Who’s tired out there?
Fatigue seemed to be setting into the stock market Thursday morning, as we count down to the long Labor Day weekend.
It’s certainly been a pretty dazzling week for stocks, thanks to the string of records, driven in part by big names such as Apple. The iPhone maker has gotten some help from talk earlier this week of shiny new phones that could be unveiled as soon as mid-September.
That brings us to our call of the day from Michael Kramer, founder of Mott Capital Management, who is gearing up for another iPhone “supercycle” that he says will take a lot of the company’s suppliers along for the ride.
He notes reports that iPhone shipments could reach 70 million to 75 million units by the end of the year, which he said would be the best performance since the iPhone 6 debut in 2015. He says all this matters because everyone thought last year would be the so-called supercycle, yet it wasn’t that strong.
“But if we look at many of the suppliers like Skyworks, Qorvo, Cirrus Logic and Analog Devices, they are all trading at the lower ends of their range on the charts. One would think investors would be buying these stock in anticipation of a strong iPhone cycle. So it could create an upside opportunity in these stocks should the cycle be stronger than expected,” Kramer told MarketWatch in a follow-up email.
Cirrus and Broadcom are both down around 15% on the year, while Skyworks is off 2%. Qorvo is the star of the group, up 20%. As a sector, semiconductors got a bump in August, but are still looking cheap by some metrics.
Mott isn’t the only one eyeing up Apple’s supply chain. Crunching the numbers in a note earlier this week, Eric Ross, chief investment strategist at Cascend Securities, painted a pretty bright picture for the iPhone supply chain as well.
“Our measurements of the iPhone supply chain show it continues to be healthy and growing (through 2Q/3Q18)—up 16% Y/Y for July and 10% for 2Q18,” he said, in an Aug. 27 note to clients. ”Major supply chain partners already see revenues and orders growing strongly, but smoothly into 4Q18.”
Ross has a buy rating and $230 price target on Apple, and predicts this batch of phone launches and holiday season will be “bigger than the Street expects.”
