A Look Inside Apple’s Core
Are the seeds and stems still there?
Is it already so easy to lose sight of Apple $AAPL?Sure, Microsoft $MSFT overtook it at the top, but it’s still the second-largest company in the world by market capitalization.
And, despite the fact that Goldman Sachs $GS declared Nvidia $NVDA the new “most important stock on planet Earth” in February, it remains one of the very few globally iconic brands.
It’s been a tough six months for AAPL, though, the share price falling from an all-time closing high of $197.96 on December 13, 2023, to $169.30 at the end of Wednesday’s normal-hours trading session.
That’s 14.47 percent. And, though he’d never let on, it’s gotta have at least a little bit of Tim Cook’s attention.
Given his track record, we won’t hear much from Cook during AAPL’s fiscal second-quarter conference call, set to start at 5:00 p.m. ET.
He’s more of a “pay attention” rather than a “seek attention” sort of CEO. Perhaps that’s to AAPL’s short-term detriment, the absence of an entertainment factor to drive marginal price action.
Safe to say Cook is watching and listening to Alphabet $GOOGL and Amazon.com $AMZN and Meta Platforms $META and Microsoft $MSFT. And Samsung. And Huawei.
And he’s demonstrated his ability to navigate AAPL through complex issues, including tough decisions on core issues of technology and product as well as on critical matters of strategy in a global marketplace.
That was before Jerome Powell’s press conference on Wednesday drove a strange intraday roundtrip amid a series of big earnings reports.
The photo above is not from Wednesday’s press conference, but it is indicative of AAPL’s place in the world right now: everywhere except “up and to the right.”
It’s losing ground in the market cap race, and it’s just “there.”
Meanwhile, the upstart NVDA won’t close the book on this season’s reporting from The Magnificent Seven until May 22. As Mish notes in her Weekly Market Outlook, NVDA is “the best barometer for the semiconductor world.”
I’ll suggest that’s an important distinction. NVDA, as Goldman’s analysts rightly trumpet, has generally led the market higher this year.
And I’ll add that we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that AAPL has been leading the market higher for many years. Its products are ubiquitous. Its style is timeless.
That doesn’t mean its tech doesn’t have to keep up, that inertia is good enough, that gravity won’t act on it.
So we’ll get another glimpse at AAPL’s core this afternoon, and in the real world that means iPhone sales, China, and catching up on artificial intelligence.
There’s a growing services segment too, though, and the C-suite knows how to run efficient operations.
The numbers will be big, and they’ll be impressive, and the guidance, as ever, is super-critical.
