Customers line up to enter an Apple store as the iPhone 14 series goes on sale in Shanghai on Sept. 16, 2022.
VCG | Visual China Group | Getty Images
A month after Apple’s latest iPhones came out, analysts and investors are starting to see signs of slow demand in China versus last year’s models.
Sales of Apple’s iPhone 15 models in their first 17 days are down 4.5% in China versus last year, according to an estimate from Counterpoint Research. Unit sales of the higher-end Pro Max and Pro are down 14% and 11% versus last year, according to the estimate.
Wall Street analysts also point to shorter shipping times on Apple’s website, suggesting that either demand has fallen, or supply has greatly increased. Jeffries analysts say “weak demand” in China has knocked Apple off the top spot for smartphone market share in the country.
China is Apple’s third-largest market after North America and Europe, and the apparent sluggish start comes after a few news stories that have some analysts fretting over the iPhone maker’s outlook in the country.
Huawei has returned to the high-end smartphone market in China after a few years where it was mostly absent, as U.S. trade restrictions made it hard to get certain parts necessary for building phones.
Last month, some Chinese government agencies reportedly banned iPhones for work, raising questions about Apple’s brand in the country.
Apple CEO Tim Cook is spending time in China this week, his second visit of the year. He’s visiting Apple stores, suppliers and Chinese officials. Apple also released a new iPad model this week specifically for China that works with the country’s carriers.
It’s a tough smartphone market for everyone. Smartphones sales are down around the world, on pace for the lowest shipment total in a decade, and they’re specifically down in China because of macroeconomic concerns.
“Apple, we suspect, could be down five-ish percent — and the China market is down at least 5%,” Counterpoint research director Jeff Fieldhack told CNBC. “It’s basically holding serve in a down market.” He stressed that U.S. demand, according to Counterpoint’s data, is strong and is making up for some of the Chinese shortfall.
All eyes on the holiday quarter
Investors are eager to see Apple return to growth this holiday season after three-straight quarters of declining overall sales. Data points from Apple officials in July point to falling growth yet again in the quarter ending Sept. 30.
Apple will reveal its September quarter results Nov. 2, and executives will likely give some data points about how the holiday quarter is firming up, and whether it’s returning to growth. The holiday season is Apple’s busiest of the year, and the first full quarter to include iPhone 15 sales. The September quarter only included a few days where the latest iPhones were sold.
Analysts often use shipping times — or how many days Apple is estimating it will take to ship a new iPhone — on Apple’s website to infer demand. These wait times are lower across the board than they were a year ago, especially in China, according to recent analyst notes from UBS, JPMorgan and Bank of America.
Bank of America analysts say the lower ship times reflect improving supply, not slipping demand.
But that’s at odds with Morgan Stanley analyst Erik Woodring, who said the bank is slashing its December quarter estimates and target price for the stock because it believes that limited supply will push some iPhone sales to the first quarter of 2024.
Adding to the concern among investors is that Apple’s other products won’t make up any iPhone shortfall. Apple’s Mac and iPad lineups haven’t gotten a major update yet this year. New models usually stoke demand, and the Chinese iPad announced this week was a very minor update. TFI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says MacBook sales could crater as much as 30% in 2023 versus last year.
One event that could signal how well Apple is doing in China is “Singles’ Day,” a major shopping holiday taking place Nov. 11, where iPhones will likely be slightly discounted to boost sales.
“That’s a big deal. They do a lot of sales and that will be a good harbinger of what the Q4 will be in China,” Fieldhack said.
Standard Chartered’s bullish crypto analyst still sees bitcoin’s price hitting $500,000 during Donald Trump’s presidency — even after a selloff that sank the world’s largest digital currency to a three-month low.
Geoffrey Kendrick, who heads up digital assets research at Standard Chartered, told CNBC he believes bitcoin will hit the $200,000 mark this year before climbing even further in the coming years.
“Within the crypto ecosystem, what we need are traditional financial players, like Standard Chartered, like BlackRock and others that have the ETFs now to really step in,” Kendrick said in an interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” Thursday.
“As the industry becomes more institutionalized, it should be safer,” Kendrick said, adding that this should result in fewer negative headlines — such as the recent $1.5 billion hack on cryptocurrency exchange Bybit last week.
This increase in crypto adoption by institutions, coupled with some “regulatory clarity” in the U.S., should lead to less volatility over time, he added.
“That should add to that medium term, top-side potential, which for me is bitcoin up to $200,000 this year, and $500,000 before Trump leaves office,” Kendrick told CNBC.
Kendrick said the catalyst necessary for large financial institutions to gain confidence to invest in bitcoin and other crypto assets is a stabilization in prices and increased regulatory clarity.
Bitcoin earlier this week sank to a three-month low below $90,000 amid declines in global equity markets. As of Thursday, the token was trading at $86,418. That means it’s down about 20% from an all-time high of $108,786, which the coin peaked at in January, according to CoinGecko data.
Standard Chartered’s Kendrick said digital currencies have dropped more broadly due to uncertainty around tariffs and resolutions to major wars such as Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Gaza.
“Risk assets don’t like uncertainty, and so that’s what we’ve seen. We’ve seen tech stocks in the U.S. coming lower,” Kendrick said, adding that the breach of Bybit has also contributed to negative sentiment surrounding crypto more broadly.
He expects the outlook for crypto will improve later in the year as traders await key regulatory developments in the industry, such as new rules around stablecoins and anti-money laundering.
“That should further legitimize, so you’ll see more U.S. banks involved. You’ll see larger institutions in the U.S. continue to push through,” Kendrick said.
Kendrick was one of the numerous market analysts who predicted a doubling in bitcoin’s price this year to $200,000. Bitcoin broke the highly anticipated $100,000 mark in December following Trump’s election to the U.S. presidency.
Crypto bulls view Trump positively given his support for digital currencies. In January, Trump signed an executive order promoting the advancement of cryptocurrencies in the U.S. and developing a national digital asset stockpile.
The company reported adjusted earnings of 30 cents per share on $987 million in revenue, surpassing the 17 cents per share and $956 million in sales expected by analysts polled by LSEG. That reflected 27% year-over-year revenue growth.
“We see tremendous opportunities ahead to support our customers throughout their end-to-end data lifecycle, and we are laser-focused on delivering on this vision,” said CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy in a press release. He called Snowflake the “most consequential data and AI company in the world.”
Like its peers, Snowflake has pushed to offer new artificial intelligence tools to its customers as the race for advanced large language models and AI capabilities accelerates. It announced an expanded partnership with Microsoft Azure to offer access to OpenAI models on Wednesday.
Product revenue also topped analyst estimates, growing 28% to $943 million. That came in ahead of the roughly $914 million LSEG estimate. The company also said it anticipates $4.28 billion in product revenue for the year, ahead of a $4.21 billion estimate.
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Guidance for the current quarter, however, came up short of estimates. Snowflake said it expects product revenues to range between $955 million to $961 million, versus a StreetAccount estimate of $961 million.
Goldman Sachs analyst Kash Rangan said the results further boosted the firm’s confidence in the revenue add from new products in the second half of the fiscal year for Snowflake and he views the company as set to become a long-term generative AI winner.
“By expanding the reach and accessibility of its core data platform to more avenues such as [large language models], Hyperscalers, etc., Snowflake can become core to the development of AI applications, evidenced by 4,000+ accounts using Snowflake AI/ML and Cortex AI’s early momentum,” he wrote.
Snowflake said it had 11,159 customers during the period, up from 10,618. Analysts polled by FactSet had expected 10,987. The company also said that Chief Financial Officer Michael Scarpelli will retire, but remain in the role until a successor is found.
Excluding Thursday’s premarket moves, shares are up about 8% year to date.
Stripe announced a tender offer for employees and shareholders on Thursday that values the payments startup at $91.5 billion, the closest the company has been to its peak valuation of $95 billion in 2021.
“We very much care about providing good liquidity for employees and existing shareholders,” Stripe co-founder and President John Collison told CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin in an interview on “Squawk Box.”
As for the company’s long-awaited public market debut, Collison said, “We are not dogmatic on the public vs. private question,” and “have no near-term IPO plans.”
Stripe also revealed in its annual letter on Thursday that it generated $1.4 trillion in total payment volume in 2024, up 38% from the year prior. The company said it was profitable in 2024, and expects to remain so this year.
Collison said the business can’t be managed on a “super tight quarterly EPS basis because this growth tends to come in waves.”
Collison said the artificial intelligence boom has been key to the company’s recent growth. High-profile AI startups OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity and Mistral are all Stripe clients.
“Unlike maybe previous booms that were more speculative in nature where you had asset price speculation, here we are seeing an AI boom that is very real,” Collison said. “There’s a bunch of companies that have grown and grown and grown over the past few years, but they’ve grown because they have real revenue and they have real revenue because they have customers that find their products really useful.”
More than 700 AI agent startups launched on Stripe last year, according to the company’s annual letter. Collison said a future where agents will make purchases for human customers is inevitable.
Founded in 2010, Stripe has regularly conducted tender offers to allow early investors and employees to sell a portion of their equity in order to reduce the pressure to go public. A year ago the company announced a tender offer at a $65 billion valuation.