Rosenblatt Lifts Price Target on Apple by $1, Maintains Netural Rating
by Horace Dediu
From $267 to $268
On March 5, TheFly reported that Barton Crockett of Rosenblatt Securities increased the price target on Apple Inc. from $267 to $268, maintaining the Neutral rating on the iPhone maker.
Crockett remains positive on Apple following the company’s recent event, in which it launched its MacBook Neo, tapping into the lower end of the laptop market. Apart from that, a lower-end iPhone 17e also adds to the company’s lineup in the budget hardware category. The analyst also mentioned that Apple’s high-end products account for a modest percentage of build-to-order, which could lead to in-line performance with its March-quarter guidance.
On January 30, Reuters reported that, according to the LSEG, Apple expects Q2 FY2026 revenue to increase by 13% to 16%, compared with analysts’ 10% growth rate. Despite strong performance, Crockett highlighted that Apple trades at a meaningful premium.
A majority of 52 analysts out of 54 have rated AAPL a Buy, while only two analysts rate the stock as a Hold. The average price target of $302.5 highlights an upside of over 16%, while Rosenblatt’s price target implies a modest increase of almost 3% as of March 10.
Source: Yahoo Finance
NB: Apple expects revenue to increase by 13% to 16%, compared with analysts' 10%??
Apple does trade at a premium, but not much. As the table of the largest market caps below shows, as of time of publication, Apple trades at 32 P/E vs. high 20s for the other tech giants (with TSMC at the same multiple). Arguably Apple gets the premium as a counter to getting the discount during the go-go days of AI hype inflation. Apple is now seen as a reliable growth story and a safe harbor during volatile times (read: not throwing cash flow into the bonfire of AI vanities.) I should also point out that the new "affordable" products are indicators of aggressive market share expansion.
3 comments
deemery ·
Is there -any reason- to take seriously an adjustment in estimates like this that are less than 5%? My gut would say that's a rounding error in estimation models. So I view such Grand Pronouncements as nothing more than clickbait.
But I would be interested, though, in the Asymco view of what you-all think is the range of estimation error, i.e. when should we take estimates as serious analysis, rather than clickbait?
vhs ·
I wouldn't have "serious" depend on any quantitative measure, but rather on the quality of the analysis. Which, IIRC, is rather questionable in the case of Rosenblatt. I think they have been consistenly and wrongly bearish.
deemery ·
My core question really is "what's the expected error range/confidence intervals for costing models?"