With the holiday season closing in, a number of tech giants and retailers have been reporting strong projected earnings for the coming month. One of these was Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL), which is poised to report a strong 2019 holiday season thanks to sales of its Apple Watch’s, iPhone 11, iPods, and a number of other products. With analysts expecting good things from the tech giant, shares of Apple ended up reaching a new record high just before the weekend.
Shares of Apple ended up jumping 1.9% on Friday, hitting a new record of $271 per share. While the holiday season is expected to lift up many companies, Apple was also the recipient of a number of thumbs up from analysts. On Thursday evening, Citigroup analyst Jim Suva raised his price target for the tech giant from $250 to an aggressive $300, suggesting an 11% percent from its trading price.
Specifically, he goes on to cite strong forecasted sales for the company’s wireless earbuds as well as Apple Watch smartwatches. The Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend was also expected to have been a good period for Apple, with this year’s Cyber Monday having been projected to be one of the biggest in recent history.
He also went on to add that he thinks this Christmas is going to be different, with the company not being hampered by supply issues for this holiday season. “This year Apple is not facing supply yield production constraints nor a staggered iPhone product launch,” wrote the analyst in a note to his clients.
While other analysts are a bit more cautious with their price targets, many have still increased their targets for the company nonetheless, albeit to only slightly more down-to-earth levels. Loop Capital Markets analyst Ananda Baruah, for instance, upgraded Apple’s stock to only a $265 price target.
Apple has done exceedingly well so far this year. Shares of the company are up over 70% since the beginning of 2019, outperforming the S&P500 handily and putting the tech giant’s market cap well into the $1.2 trillion range. Apple is a well-covered stock, with over 40 Wall Street analysts covering the stock at any one point in time.
Over half of them are very bullish on the company, while around a quarter are more neutral. The remainder are spread out, with some being only mildly bullish or bearish, while around 5 analysts have a “sell” rating on the stock. At present, Apple’s growth is showing little sign of slowing down, with only a major recession likely doing anything to stop the company’s strong growth figures.
Apple Company Profile
Apple designs a wide variety of consumer electronic devices, including smartphones (iPhone), tablets (iPad), PCs (Mac), smartwatches (Apple Watch), and TV boxes (Apple TV), among others. The iPhone makes up the majority of Apple’s total revenue. In addition, Apple offers its customers a variety of services such as Apple Music, iCloud, Apple Care, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, Apple Card, and Apple Pay, among others. Apple’s products run internally developed software and semiconductors, and the firm is well known for its integration of hardware, software and services. – Warrior Trading News
