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Are consumers finally tiring of the iPhone?

By
James Covert
Published Dec. 14, 2015, 10:45 p.m. ET

The iPhone may be approaching the end of an era.

Wall Street is growing increasingly worried that sales of Apple’s blockbuster device — by some measures the most successful consumer product in history — could drop for the first time ever this quarter amid slowing demand.

Citing recently slashed orders for iPhone parts from Asian suppliers, Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty said unit sales of the iPhone could drop 3 percent in the current calendar year from 2014 levels.

The decline could grow steeper — falling nearly 6 percent during the fiscal year that ends next September — as the global market for smartphones continues to saturate, Morgan Stanley analysts said in a downbeat research report.

The current holiday quarter will be a nail-biter as Apple faces what Chief Executive Tim Cook has called “the mother of all comps” — year-ago sales of 74.5 million iPhones, which fueled a quarterly profit of $18 billion, the largest in corporate history.

Indeed, recent Web searches by holiday shoppers suggest that Apple could sell as few as 74 million iPhones this quarter, Huberty said.

What’s dogging the iPhone? The new, slightly improved 6s model has failed to excite techies the way the radically upgraded 6 version did.

But Huberty also blames currency fluctuations that have driven prices higher in markets overseas, where consumers are having trouble footing the bill.

That’s despite forecasts that the iPhone will continue to grab a larger slice of the pie from Android-based rivals led by Samsung. Sales of iPhones jumped 37 percent last year alone, marking an uninterrupted growth tear that began with its launch in 2007.

Morgan Stanley’s bearish call remains a minority opinion among analysts, who collectively forecast fiscal 2016 sales will grow 3 percent, to 238 million units, according to FactSet, versus Morgan Stanley’s 218 million units.

Still, JPMorgan and Barclays also issued glum reports of their own that sent Apple shares tumbling as much as 3 percent Monday before closing at $112.48, off 70 cents.

That’s well off an all-time high of $134.54 set in April, when Apple’s market capitalization topped $750 billion, sparking chatter that the company founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak was on its way to top $1 trillion.

With Apple’s market value down to $627 billion, it’s hard to see how that dream will come true anytime soon.

The stalling iPhone is two-thirds of Apple’s business, making it hard for MacBooks and the Apple Watch to move the needle.

Apple also may be in danger of losing its crown as the world’s most valuable company. Its stock is up less than 2 percent this year, while shares of Google parent Alphabet have surged 42 percent since the start of 2015, giving it a market cap of $514 billion.