPhone 16 series - Apple's first artificial intelligence (AI) smartphone.
Despite reviews showing that the iPhone 16 with AI functionality has made many mistakes, leaving some Wall Street analysts disappointed, Apple, a long-time giant company, and the well-known US investment bank Wedbush, still have high hopes for the iPhone 16 and Apple's stock price prospects.
Wedbush believes that the Apple iPhone 16 will help the company's market cap reach $4 trillion in 2025.
Wedbush analyst Dan Ives raised Apple's target price from $285 to $300, with a potential upside of over 36% from the current level.
On Tuesday, Apple's stock price fell slightly by 0.36%, to $220.11. The day before, on the day of the launch event, Apple barely closed up 0.04%. This seems to indicate that Apple's Monday event did not bring much surprise to the market.
Ives said, thanks to the artificial intelligence-related features, or "Apple Intelligence", the iPhone 16 will become the most successful iPhone product in Apple's history.
"We believe that cautiously introducing the Apple Intelligence feature in the next 6-9 months is the right strategy to drive Apple user upgrades," Ives said.
This Wall Street analyst expects that in the next 12 to 18 months, iPhone sales growth will reach high single digits, eventually forming a super cycle of upgrades.
"We continue to see further signs in the Asian supply chain indicating that this iPhone upgrade cycle could be historic, laying the foundation for a super cycle. Currently, we estimate that globally around 0.3 billion iPhones have not been upgraded in over 4 years," Evers explained.
He predicts that pent-up demand from iPhone users will eventually drive iPhone 16 sales to 0.24 billion units in 2025.
Evers is also encouraged by Apple's decision to keep the price of its new iPhones unchanged, calling it "a wise strategic move that will ensure users do not miss any upgrades."
Evers also mentioned that in China - Apple's key market, iPhone 16 is likely to be successful as it may cooperate with Baidu to develop a large language model to support its Apple Intelligence feature.
"Apple's introduction of artificial intelligence, combined with a large-scale upgrade cycle, is creating a new era of iPhone growth, especially in the key China region," Evers said.
It should be noted that currently Apple Intelligence is only in the testing phase, and the full functionality will not be available with the launch of the iPhone 16 series. It is reported that its full functionality will be officially released in October this year.
Editor/Somer