Canaccord Genuity reiterated a Buy rating and raised its price target to $160 from $155, implying an upside of 40% from current prices. At the same time, the firm increased its calendar 2015 and 2016 earnings per share (EPS) estimates to $9.17 and $10.22 from $9.01 and $9.64, respectively.
This rating is based on the firm’s survey work and analysis of leading carrier store traffic and price promotions, and it anticipates Apple will maintain very strong share of the premium tier smartphone market. In fact, Canaccord Genuity believes the iPhone 6s products should enable Apple to continue to post strong sales and high-end smartphone market share gains, as it believes the iPhone 6/6s Plus smartphones generated very strong replacement sales from existing iPhone consumers who slowed the pace of iPhone upgrade purchases during the relatively disappointing iPhone 5 and 5s product cycles.
Another prediction the firm has is that the new Apple installment plan programs combined with similar to more aggressively priced installment programs from leading carriers will improve the rate of iPhone upgrade sales to the growing installed base of iPhone users. In fact, with only 27% of the iPhone installed base having upgraded to the iPhone 6/6 Plus devices by the end of the fiscal third quarter of 2015, Canaccord Genuity anticipates continued strong replacement sales through the 2015 calendar year and beyond.
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Further, the firm anticipates continued high-end smartphone market share gains for the larger screen iPhone 6 devices as its surveys indicate a greater mix of Android smartphone consumers are switching to the iPhone 6 smartphones than during iPhone 5 series launches. According to Canaccord Genuity these trends should grow the iPhone installed base to over 500 million exiting calendar 2015, and this base should drive strong future iPhone replacement sales, earnings, as well as cash flow generation to fund strong long-term capital returns programs.
In a separate report, Canaccord Genuity commented on recent softness in BlackBerry Ltd. (NASDAQ: BBRY) smartphone sales. Analyst Michael Walkley said:
Our wireless surveys indicated soft BlackBerry smartphone sales to end-customers. Given these trends and with BlackBerry recognizing hardware revenue on a sell-through basis, we maintain our well below-consensus estimates for the August quarter and for all of fiscal 2016. Despite significant one-time payments from two new technology licensing deals driving strong first quarter of fiscal 2016 licensing revenue, the lack of visibility for the cadence of these deals leads us to assume potential future deals will be lumpy in nature and we are not anticipating new deals during the August quarter… We maintain our Hold rating and $8 price target.
Shares of Apple were up 0.4% to $113.90 Monday morning. The stock has a consensus analyst price target of $145.64 and a 52-week trade range of $92.00 to $134.54.
BlackBerry shares were up 0.4%, at $7.53 in a 52-week trading range of $6.41 to $12.63. The consensus price target is $8.74.
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