The weather may be getting warmer, but iPhone sales are cooling off.
Sales of Apple’s popular smartphone will fall roughly 15 percent in the current quarter — thanks to weaker demand in China, one Wall Street analyst said Friday.
Apple iPhone sales in the quarter ending June 30 will fall to 34 million units from earlier estimates of 40.1 million, Katy Huberty of Morgan Stanley said in a report.
“We expect Apple to report an in-line March quarter, but are cautious into earnings on May 1 due to our belief that June quarter consensus estimates need to be revised lower,” Huberty wrote.
The bearish forecast scared investors, who pushed Apple shares 4.1 percent lower, to $165.71.
Huberty also trimmed her Apple price target to $200 from $203.
It’s the latest dose of bad news for Apple’s smartphones, which have been underwhelming Wall Street since the release of the iPhone X and 8 models in late 2017.
In late January, the Japanese news service Nikkei reported that Apple was halving its production target for the first three months of the year from 40 million units to 20 million.
The production cut was reportedly prompted by slower-than-expected sales in the holiday shopping season in Europe, the US and China.
The Cupertino, Calif., company reported a decline in iPhone unit sales in the December quarter — but managed to hit revenue targets thanks to the X’s stratospheric price tag.
The cost of the average iPhone is $796.
In an earnings call with investors in February, Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook shrugged off sales concerns and declared that the iPhone X has set Apple up “for the next decade.”
Earlier this week, KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo wrote in a note that he expects Apple to offer a cheaper, 6.1-inch iPhone model this fall for $550 — nearly half the cost of the current iPhone X.


