Canaccord Genuity reiterated a Buy rating with a $160 price target, implying an upside of 40% from current prices. Overall, based on its survey work and analysis, the firm believes Apple is maintaining strong share of the premium tier smartphone market.
While the firm believes the iPhone 6s products should enable Apple to continue to post strong sales and high-end smartphone market share gains, it anticipates the rate of share gains will slow, considering the survey work indicates ongoing slower growth trends for the global smartphone market. Canaccord Genuity believes 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.
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In its report, Canaccord Genuity said:
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, we anticipate continued strong replacement sales through calendar 2016 and beyond. Further, we anticipate continued high-end smartphone market share gains for the larger screen iPhone 6 devices as our surveys indicate a greater mix of Android smartphone consumers are switching to the iPhone 6 smartphones than during iPhone 5 series launches, but we anticipate the rate of market share gains to slow versus the strong iPhone 6 share gains. We believe 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.
However, Canaccord Genuity believes overall global smartphone unit demand has slowed, resulting in slightly lower iPhone unit estimates for the second quarter of fiscal 2016, to 57.6 million units from 62.1 million units, and the calendar 2016 iPhone unit estimates to 226 million units from 237 million units. Ultimately, these changes result in the firm lowering its calendar 2016 EPS estimate to $9.90 from $10.22.
In the longer term, the firm believes iPhone sales will remain strong at 225 million plus units, and this should fund solid long-term capital returns programs. Apple could further monetize this large iPhone user base through additional products, software and services driving ongoing long-term sales growth.
Shares of Apple were last seen trading at $114.31, with a consensus analyst price target of $147.95 and a 52-week trading range of $92.00 to $134.54.
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